Understanding Death

An Introduction to Ideas of Self and the Afterlife in World Religions

Angela Sumegi

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118323120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A comprehensive survey of how religions understand death, dying, and the afterlife, drawing on examples from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Shamanic perspectives.

• Considers shared and differing views of death across the world's major religions, including on the nature of death itself, the reasons for it, the identity of those who die, religious rituals, and on how the living should respond to death
• Places emphasis on the varying concepts of the 'self' or soul
• Uses a thematic structure to facilitate a broader comparative understanding
• Written in an accessible style to appeal to an undergraduate audience, it fills major gap in current textbook literature

1

Understanding Death

Life surrounds us. Wherever we find ourselves, we are conscious that countless other living things exist alongside us – animals, plants, insects, microbes, as well as strange combinations of not-quite-animal, not-quite-plant life, like sea anemones. Death surrounds us. From the mosquito unconsciously slapped on an arm to the daily news stories that are of passing notice, to a loved one whose loss brings prolonged grief and mourning. In general, however, we tend to think deeply of death only when it becomes part of our emotional experience, and even then, the business and busyness of life is like a river that carries us along past the numerous moments of other deaths until our own moment arrives. One feels helpless in the face of inevitable death – what can one do about it, really? It is easy, therefore, even in the midst of death to avoid contemplating death, to turn to life where we can have some kind of control, where we can do something about it. I invite you to consider this book as a space in which you can take the time to consider questions like: What is death? Who dies? Where do we go from here? Do we go anywhere? And, as you will discover, these questions are much the same as asking: What is life? Who lives? Are we going anywhere now? In the complex symbol system that is language, however, words like “life” or “love” or “death” are bound up with feelings, emotions, and ideas that are very complicated; those that surround death have a long and complex history – you might think of it as the history of becoming who and what we are. When we look at the sacred stories of various cultures and religious traditions that aim to explain death and how it came into the world, we find that at the same time they tell of how we became human, how we became mortal. Take, for example, the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. Their life in the Garden of Eden is one of innocence and joy in the presence of God. Without work or toil, they enjoy the fruit of all the trees, but tempted by the serpent, they disobey God's commands and eat of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. (Gen. 3:1–7)1

Due to this transgression, God banishes them from the Garden. They must make their way in the wilderness beyond, working hard for their food, the woman experiencing pain in childbirth, and eventually they must return to the earth from which God made them. But this is not only a story of temptation, disobedience, punishment, and the suffering and death that are an inevitable part of the human condition, it is also a story that acknowledges human powers of reasoning and judgment, the attraction of wisdom, thirst for knowledge overcoming rules and regulations, and the responsibility and danger that come with the knowledge of good and evil. Ultimately, the story points to an understanding of humankind as partaking of divinity in that knowledge.

Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” – therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. (Gen. 3:22–24)

The immortality that was denied to humans in the Garden of Eden, eternal life in the presence of God becomes a primary goal of Biblical traditions. Stories such as this relate the mythic events of our past and tell us why we must die; they also look to the future and tell us where we go when this life is finished.

Throughout human history, there have been many who claimed to have made the journey, many who believed that they received a glimpse of that future; a life beyond life in a time beyond time and a place beyond place. One of the earliest literary accounts of what would be now called a “near-death experience” comes from the Greek philosopher Plato (427–347 BCE). It is the story of Er, a soldier who died in battle and returned to life on his funeral pyre:

He [Er] said that when his soul departed, it made a journey in the company of many, and they came to a certain demonic place, where there were two openings in the earth next to one another, and, again, two in the heaven, above and opposite the others. Between them sat judges who, when they had passed judgment, told the just to continue their journey to the right and upward, through the heaven; and they attached signs of the judgments in front of them. The unjust they told to continue their journey to the left and down, and they had behind them signs of everything they had done. And when he himself came forward, they said that he had to become a messenger to human beings of the things there, and they told him to listen and to look at everything in the place. (Bloom, 1968, pp. 297–298)

Such reports have inspired faith among some, disbelief or skepticism among others. In the last century, the personal accounts of those who have been declared dead or appeared dead but revived have received increasing attention both from the spiritually thirsty and from scholars who seek to analyze and understand the nature of these experiences. Carol Zaleski (2006) notes that in comparison with ancient and medieval stories of afterlife journeys, the theme of judgment and the fear of death as a prelude to hell have mostly disappeared from modern accounts, as they have from the following memoirs of another soldier who was also felled on the battlefield more than 2,000 years after Plato.

Return from the Dead

It is 1915 and 20-year-old Vaughan Ivan Milton Henshaw is a Canadian soldier on the frontlines of World War I. What follows is his personal account recorded by his granddaughter, Linda Henshaw.

On the first of September, it started to rain and the rain never stopped day and night and what were trenches turned into canals – the water waist deep. The dugouts were the same; we'd put stuff under our heads at night to keep our head and shoulders out of the water. We had no protection standing around in the rain, at night we'd sleep in the mud and rain. On November 6th the rain stopped and turned to sleet, great walls of sleet swept in on 20–25/hour winds. That was the day we were to leave for a 6 day so-called rest.

That was also the morning that Henshaw was scheduled to escort the colonel and the doctor on a morning inspection tour of the line. As they arrived at the front line, Henshaw noticed the presence of a sniper. He knocked the colonel into the mud and was hit by the sniper's fire. “I was badly hit; the blood was running out of my nose and mouth. My left side was mostly blown away.” He has a chance to live if he is transported immediately to the hospital, but the wounded are only taken out at night due to the danger of enemy fire. Despite the danger, however, Henshaw's comrades decide to carry him out wrapped in a rubber sheet and lashed to a pole. They emerge from the trench carrying the makeshift stretcher, falling in shell holes and scrambling out, mud halfway to their knees: “The air was torn to shreds [from gun fire].” They finally make it to a protected knoll. Many years later, at a reunion, Henshaw learns from one who was there:

When we first saw you, your face was just as black as my shoe but in about a minute or two, suddenly your eyes closed and you turned as white as a sheet and one of the boys said, “he's gone,” and I don't mind telling you many tears were shed over your doggone frame.

But for Henshaw, something else was happening:

As for me, when that happened apparently that was when I thought I was being airlifted. I thought the boys had picked up the pole and started to carry me on. Instead in a split second I was in a great concourse of people stretching away as far as I could see to left and to the right. I call them people but later I discovered that they weren't people at all … However, what caught my attention almost immediately was a wall, like a blanket or sheet, a white covering of some sort and behind it was a bright light, the brightest light I ever could see. There was something about that light that was different from any ordinary light. It seemed to fill me full of the greatest desire to penetrate that sheet or whatever it was and see what that white beautiful bright light was all about. When I had a chance to look, I couldn't move my head or my hands or anything at all because of the people – later I thought they were not really people, they seemed more like objects or shapes, all black in long lines; they were moving forward as if they were on an escalator only there was no escalator – we were just drifting forward. I was so impatient I felt like brushing them all out of my way to get to that wall and see what that bright light was all about. I could hardly contain myself. Then I watched these black shapes; when they reached this so-called wall, they entered one by one. They just seemed to fade through. I could see them as far as about a foot and a half into the wall and then just barely make them out, and then they would dissolve. That went on all the while we were drifting forward. I don't know how long it was before I reached that transparent white wall. What it was made of, I don't know, but it was plain to be seen that those black figures weren't solid because they made no motion at all when they went through – if it had been any solid body passing through, there would be some commotion in the hole where they went through but that wall never moved. Finally it came pretty close to my line with only one line ahead of me, but even then I couldn't see how the line ahead of me could pass one by one through the same place in that wall without a ripple and yet not hold up my line or the lines behind. How that could be done, I couldn't understand. The line passed through one by one, and we were still drifting forward with no hesitation whatsoever and finally it came my turn. I was just ready to dive head first through that beautiful white wall, but when I attempted to do it, in one split second I found myself floating back to earth about 40 feet in the air. I saw my comrades standing off to one side talking. I saw the great walls of sleet blowing in making the puddles and ponds of water into foam. Then I saw a man lying in the mud and I thought “how pitiful! That poor fellow far miles from home lying there dead in the mud. What a place to die!” and by then I was getting a little closer and to my amazement I found I was looking at myself. I couldn't understand how I could be in two places at once – one dead and one seemingly alive. All the while I was drifting down and then presently I saw myself more plainly – but how can I see myself when my eyes are closed? And then a feeling of utter desolation swept over me so deadly that in the next second I was home and opened my eyes, and that feeling of utter desolation was so great that two tears were rolling down my cheeks, something that had never happened before in the wide world – my tear ducts had dried up long ago. Well, I heard one fellow cry out in a voice so full of excitement. In a loud, loud voice he yelled “He ain't dead yet.”

Although the term near-death experience (NDE) would not appear in popular literature for another 60 years,2 Vaughan Henshaw's experience is a classic example of this phenomenon. Moving through darkness, encountering other beings, visions of light, feelings of joy or excitement, a sense of dying, observing one's own body from a distance, and finally the return to the body and to life are all standard features of NDEs documented by researchers studying the experiences of people who were assumed or declared dead but later revived.3 In this account, Henshaw, a soldier grounded in the physical realities of life and death, struggles to make sense of the immateriality of a world that, nevertheless, appears physically external to him. He is confounded by the fact that even while perceiving his own dead body, he is experiencing himself as alive. As we will see in future chapters, other cultures interpret similar experiences as an aspect of the dying process. For example, in Tibetan Buddhist literature, the newly dead experience themselves as existing in another “in-between” state that intersects with this world. They are, therefore, thought to be confused about what is happening to them and in need of help to understand that they are indeed dead, as well as guidance in learning how to negotiate this new reality.

According to a 1997 survey, over 15 million American adults claim to have had a near-death experience (Carr, 2006, p. 235). But what does that mean? Have these people encountered an objective reality beyond the hallucinations and psychological projections of a dying brain? Does this constitute proof of survival after death? Is this what happens to all of us when we die? Perhaps for those who have been profoundly affected and altered by their experience, for those who no longer fear death because of it, such questions, and their answers, do not matter; do not change the event or what it means to that individual. Nevertheless, in the face of spiritualist or transcendentalist interpretations, scientific researchers and theorists have proposed various explanations for the thousands of anecdotal descriptions that feature NDE. Most of these take a biological or psychological approach.

Thomas Carr provides the following breakdown of these differing interpretations. On the psychological side, NDEs manifest (a) an emotional response to the shock and trauma of death resulting in a state of depersonalization or detachment from the body; or (b) represent fantasy and wish-fulfillment in the face of the horror of death; or (c) result from mythological archetypes buried in the brain that surface under extraordinary circumstances and are of evolutionary survival value in creating calm in the person facing death. On the biological side, NDEs can result from (a) metabolic disturbance, i.e. severe imbalances in the body arising in the process of dying or sickness, for example due to lack of oxygen or high fever; (b) drug overload, of anesthesia, for example, during surgery – many NDEs come from those who report what they heard and saw while undergoing surgery; (c) endorphins, a tranquillizing substance released by the brain during times of shock or exertion that results in feelings of calm and happiness, experienced for example by long-distance runners; (d) limbic lobe seizure, the seizing up of the area of the brain that controls mood and memory; (e) visual cortex hyperactivity, which explains the sensation of a bright light approached through darkness or a dark tunnel due to the hyperactivity of the area of the brain responsible for processing visual stimuli (Carr, 2006, pp. 235–236).

Scientific research concludes that NDE relates to the nature and functioning of the physical brain and its relation to the body and perception. Nevertheless, despite decades of study and many theories regarding the exact nature of the relationship between ourselves as creatures of body and creatures of thought or mind, most of us are still as mystified as Vaughan Henshaw was by the how and why of consciousness and its connection to bodies that live and die. This book does not propose any answer to those questions; I raise the issue of NDE here because it represents an enduring theme of return from the dead – underpinned by diverse human experiences and formalized in the death teachings of many religions.

Regardless of the narrative content, whether it comes from contemporary reports of NDE or medieval Christian accounts of visitations to hell or the reports of those the Tibetans call delok (“returned from the dead”), a crucial aspect of the narrative is that the person has returned to this world to act as a living witness to the experience of dying and the encounter with what lies beyond death. However, from another perspective, if death is defined as a state of no return, then perhaps such people have not died at all.

Debates and Definitions

Death from which there is no return would appear to be a different matter altogether. How do we know when that death takes place? What happens then? These are questions that raise many debates among scientists and theologians. In the past, the clues that indicated a state of death were related to the condition of the physical body. Doe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Understanding Death
• Chapter 2: Primal Perspectives on Death
• Chapter 3: Death in the Ancient World
• Chapter 4: Jewish Perspectives on Death
• Chapter 5: Christian Perspectives on Death
• Chapter 6: Muslim Perspectives on Death
• Chapter 7: Hindu Perspectives on Death
• Chapter 8: Buddhist Perspectives on Death
• Chapter 9: Daoist Perspectives on Death
• Index