A dear friend of mine is in hospice care with advanced Alzheimer's Disease. The decline has been shockingly rapid, and I don't fully understand why, although I think it's probably for the best for his family and friends that it's happening the way it is instead of being much more drawn out.
Anyway, I posted something to Facebook last night about my friend, and another friend of mine, Tom, who recently met the unfortunate victim of this terrible disease at my house, made a comment about his hopes for the afterlife, and I replied with my less sanguine thoughts about what any real afterlife would likely consist of.
Here is what he and I wrote:
Me: Sitting at the bedside of a good friend who seems, for reasons I don't fully understand, to be virtually comatose and close to death from cerebral hypoxia associated with an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. What an awful, cruel disease Alzheimer's is!
Tom: Terrible, terrible. While I have no faith in the Gods that write books, I do hope that there is some sort of "veil" we pass through after death where we get some sort of explanation what life, in general, and our life, in particular, was all about.
It's not that I think a life between just birth and death is meaningless. It is just that I think a reason and meaning for having been alive is due us. In Hamlet, the Bard talks about "defeated joy."
Me: Tom, if we die and that's the end of our personal existence and consciousness, it won't matter to us whether we find out why we were here or not. But if we go on to inhabit forever and ever some conscious afterlife, as much as I, like you, would love to believe that we would learn the answers to all our pressing questions and reap huge benefits from this, I'm more inclined to think that posthumously everlasting life could eternally make the trials and tribulations of this ephemeral lifetime seem like a joyous picnic by comparison.
In other words, if so much inequality, injustice, and suffering can dominate this life, what's to stop this from occurring on a far more iniquitous and torturous scale in any life to come? A supremely loving, just, and merciful God? What God is that? One of the "Gods that write books"? Any God that created and sustains THIS unholy vale of earthly tears?
What do you think about Tom's and my comments, and what do you think happens to us after we die, and why do you think it?
I agree with your statement:
ReplyDelete"if we die and that's the end of our personal existence and consciousness, it won't matter to us whether we find out why we were here or not. "
That's assuming that consciousness is merely a product of the brain.
Here's an excerpt from a book Swami Tripurari recently wrote, Sacred Preface, that delves into this topic a bit. After explaining the concept of the illusory self-the false ego, he goes on to write:
"Be that as it may, in Gaudiya Vedanta this false illusory self that does not endure and that we all identify with rests nonetheless on a real eternal self., the witness and existential agent of action. This real eternal self animates the world of thought and things and opsits value in them. It is consciousness proper, the "Self" as opposed to the "self." It is this Self that is not reducible to the natural world, neither its physical nor psychic dimensions. It speaks loudly beyond words, "I am", and it knows this beyond thought. It It animates both the psychic dimension of matter, through which material experiences occur, and the physical dimension of matter, through which action occurs.
Psychic matter is illumined by the reflection of consciousness proper. This illumination enables mind stuff to have subjective experience, giving rise to the false self and the unfolding of physical matter. Consciousness proper thus exists unto itself as the basis of all experience, without which the psychic dimension of matter, having been illumined by consciousness and subjected to impressions of the physical world. In turn, consciousness approves or disapproves of any particular mental proposition.
On the other hand, perhaps the most popular scientific reductive conjecture is that consciousness, often conflated with mind, is an emergent property of physical matter and thus inherent within it. Could this idea be true? Stranger events have not occurred. To think of consciousness as such would be to think of emergent properties observed in physical matter in a way that is entirely unlike any example nature provides. In every known material example of emergent properties, that which emerges is found to have been already present in some form within that which it emerges from. But there is nothing that even remotely resembles first-person experiential existence within third-person objective, nonexperiential physical matter. In other words, there is nothing like consciousness in the brain, nor is there an evolutionary place for it since evolution is conceived of as a continuous process that molds preexisting properties into more complex forms but which cannot produce entirely novel properties. Consciousness is clearly such a novel property."
( Swami Tripurari, Sacred Preface, p. 59-60)
Thank you for your reply, Jessica. A few quick words in response.
ReplyDeleteI don't presume to know that personal "consciousness is merely a product of the brain" or whether it continues after death whether it is or isn't a product of a living, functioning brain. My point to my friend Tom was simply that I don't see how it's a bad thing for us if our personal consciousness ceases to exist after our brains die if "we" aren't around to miss it.
Second, although I have difficulty understanding the nature of the "real eternal self" to which Swami Tripurari alludes in the passage you quoted, even if we provisionally grant its existence, I don't see how it obviates my second point or concern to Tom about what this transcendent self is likely to experience in a life following this one.
That is, if this life, for many if not most of us, is racked with suffering that far outweighs its pleasure or fulfillment, what good reason do we have to think that the next one will be any better if not far, far worse, especially if it goes on forever or for eons and eons until some fabulous realization is ultimately achieved?
I don't doubt that Swami Tripurari and the tradition he represents in his arguably idiosyncratic or unique way has some kind of answer to my question or balm for my concern, and, perhaps, it's a valid answer or effective balm for those who deeply understand its soundness or accept it on faith. But, for better or worse, I fall into neither of those categories.