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The Soul Upon Death?
Have you ever wondered what it'd be like to die?
No, it's not me being suicidal, just clinical curiousity - what IS it like to die? Is it like a big white light which more or less constantly shines in your eye or is it something more like when we're asleep and we go through a series of dreams? Or just blackness?
I wonder if people are ever aware of the exact time they die. Do they feel their last breath slipping away, the light going out, the loss of sensation in their limbs? Is it like falling asleep? If it's a violent death, is it a blinding sharp pain and then nothing? What is that instant like?
In Buddhism, Theravadan Buddhism at least, we are taught that the body is constantly moving at an extremely fast rate .... to represent it visually, it would look like this:
..............................................................
As a person dies, it slows down:
......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And so on.
What are those moments like? When brainwave patters slow down... does the person feel anything? Or does everything slow down just like the brain? Maybe the conscious mind doesn't register anything after that.
I've been watching a lot of TV and lately there've been a lot of portrayals of death. Only Dead Like Me actually discusses the possibility of an afterlife, and EVEN THEN - while the Reapers gallivant around getting souls, none of these episodes actually depict what happens after the soul has moved on. There's just this very shiny scene and then nothing. All it does is follow the Reapers around in the living world. It gets old after a while.
(Plus, the only great thing about that show is Mandy Patinkin, because I think he's awesome. I like the comedy and all, but man, the main narrating character is a pain in the ass.)
And what's it like to be a ghost? That must suck, just wandering around in the same place all the time, and not even being aware of being dead - wait, how do we know that ghosts don't know they're dead? Some of them MUST know. Why else would you have friendly-type ghosts who don't harbour malevolent feelings towards the living? How does one retain knowledge of one's own death after there's no more physical body to process the information? IS the physical body needed to process new information?
This is, of course, assuming that the body is the hardware needed to process consciousness - which obviously isn't the case with some ghosts who show full consciousness of their own existance. What then, are brainwaves? What happens when brainwave activity is low?
I watched this great Cantonese movie once and I can't remember what it's called. Basically, it's about this old woman who initially wants to die, but after a field trip with other old folks, she meets a man in white, and she says, "give me ten more years and I promise I'll appreciate every moment." A host of wonderful and bad things happen to her family during the next few days until the end, when the man in white returns, and when she says "I thought I said ten years" he says "one day in heaven is a year on Earth."
Her eldest son (with whom she shares several flashbacks) is starting to realize his mother isn't what she is when he is called to the hospital, to find her in the hospital bed, and the doctor tells him, "her brainwave activity is ten times the usual rate for a normal human being." (The movie ends with both of them reconciling their less-than-satisfactory lives and realizing their worth to each other, and he gets a call, and he knows it's the hospital's news, and she says, "let me go. Pick up the phone." The next shot is him in the room without her. The scene shifts to the hospital where his sister's newborn baby is in the observation nursery, and while the entire family waves to it and says hello and all that fun stuff you do with babies behind the window, the son can feel his mother with them.)
ANYWAY, the point is, what DOES happen if brainwave activity is high? Does it mean a heightened sense of consciousness? A lot of thinking, more than what the average human does? And if it's low, it just means little brain activity, does it mean, "close to death"? How is the consciousness determined by the body - or does the consciousness determine the body's activity? As long as the "soul" (for lack of a better term) remains in the body, it's alive? Can the soul leave the body and the body remain alive? Would that accurately explain brain-dead people?
In The Redemption of Althalus, the title character thinks that "crazy people are just people who were past their time to die. It would drive anybody crazy, still being alive when they're supposed to be resting peacefully in their graves." (BTW, have I said yet that David Eddings is the shiznit? No? Well, he is.)
I think that this is the pivotal tie-in between science and spirituality - if we could understand how the both of them are linked to each other, there would be a greater understanding of the processes of death AND life. There has to be some sort of link, some way of qualitatively measuring (instead of merely quantitatively the way we so often do).
No, it's not me being suicidal, just clinical curiousity - what IS it like to die? Is it like a big white light which more or less constantly shines in your eye or is it something more like when we're asleep and we go through a series of dreams? Or just blackness?
I wonder if people are ever aware of the exact time they die. Do they feel their last breath slipping away, the light going out, the loss of sensation in their limbs? Is it like falling asleep? If it's a violent death, is it a blinding sharp pain and then nothing? What is that instant like?
In Buddhism, Theravadan Buddhism at least, we are taught that the body is constantly moving at an extremely fast rate .... to represent it visually, it would look like this:
..............................................................
As a person dies, it slows down:
......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And so on.
What are those moments like? When brainwave patters slow down... does the person feel anything? Or does everything slow down just like the brain? Maybe the conscious mind doesn't register anything after that.
I've been watching a lot of TV and lately there've been a lot of portrayals of death. Only Dead Like Me actually discusses the possibility of an afterlife, and EVEN THEN - while the Reapers gallivant around getting souls, none of these episodes actually depict what happens after the soul has moved on. There's just this very shiny scene and then nothing. All it does is follow the Reapers around in the living world. It gets old after a while.
(Plus, the only great thing about that show is Mandy Patinkin, because I think he's awesome. I like the comedy and all, but man, the main narrating character is a pain in the ass.)
And what's it like to be a ghost? That must suck, just wandering around in the same place all the time, and not even being aware of being dead - wait, how do we know that ghosts don't know they're dead? Some of them MUST know. Why else would you have friendly-type ghosts who don't harbour malevolent feelings towards the living? How does one retain knowledge of one's own death after there's no more physical body to process the information? IS the physical body needed to process new information?
This is, of course, assuming that the body is the hardware needed to process consciousness - which obviously isn't the case with some ghosts who show full consciousness of their own existance. What then, are brainwaves? What happens when brainwave activity is low?
I watched this great Cantonese movie once and I can't remember what it's called. Basically, it's about this old woman who initially wants to die, but after a field trip with other old folks, she meets a man in white, and she says, "give me ten more years and I promise I'll appreciate every moment." A host of wonderful and bad things happen to her family during the next few days until the end, when the man in white returns, and when she says "I thought I said ten years" he says "one day in heaven is a year on Earth."
Her eldest son (with whom she shares several flashbacks) is starting to realize his mother isn't what she is when he is called to the hospital, to find her in the hospital bed, and the doctor tells him, "her brainwave activity is ten times the usual rate for a normal human being." (The movie ends with both of them reconciling their less-than-satisfactory lives and realizing their worth to each other, and he gets a call, and he knows it's the hospital's news, and she says, "let me go. Pick up the phone." The next shot is him in the room without her. The scene shifts to the hospital where his sister's newborn baby is in the observation nursery, and while the entire family waves to it and says hello and all that fun stuff you do with babies behind the window, the son can feel his mother with them.)
ANYWAY, the point is, what DOES happen if brainwave activity is high? Does it mean a heightened sense of consciousness? A lot of thinking, more than what the average human does? And if it's low, it just means little brain activity, does it mean, "close to death"? How is the consciousness determined by the body - or does the consciousness determine the body's activity? As long as the "soul" (for lack of a better term) remains in the body, it's alive? Can the soul leave the body and the body remain alive? Would that accurately explain brain-dead people?
In The Redemption of Althalus, the title character thinks that "crazy people are just people who were past their time to die. It would drive anybody crazy, still being alive when they're supposed to be resting peacefully in their graves." (BTW, have I said yet that David Eddings is the shiznit? No? Well, he is.)
I think that this is the pivotal tie-in between science and spirituality - if we could understand how the both of them are linked to each other, there would be a greater understanding of the processes of death AND life. There has to be some sort of link, some way of qualitatively measuring (instead of merely quantitatively the way we so often do).
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When her son was a child, he was stricken with an incurable disease. The mother was outside the hospital, obviously very distressed, looked at the heavens (twinkling with stars) and pleaded that 10 ten years of her life is taken in exchange of him surviving the disease. A shooting star passes by and she took it as a sign that the heavens agreed.
He survived the ordeal miraculously and it was 30 years on later that the mother will meet Death (the late Roy Chiao) who came down to collect her. And it was the beginning of the film where she went on the senior citizen field trip, she met him. She said "Is it time already? I need ten more years"
She got her 'ten years' albeit equalling to 'ten days'. Her body remains at the hills where she died while her spirit remains on Earth for another ten more days. That is why at the end, the son was confused as to the mother's body who is in the hospital and the same lady who is talking to him on the rocking chair. And then he realised, it was her apparition; hence her 'normal than usual body wavelength activity'. It doesn't help that mother is also a clairvoryant.
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