Deathing: An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life
424
Deathing: An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life
424eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780892545742 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nicolas-Hays, Inc |
| Publication date: | 01/15/1989 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Deathing
An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life
By Anya Foos-Graber
NICOLAS-HAYS, INC.
Copyright © 1989 Anya Foos-GraberAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89254-574-2
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The death moment has been forgotten by our society. Rather than accepting death as the culmination of physical life, and seeing it as a beginning of a new chapter of consciousness, most people view its inevitability as tragic. Death is a curse that comes to each of us, whether or not we want it. So we mourn it as an end to the good life, a void that capriciously claims us at a moment's notice. This final abyss is spoken of in hushed, regretful tones, and usually in connection with grief, crisis, and mourning. Nothing makes us so uncomfortable as having to think ahead to the final days of our parents or spouse or closest friends, or having to consider the deaths of our children. This deep cultural bias against death has cleaved it from life. As a result, we deny ourselves a valid part of our birthright and neglect the vital connection between life and death — the moment of death.
We rarely are taught to accept the reality of our final moments or that those moments even have effects. Most people never learn how to die, nor are they given the opportunity to prepare for their departure. The actual process of dying is resisted and forgotten as much as possible; it is hidden, shunned. As a result, dying people are relegated to invisible corners of our society. During their final hours they often are excluded from the rest of life, and subsumed in the technical and impersonal world of medicine.
Modern medicine has developed in a way that emphasizes the pursuit of life-saving measures at all costs. Therefore, instead of taking responsibility for the dying process, we turn to technology to delay it. Medals are given to doctors for the patients they save, not for those whose deaths they make easier. In fact, in our active, life-oriented society, death represents the ultimate failure of modern achievements; it means that the life-prolonging measures in which we have so much invested have fallen short. Because of the emphasis on technical solutions, little value is given to learning to accept and confront death. The very power that has lengthened our lives also has separated us from our biological roots. We have paid for the rapid technological advance with an alienation from ourselves, our bodies, and the world we live in. At the death moment, when our biological frailty becomes most apparent, we find ourselves helpless and unprepared, unconnected to what we are leaving, or where we are going.
Trying to avoid the act of dying has only made us more afraid of it. Because we won't confront it, we can't control it; we are unable to shape it into the type of death we would want, as we have tried to shape our lives. At the moment of death people often are under sedation, unable to consciously participate in the singular process of dying. The attitude prevails that death should be allowed to take care of itself because, after all, it is living that is hard. This platitude, unfortunately, is just a placebo; most of us fear death greatly. By pretending that dying will readily proceed on its own, we create needless tensions. Energy that could better be put into living is diverted into fears of mortality that rarely can be expressed and remain unresolved. We can salvage this waste, however.
The anxiety which besets us individually can be seen in the society at large as well. Not only are the social and emotional contexts around each of us devoid of the power that comes from facing and accepting death, but our institutions are not able to respond to its insistent presence. Understandably, people feel profoundly alone. There are no rites of passage to ease the inevitable. At a time when people most need attention, they are placed inside impersonal institutions. With the last parts of their selfhood stripped away, the sick become another cog in a system that is supposed to be oriented toward patient care, but which often functions more like an assembly line. Best efforts usually are made to provide a good environment for dying, but too often the institutions are inept at this important moment. Rather than allowing people to die with kindness, dignity, and consciousness, they compel many people to die alone and unaware.
My intent is to place the death moment back in its rightful place, as our birthright, and to encourage its fullest expression whenever possible. I believe that it is possible to establish in our society an attitude of respect toward a vacating body and the dying person's right to depart in peace, thus establishing an after-life consciousness. By rejoining death with the rest of life, all of us will experience a joy and a release of the energy that is currently locked up in our fear and evasions. We can also prepare for the tomorrows of the soul.
Death has not always been treated as it is today. Long before the triumph of modern medicine, there was a craft of dying. In medieval times, people in the Western world approached death in a more natural way than we do now. In those days, the parameter of death defined life; even the main theme of literature was "momento mori — remember death," which, far from being morbid, meant that life was to be recalled as a spiritual continuity. Within the Catholic church, last rites were performed to ease the transition from life to death. These traditions were based on a distinct psychology of consciousness that is no longer acknowledged today. These rites may still be performed, but their true function is rarely understood today.
With the advent of technology, Westerners became separated from the fundamentals of their biological existence. Re-pressions about sex, birth, and death became increasingly meshed in social styles of behavior. Victorian prudery extended to a vocabulary of symbolic cover-up in which even the legs of a chair were called limbs. Death was equally obscured.
While Western traditions for dying declined, Eastern practices continued, although they were deliberately kept secret until recently. The Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead reveal life to be a series of changes starting at birth and continuing through the moment of death into afterlife and rebirth. These precise and detailed guidebooks recognize different levels of consciousness involved in living and in dying — states that are experienced in meditation and in the practice of disciplines such as yoga that integrate physical, psychological, and spiritual concerns. Some Tibetan Buddhist lore has been conveyed to the West through translations of its Book of the Dead and by the rash of Eastern teachers who have emigrated to the West. Nevertheless, the significance of the act of dying by and large has been lost in our society and it needs to be regained as a conscious act.
Although, by convention, the death process has been shunned, it is starting to reappear as a topic of conversation and a matter of interest. Death can't be ignored for long; it won't stay quietly out of sight, democratic as it is. Many people are thinking about it, often because of unusual or seemingly inexplicable events they have heard about or experienced themselves. For instance, some people report having been visited by a loved one who has just died — a parent, child, husband or wife, or close friend. Still surprised, they try to tell what the visit was like, perhaps attempt to figure out what it meant. Others talk of experiencing altered levels of consciousness when they are in conditions of clinical death. The states of consciousness that they describe are called the "near-death experience," or NDE, and are similar to those attained by people who have meditated conscientiously over a number of years, or who have spontaneously experienced altered consciousness.
Many people who have experienced NDE, ironically, have been pushed to question the process of dying and its relationship to living a fulfilled life because of the very medical technology that has helped keep death in the closet for so long. Because of modern medicine, people who have clinically died often can be resuscitated and brought back to life again on an unprecedented scale. Resuscitation techniques usually are applied in hospitals when people "die" — which, according to the clinical definition, means that a heart stops beating, breathing ceases, and the EEG fails to record the presence of brain waves. But modern medical technologies can revive the biological body so that patients who were declared "dead" can live once more. Most usually, these people return with an expanded view of life. This near-death experience is shared by so many people that it has become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon. A recent Gallup Poll reports that about eight million people have survived a near-death experience. Because their numbers are so large, their experiences are bound to effect societal change. They are not people who claim to have psychic powers or who have experimented with trying to reach different levels of consciousness. On the contrary, they are everyday people who probably had little interest in death until they died — or nearly died.
Some people who once were declared clinically dead cannot remember anything that elapsed from the moment they lost consciousness until they regained it, just as dreams are often forgotten upon waking. Their near-death experience in subtle realms remains forgotten time for them. Many others can remember the experience, but find it difficult to describe, and they are afraid of other people's reactions. However, an astonishing number of survivors can retell the event with complete clarity and detail. Some recall seeing the operating room from the vantage point of the ceiling. Although these reports vary greatly, they also overlap and share many similarities.
In the late 1970s, Dr. Raymond Moody, a physician, documented the story of the near-death experience in Life After Life. He introduced such terms as the "tunnel," "out-of-body state," the "light," and the "figure of light," which have since become common parlance about the almost-dying process. Drawing on accounts of hundreds of people whom he interviewed from all over the world, Moody compiled a model of the near-death experience. The following scenario closely resembles many of the stories that he heard, although not all of the case histories share all of the model's features.
* * *
A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside his own physical body, still in the same immediate physical environment, and sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.
After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a "body," but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet him and help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before — a being of light — appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point, he finds himself approaching some sort of a barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.
Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so. In the first place, he can find no words to describe these unearthly episodes. He also finds that others scoff, so he stops telling other people. Still, the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life.
* * *
Most people who can describe their near-death experience mention a tunnel, tube, or pipe through which they travel after having left their bodies, usually moving toward a bright light. They often experience a life review, and sometimes glimpses of the future; ordinarily they report back undescribable experiences of ecstasy and the feeling of being one with all life. Because these recollections seem to imply that "near-death" involves a unique mental state, they suggest that consciousness exists in a wider context than that usually described by contemporary, body-based psychology.
I view the tunnel in Moody's model as a change in the level of a person's consciousness. It may be that during a near-death experience, consciousness shifts its locus away from the physical body. Someone who had never experienced this radical a shift in consciousness might call it "leaving the body." Those a little more practiced or accustomed to the event might refer to it as simply being someplace else. In this state, people feel freed of the three- dimensional limits of a time-bound world that usually surrounds us. Their entire existence seems simultaneous, although they describe having felt the sensation of a past, present, and future. The place they mention having moved to is sometimes called "the astral plane." It seems to be an actual dimension of existence. The "body" used for expression of consciousness on the astral plane is sometimes called "the secondary body," or "light body." The ancient Egyptians called it the "ka," while Eastern lore has many names for the different "bodies" or sheaths that are utilized in these various realms of consciousness. People also frequently report having perceived an additional "etheric body." This is the electromagnetic biofield which Samkyha yoga calls the "pranamaya kosha" that surrounds the physical body until death.
Nor is clinical death to be equated with "real death," which is the departure of the Consciousness Principle in utter abandonment of the body. The "when" of this complete departure has to be left, unfortunately, to the future findings of consciousness research. That clinical death and the departure of total consciousness from the body are not synonymous is sufficiently significant in and of itself.
It is the etheric body that Deathing seeks to harness in "conscious dying," for its disengagement from the physical is our means of "lift-off," our propellant for the departing Consciousness Principle. Properly focused in the conscious dying process, it runs its course, its purpose served — not unlike the placenta in the birth process, which is dispensed with after the baby is born. Yet, it is this unutilized etheric body which can cause "breech" deaths, for it can tangle or otherwise obsure a clean exit.
My observation is that when the etheric or biofield body becomes incoherent — through shock, trauma, or just the death process experienced in ignorance — it tends to clot around the subtle bodies, muffling higher perceptions. This creates an environment the Greeks called Hades, and what I call the Gray Place. Robert Monroe, in Far Journeys, chronicles precisely the "rings" or levels of the Gray Place, into which shock deaths, suicides, or mass deaths can precipitate one, which further substantiates a public need for information about deathing's preventative role.
All these different sheaths or bodies are the expression of states of consciousness operating in actual "geographies" of inner space. The infinite, vibrating field of the universe is organized according to mathematical, harmonically resonating intervals. That is what is meant by the so-called planes and subplanes, the bardos and lokas of esoteric literature in many religious traditions. The various bodies, by whatever name they are called, correspond to (and operate on) various levels, ranging from the dense physical to the most subtle.
The sensation of being out-of-the-body is one of the most distinctive features of near-death as well as death, and is included in the literature of every main religion of the world, although it was usually hidden. Judaism contained it in the secret teaching of Kabbala, the Greeks and Egyptians in their mystery schools and initiations, and the Moslem tradition in the Dervish orders, while St. Paul, who practiced this ancient art, called it "dying daily." It is also a faculty that tends to emerge in an individual who has experienced a partial or complete kundalini awakening into higher consciousness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Deathing by Anya Foos-Graber. Copyright © 1989 Anya Foos-Graber. Excerpted by permission of NICOLAS-HAYS, INC..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.,Preface by Ramamurti S. Mishra, M.D.,
Acknowledgments,
Part I Introduction,
Part II Tom Breacher's Departure and The Deathing of Selma,
Part III The Manual of Deathing,
Resources,
Index,