ELEVEN: Life is Death's Dream

The trouble with the memories of past lives that many rely on to convince themselves of their immortality is that they have only a single witness. If what we call “reality” is based on consensus, experiences that we have on our own with no other witnesses could be completely valid – or figments of our powerful imaginations. There is simply no way of knowing.

But let’s not minimize the role of the imagination. The imagination is that part of the mind that associates images, and it plays a part in just about every aspect of our thought process. I imagine the imagination – if one can do that – as a pool of raw consciousness, like this waterhole of magical paint that contains all colors and can take any form with just the slightest nudge of an idea. It is out of the stuff of imagination that we create the universe.

Another thought I have had on the relationship between life and death is this: Life is Death’s dream. I don’t remember when I first had the thought, and I’m not at all sure what it means, but it feels like one of the more profound thoughts I have ever had. Life stands in the same relationship to nonliving matter as a dream relates to one’s wakeful experience. Note that dreaming connotes aspiring, and that root “spir-“ refers to breathing as in respiration and spirit, as in, well, spirit. I have a sense that eons ago in the primordial soup, the right combinations of molecules came together and in some kind of rudimentary act of will, chose life. I sense the willfulness underlying all of evolution as well, though I can’t prove it. I have a sense that whales and other sea mammals, for instance, as adaptations of land species, “chose” to return to the sea. And I sense some reflection of the aspiration toward life in my own life: I have a lot of choices and within them, I generally choose those that enhance my life rather than those that might lead toward death. I have sometimes interpreted this sense as meaning essentially that the universe created itself, that we create ourselves, but there is this underlying willfulness that qualifies as spiritual, that one could characterize as the will of God.

I have a hard time with the idea of past lives, though God know I am trying to be open minded. Again, whatever past life experiences people report are individual experiences without other witnesses. There’s this guy Newton, a hypnotherapist who wrote a book called Journey of Souls. He claims to take people hypnotically not only into their past lives but also into their past deaths, and into the spirit time between their lives. It is an impressive collection of case studies, with all kinds of intriguing similarities of the experiences that people report, but it also seems so likely that these peoples’ stories are telling the hypnotist what he wants to hear. After all, a primary characteristic of the hypnotic state is suggestibility.

Also the entire concept of past lives seems dependent on the concept of history and therefore on the development of complex language and writing. Could “past lives” have existed in prehistorical times? It would seem that the lives of prehistoric humans, and for that matter, other species of animals, wouldn’t be sufficiently distinguished to be recognizable as past lives, unless these lives included taking on the identity of different species, as the Buddhists believe. And then you have to reconcile the existence of some kind of spiritual hierarchy, a hierarchy of beings that gives humans, surprise, surprise, the position at the zenith. This doesn’t jibe with my sense that any creative impulse in the universe would be fundamentally egalitarian, valuing no species or being over any other.

I suppose there could be a spiritual hierarchy based on the notion that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” – the idea that development of the human embryo passes through phases that resemble more “primitive” species, a human embryo’s temporary development of gills, for example, phases that mirror evolutionary development. It would make sense that the creative impulse such as it is would apply the principles of evolution to souls, just as it does to bodies. And there is a hierarchy implied by the theory of evolution, the sense that over time, organisms become increasingly complex – a hierarchy which once again puts humans in the cat-bird seat, but why not since it is humans articulating the theory.

A premise I developed in writing Tales of Monkeyman was that rather than taking the “scientific” approach of assuming that humans are fundamentally different from other species in all ways where they are not demonstrably similar and turning it on its head: let’s assume that other species of animals are exactly like us except in ways where they are demonstrably different. This approach is scorned as “anthropomorphism” by most of the scientific community, but it seems to me to be an equally valid premise.

So I don’t cotton to systems of thought which emphasize human exceptionalism. Humans are no better nor worse than any other species, just as no individual humans are, in the grand scheme of things, “better” or “worse” than any other. Which brings up Hitler again, and his historical cohort of genocidal maniacs.

In the useful set of metaphors I adhere to called co-counseling, all humans are born completely good, and their essential humanity remains completely good throughout their lives. But what happens is that humans get hurt, sometimes over and over, and as they try to get some emotional release from their hurts, they sometimes hurt others – sometimes pretty badly, to put it mildly. Theoretically, their goodness remains intact, but the set of patterns that develops from their hurts, from their disconnection to others creates a false, or limited reality that gloms onto them like some kind of primordial parasite and forces them to do horrific things. Such patterns justify the most drastic of interventions, surely, like a bullet to the head in the case of the Hitlers of the world, perhaps with a small apology, “I’m sorry, I know you didn’t mean it.” BLAM!