The following essay is an excerpt from a chapter in Daniel Voorhees’ upcoming, as yet untitled book.

The chief regret of those dying is not having really lived. The tragedy isn’t dying; it’s recognizing you haven’t lived until its too late to do anything about it.

It strikes me as odd that there remains such a primitive cultural bias against the open acceptance and discussion of one of the two most important milestones of our personal human experience.

Neither the beginning, the middle or the end of life can be understood, except in the most rudimentary fashion. Their true meaning cannot be understood out of context with what else exists both prior and after our brief time here, and that larger context cannot now be more than speculated upon. So we have created myths and fanciful belief systems to give us emotional support against the big, scary, dark mystery of the backdrop of our strange existence on this physical stage.

When the Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware interviewed scores of people in the last 12 weeks of their lives, she asked them their greatest regrets. The most frequent, published in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011), were:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me;
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard;
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings;
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I think first, it should not be radical to examine and come to terms with an obviously inevitable outcome to our life here. And once accepted and turned over in ones hands and examined like a bird’s egg or a conch shell, fascinating surprises and delights are revealed.

Second, a life well-lived shouldn’t be mourned or let go with tears and a whimper. It should be celebrated, as it is in some cultures.

So, what does life mean? What does death mean? What happens afterwards? I suggest the answers are all around us.

As part of the human experience, we grieve when someone we love passes from this stage. A fox chases down a rabbit and kills it – is that equally tragic? We generally would agree that it is not. Should you be reluctant to kill an insect that carries a virus that is about to infect your child? Is killing the virus tragic? It’s controversial to suggest that the same ethical standards should perhaps apply for our species as it does for ‘lower’ animals, or bacteria, but in fact, our human existence is subject to the same randomness and attrition as elsewhere in the food chain. It’s the natural ‘chaotic order’ of physical life. We are born, some die young, some die of disease, some die tragically, but we all die. To attempt to explain one’s death in terms of what is God’s plan is just plain superstitious. We live, we die. Some sooner than others.

So, this raises the question of what is the purpose of life. Is our death somehow more meaningful or poignant than the death of a squirrel in the woods? Or the death of a dandelion? I don’t think so. Life is life. All life is sacred, or perhaps no life is sacred. If death is ubiquitous and natural, is consciousness likewise ubiquitous? How does consciousness arise? Is it somehow a function of all life?

All life on earth is an electro-chemical reaction. Radiant solar energy powers the continuing unfolding of metabolic processes involving complex sugars and oxidation, resulting in a conversion to kinetic, thermal and other forms of energy. Complex proteins control cellular division and transformation. It is a dance of the vibration of particles excited by radiation in a medium that we can only partially experience and cannot possibly fully understand. We don’t know. We cannot know. We speculate. We conjecture and we hypothesize. We watch as we observe that our observation of the unfolding universe responds to our observing it, and yet we continue to hope and believe that we can understand it objectively. The same is true of death. We can only guess.

It is arrogant and dogmatic to declare that we are the only animals to have some form of consciousness or a soul, just because we can contemplate experiencing ourselves. We are filled with the same life as all other living creatures. And though we share the same death, it is hopeful and not unreasonable to believe that some part of us survives our physical death. Something inside us hints at it. It’s estimated that 5% of humans have had a near-death experience. Most of those report a separation from their body, and a transition to another zone where they are greeted by other consciousness.

Many people (including myself) who have participated in Amazonian Shamanic Ayahuasca ceremonies have reported crossing over into a different frame of consciousness inhabited by entities not of this world. In my case, they were delighted to encounter me and to find me ready to participate with them in the co-creation of reality [words fail me here . . .] as they operated and / or responded to the pulsing nature of this seemingly plasmic / geometric fabric of reality in sync with the surrounding cacophony of jungle fauna and the a capella icaros sung by the Shamanic spiritual guides. The beings appeared as positively existent conscious entities that seemed like playful sprites, comprised of benevolent and creative energy who hammered out their synchronized harmonies in a matrix above our consensual time and space. (For more detail on this topic, see here)

Through meditation and other entheogenic facilitation, I have observed considerable other consciousness, enough to tear at and redefine for me the socially acceptable boundaries of consensual day-to-day reality. I am certainly not the first or only person to push that boundary.

The thought of some part of us somehow surviving our death and going to another place is an archetype with roots stretching back to the beginning of our history. The debate regarding the nature of that surviving transitioning form has raged since the dawn of our group consciousness. We know a lot about what it is not that survives. It is not our head, or our feet, or intellect. Those things are part of the body that dies (and is itself transformed into heat energy, or the foodstuff of bacteria). The over/under suggests a conscious, love/life energy that expresses through our physical form during our life and survives the death of our body. It’s not some contiguous soul that survives to inhabit another body or go to pearly gates.

Like all other energy, life in our plane of existence is presumed to be obliged to conform to some ‘scientific’ laws. Specifically for the purposes of this conversation, laws regarding the conservation of energy. It’s held that in ‘our universe’, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed into another form of energy. I suggest that our life energy was another form of conscious energy before our birth into these bodies and transforms back into another, perhaps the previous, form of conscious energy upon our physical death. Perhaps like water scooped out of an ocean and poured for a brief time into our bodies, then returning to from where we came. Maybe our consciousness inhabits this living ‘gaia’ planet for the purpose of permitting the ocean to experience itself through our senses, feet and phalanges.

Or maybe its really all about a long march of evolution, which makes us simply selective adaptation vehicles for the information contained in our genetic code.

We can only surmise, based on what seem to be reasonable presumptions. Tragically, most of our socially acceptable presumptions about the nature of reality are rooted in ancient mythology and rigid belief systems constructed to reinforce power structures. I say tragic, because virtually all organized religions encourage devotees to believe a framework of elements, and then – stop – using their brains, minds, spirits and sense of wonder about the beauty and grandeur that defies explanation utilizing the limited palette of tools accepted by people too compliant with church doctrine and authority, and too lazy to think for themselves. Come on, the universe is a shockingly big place, full of large fish eating smaller fish eating smaller fish. We cannot stop wondering and exploring. It is our nature, and perhaps our only purpose,

In order to arrive at an interesting and coherent model of life and death for us, we should practically peel back the apparently ridiculous, unsupportable and the self-serving pillars of our various belief constructs.

Continued . . .