Explorations in Life, Death and the Afterlife

Explorations in Life, Death and the Afterlife

Fiona BowieSt. Lukes Church, Tutshill, 2015+IntroductionsWhy are you here and what do you want out of these talks?Ground rules no one has to speak; confidentiality; respect other peoples experience for what it is without judging it sensitive areas that can be difficult to talk about and bring up expected or unexpected emotions.Not therapy present as an academic - can interrupt me and ask questions David is here as someone you can talk to if you want to know more about a specifically Christian or Anglican take on things, or would like pastoral support.About me: Academic and family background. Interest in this area of research.1Fiona Bowie19th May 20153. Finding lifes purpose and plan

+This may seem like more of an existential question than an anthropological one. You may wonder why this topic is included in a series of talks on the afterlife. Anthropology is concerned with what it means to be to a human being. As this question or these questions are central to our nature as human beings, and perhaps exclusively so (although we can never really be sure what other intelligent creatures think and reflect upon) they properly fall within the remit of anthropology as well as metaphysics and theology. I would just like to stress again that I am not seeking to give theological or Christian answers, although my own experience is informed by my Christian practice. What I hope to do is share some of the insights and views gained from taking a wider view of these questions. It is then up to you to decide what you want to do with that information. 2The meaning of life

According to Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy+In the first of Douglas Adams books on life, the universe and everything, intelligent life forms build a computer called Deep Thought to answer the ultimate question, What is the meaning of life?. The computer takes thousands of years to compute the answer, and when those who asked the question, or their descendents, gather to receive the answer they are told that it is 42. When they protest that this doesnt get them any further, the computer points out that they were asking the wrong sort of question. 3Why are we here?

+They decided to perform an experiment, led by the super-intelligent mice, to create a planet, earth, which they could observe in order to determine what life is all about. This was a step forward. The meaning of life is to be found less in abstract questions than in life, in performance one might say. This only works if there is a connection between life-forms and the rest of the universe. According to the classical mechanics that has dominated scientific thought since the Seventeenth Century, our minds observe, but do not affect, what is really there. Physical reality and mental forms have no essential connection. The world is created and we observe it, discover and probe its secrets. 4Co-creation according to quantum mechanicsAcquiring knowledge an essential act:Creates the factAnd knowledge of the factInfluences by its probing that which it probes

Knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge are integral parts of the process of creating the evolving universe (Stapp, 2011).

+Stapp, p.160, The acquisition of knowledge does not simply reveal what is physically fixed and settled; it is part of the process that creates the reality that we know.

5We are part of the universe

The mind-bending laws of quantum mechanics say we can't observe the smallest particles without affecting them. Physicists have now caused the smallest-ever disturbance while making a quantum measurement - in fact, almost the minimum thought to be possible. This disturbance is called back-action, and it is one of the hallmarks of quantum mechanics, which governs the actions of the very small. It arises from the supposition that before a measurement is made, particles exist in a sort of limbo state, being neither here nor there while retaining the possibility of either.

+The mind-bending laws of quantum mechanics say we can't observe the smallest particles without affecting them. Physicists have now caused the smallest-ever disturbance while making a quantum measurement - in fact, almost the minimum thought to be possible. This disturbance is called back-action, and it is one of the hallmarks of quantum mechanics, which governs the actions of the very small. It arises from the supposition that before a measurement is made, particles exist in a sort of limbo state, being neither here nor there while retaining the possibility of either.

So this is the first lesson. That we are not visitors or observers of the universe but an integral part of it. In fact, everything that exists is a part of the universe and we are all interconnected. What we think, as much as what we do, affects everything around us. We co-create reality. In this way we are indeed all Gods, or part of God, or children of the universe however one likes to phrase it. Whatever the meaning of life it is not something we discover but something we create. Douglas Adams description of earth as an experiment is perhaps not so far from reality.

6Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ(1881-1955)

+The French philosopher, geologist and palaeontologist, who was also a Jesuit priest, is one of those who has most closely expressed this view from a religious perspective. I spoke last time about the American physicist, Bruce Moen, who reached a similar conclusion following a visionary dream he had one day, in very mundane circumstances, which he would not have described as religious. He described God as curiosity, sending out probes into the unknown, finding that only when these probes had the characteristic of love that they found their way back to their creator and source. 7

Teilard de Chardin also famously asserted our essentially spiritual nature, but this should not be misunderstood as Cartesian dualism. He was a scientist, and like quantum physicist Henry Stapp, asserted that our human experience is part of who and what we are, it is in this experience, not despite it, that we co-create the universe. If this is the case, how did we get to be the kind of beings we are, with our capacity for self-reflection. What is the nature of this human experience?8

The Victorians liked to believe that White, Protestant Christianity was the apex of civilization and human achievement. Archaeologists tell us that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had bigger brains and were physically fitter than we are today. There is a trade-off between being the settled, technologically savvy animals we are today and physical, emotional and mental fitness. Is small hunter-gatherer bands each member had to acquire a very wide range of skills and knowledge of the environment and of other people in order to survive. Few of us have Ray Mears survival skills and we depend on others, which allows us to specialise in one or two restricted areas. The sum of human knowledge and achievement, for better and worse, is vastly greater than one person or small group could achieve. How did this come about?9

The cognitive revolution+Some time in the Palaeolithic period of human evolution a change took place in our brains, although whether it was a random mutation that gave us an advantage over other primates, or driven by other co-evolutionary factors is not clear. Between about 70,000 and 30,000 years ago we began to gossip. We could talk not only about the movement of bison, but also the thoughts and feelings of individuals. Instead of what Stephen Meithen refers to as a swiss army knife brain, with different skills in different compartments, we began to make cross connections. We used metaphors and imagined gods and devils in anthropomorphic terms. Whatever direct experiences of supernatural beings or visionary or near-death experiences individuals might have could be imagined within a cultural world that made them part of a larger narrative10The Legend of Peugeot

+. Historian Yuval Noah Harari gives the example of The Legend of Peugeot. We can accept the existence of a legal entity that is not dependent on any particular individuals, product, event or location. It is a legal fiction of the type that is so ubiquitous in modern life that we hardly give it any thought. The idea of Peugeot allows it to exist and have a reality. Like currency, it has utility only for as long as people agree that it has validity. Incidentally the image of the lion-rampant has a long history in art and literature and is reminiscent of shamanic cave art. We could equally talk about the Legend of the Buddha, or of Jesus Christ. Whether or not there is an historical story at its base, Christianity as we know it today is a series of imagined ideas and structures that we agree to agree upon, more or less, which in turn enables a vast entity , called the Christian Church, to attract and hold together in a single community, over time, millions of individuals, most of whom have never met and will never meet each other. 11

We are creatures that can ask questions about our place in the universe because of this ability to imagine, to see one thing in terms of another, and to formulate our direct experiences in cultural forms that can build communities. The project is both individual and collective, and there is always an dynamic interplay between the two. The German sociologist Max Weber described human beings as meaning makers. We instinctively look for meaning and purpose to give our lives direction and shape. Different scholarly approaches and different religious traditions come up with a variety of answers to these questions. 12Scholarly approaches to the meaning of lifeLife is essentially teleological (has a purpose and end point) religious views.Life is random and meaningless, determined by our evolutionary past and brains (classical mechanics).We cant know what life is about but try to make sense of it by attributing meaning to things that dont exist (intellectualist position).We are subject to psychological processes, fears and obsessions and our attempts at meaning are a way to rationalise or express these (psychological and psychoanalytic views).We are making sense of ontological realities, relating to the world as it is (experiential view).We are projecting our ideas onto the world in order to create meaning (Durkheimian sociology).+I started with a brief look at some of the differences between classical and quantum mechanics, and have talked before about different scholarly approaches to these questions, which can be summarised here.13Religious viewsLife and time are circular and we need to think in very large time-scales.The world as we see it is essentially illusory; enlightenment is about seeing it as it is and realising our true nature as non-physical beings.Our thoughts and actions are part of the cycle of life.We suffer the consequences of these thoughts and actions.Life and time are linear, with a beginning and end.It is a school or test, if we pass we go to heaven, if we fail we go to hell.We have help from supernatural beings, but need to beware negative forces (angels and devils). God intervenes in history on behalf of humanity.EasternWestern, Abrahamic+14Life Planning

Michael NewtonRobert Schwartz+Two interesting modern takes on the meaning of life, focusing in particular on the meaning and purpose of our lives as individuals, are the writings of Michael Newton and Robert Schwartz. Michael Newton I have spoken about before in the context of hypnotherapy. Newton takes clients to a time between lives, in which they commonly describe the process of planning the life they are leading, or perhaps a previous life, while in a state of deep hypnosis. It would be easy to dismiss this as fantasy or as cultural expectations, or the leadings of they hypnotherapist, but there are interesting similarities in the descriptions of clients when the techniques are tried by other therapists, on people of different nationalities, on people who have read Newton and those who know nothing about his ideas. They commonly talk about choosing a life, with help from others, in order to learn specific lessons. They might be struggling with issues of self-worth, for instance, and want to put themselves in a position in which they learn to value themselves, or not to rely on others. They choose who they will incarnate with and plan key events in their lives. There is always free will, so these are not predetermined. They are markers that can help the individual, but we are free to take another route, to plan different lessons, to adapt to changing plans and to succeed, exceed or fail in these lessons. 15Key life events planned or random?Think of the people in your life. Are there moments that you met or that were significant that could have been pre-agreed?Have you had a sense of something being just right, of everything falling into place as it should?Have you felt you met someone before, or know them from somewhere (who you have never actually met before in this life)?Do you become agitated if you feel that life is not going as it should, that you are missing something?What do you do to get back on track?+Whether or not one takes Newtons accounts at face value, and they make fascinating reading, they do prompt various questions that are worth asking. They help give meaning and purpose to life.16Life as a lessonWhat can I learn from a situation?What is it teaching me?Whether planned or not, what value can I take from this situation?I am not a victim, I have chosen this for a purpose.If it was not meant to be like this, I am still able to learn, and always have support. My higher self knows and loves me.What seems momentous is not so great in the overall scheme of things.+Robert Schwartz is particularly interested in why people might plan difficult lives. His work resonated with my own questions and experience.17

Everything makes sense in and is drawn together in love.18