Astrophysicist David Darling writes: “Those who have come close to death have, as it were, poked their noses into this greater world beyond human life. They have felt, briefly, incompletely, what it is like to be free of self and in contact with the absolute nature of things. No hallucination or fit of delirium could generate such an experience. Rather, it is ordinary life that, by comparison, begins to take on the air of unreality.
“The message is clear: if we can learn to see through the illusion of self now, in this life, then the ‘I’ who can die no longer exists. Death is deprived of its victim, so that the basis for fear and sorrow of death is undermined. We become part of a much larger process―the totality of being―that has no start or end.
“The scientist within us may rail at this and demand, ‘How can there be any sort of life after death? How can consciousness exist without a brain?’ But we can see now that these questions stem from a failure to grasp the true nature of consciousness and the brain. Better surely to ask, ‘How can there be consciousness with a brain?’
“We see the world as being full of relatively stable objects, such as trees and rocks and ourselves. But there is no stability anywhere, not even for a microsecond. Only our minds create that illusion. There are no trees, only a tree-air-earth-sun-cosmos process that never stands still. There are no people, only a people-air-food-cosmos process that is forever breathing, digesting and growing, breaking down and healing itself. There are no objects or things at all, but just one great interconnected system that is the whole of reality. All the world is a living, dynamic movement—continuous change and impermanence its only genuine characteristics.
“It is no coincidence that behavior which people everywhere consider intrinsically good―generosity to our fellow humans, working for the benefit of others, valuing all forms of life―serves also to lessen our preoccupation with self and to encourage the realization that we are part of an undivided unity. Only when there is no self left, is there no one who can die.
“Only those aspects of us that are selfless―qualities we might put under the unifying heading of ‘love’―will endure.
“Death is to be welcomed, when in due course it draws near, for with it we shall be freed from our terrible isolation. It is the one event that draws us all together again, back into the single true mind of the universe. Death is not a failure or a finality, but a triumph and the start of an experience we can hardly begin to imagine in our present form.
“Proper, spiritual preparation for death involves a dedicated search for the true nature of reality. And that, in turn, calls for a lifelong voyage of discovery into consciousness without self.
“Each to his or her own. There are many ways to break through the illusionary world of the rational mind. Prayer, charity, music, poetry―a million different roads.
“Only by pursuing a life course that diminishes our obsession with self, with material and emotional ‘me-ness,’ can we gain the deeper insights needed to face death with equanimity. A wonderful future lies ahead of us, following the trial of death, but not as individuals. In store is nothing less than a grand reunion with reality, an expansion of consciousness that can only occasionally be glimpsed through the dim portals of our senses and brain.”
David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 168-187.
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