Have you reached the point yet of wondering what happens when you die?  Perhaps the current pandemic will prompt more of us to think about this important question.  It is important because of the impact that the answer has on us whilst we are alive.

There is an unspoken assumption behind all the current fears and actions that death is a bad thing; that we must do whatever we can to extend life – even if the extended life comprises sitting in an armchair in a care home gazing out the window or watching daytime TV.  I use the term ‘extend’ deliberately instead of the more common term ‘save’ because we are all destined to die;  rescuing someone from drowning does not ‘save’ their life, it extends it.  But to what purpose?

Actually, it may be that rescuing someone from drowning does ‘save’ their life, in that the experience may cause them to turn from a previous pointless and self-centred existence to a life of love and purpose.  The fact that someone cared about them enough to rescue them may make them realise the importance of relationships, the importance of selflessness, the importance of love.

People who have gone through near death experiences often become dramatically changed, dedicating the rest of their lives to acts of loving kindness to others.  So it is indeed possible to save someone’s life. But it is the quality, value and purpose of the life that is saved rather than the biological state of being alive for ever.

We confuse the biological life with what I will call spiritual life.  An amoeba has biological life, a tree has biological life, and so does a virus.  But none of these have spiritual life.  They do not ‘experience’ life, they have not brain to sustain any form of consciousness and they simply live biologically.  There may be other forms of higher life (apes, dolphins) that can ‘experience’ life; I don’t know because I’m not one of them.  But I do know that I experience life.  When I eat a curry I ‘experience’ a taste, but even that is hard to pin down.

If you Google “The Qualia Problem” you will find a paper by Frank Jackson which states that:

“I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain, the kind of states, their functional role, their relation to what goes on at other times and in other brains, and so on and so forth, and be I as clever as can be in fitting it all together, you won’t have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky.”

But whatever it means for me to experience the taste of the curry, I know that there is a ‘me’ to experience it.  It is that ‘me’, not the biological me which I long to preserve, whose ‘life’ I want to save.  And so the big question is, does that ‘me’, that spiritual me, cease to be when my physical body ceases to be?

If the spiritual ‘me’ will end when the biological me ends, there will be no ‘me’ to experience that I am dead.  Do not grieve for me, I will no longer exist.

Of course I will remain in your memory, and you will look back on your memories with joy and sadness – as with all memories.  They are not erased simply because I die; they are as real as they are today while I live.   But if extending my life gives me no ‘spiritual’ life at all, then any new memories will bring sadness in remembering my final days.  So what will be the value of extending my biological life when I have no spiritual life?  The preservation of my decaying body simply to avoid biological death will bring sadness to overshadow previous memories, and will in practice bring mourning forward before my death.

This may sound heartless, particularly if you have not yet lost your parents or other loved ones.  But before you condemn me, I have suffered loss.  I have lost a child, at birth.  I have lost both of my parents.  And I know the pain that the pointlessness of the latter days of their lives brought them.  My father knowing he had to suffer the pain of prostate cancer with no hope of end other than death; my mother wondering when the pointlessness would end, her daily routine seeing her sitting on her bed gazing out at the suburban street for hours.  I grieved over them all when they died, and the grief is still there of course, many years later, just less acute.

I am not heartless.  No.  I want to see people truly, spiritually ‘live’ whilst they have biological life.

But what if the spiritual ‘me’ continues to exist beyond death?  What if my purpose is indeed eternal?  And how can I know?

The crew of early sailing ships believed that there were other lands over the horizon.  Europeans believed that there must be a large land mass south of the equator before they found it.  And brave adventurous souls set off to find it.  Some came back and told others that it was true, and soon constant travel to and fro confirmed it.  That made it easy for those who had not been there to ‘know’ that Australia existed.

But it’s not quite the same with life beyond biological death.  Our bodies cease to function and eventually the flesh rots and we are left with a skeleton.  We don’t find dead people returning to re-inhabit their skeletons; there is no free travel between here and any ‘afterlife’.  At least, not that we are aware of.

Imagine for a moment a caterpillar.  It has a physical body, it eats and excretes, it moves around and (pretending for a moment that it has the capability) experiences the physical domain of the leaf.  And then, after it has grown and fattened up, it appears to die.  It becomes encased in a shell and the caterpillar’s physical form decays.  But it is still alive, rather than being dead, it is being transformed into something different.  The butterfly that emerges from the cocoon bears no resemblance to the caterpillar, and is not even constrained to living on the leaf.  A thing of beauty, it soars into the air and is a delight to see.  Yet it cannot return and tell the caterpillars who remain on the leaf that there is life beyond the cocoon.  Neither should we expect human spirits return to tell us what happens beyond biological death.

And yet… one did return.  No ordinary man, but a man who had turned the lives of those he met upside down;  A man who taught the secrets of true spiritual life to those who would listen – yet more than a great teacher;  A man who healed those who were physically ill by the touch of his hand, yet more than a great doctor;  A man who brought biological life back into a friend’s physical body after they had been buried in a tomb for three days;  A man who willingly surrendered his body to excruciating crucifixion and inevitable physical death and burial in a tomb.

Two days later, his tomb was empty.  Although his friends and more importantly his enemies searched everywhere for it, no body was to be found, just some folded grave clothes.  His enemies were desperate to find the body to disprove the claims of his closest friends that he was alive; that they had seen him, spoken with him, and touched him.

Madness we say – they must have imagined it.  And yet such a madness that they were willing to die rather than deny it.  Such a madness that they were filled with joy, and their lives were transformed;  freed from the greed and selfishness of their world – sharing all they had with one another, loving one another.  Such a madness that they began to understand the secrets their friend had taught them about what a true spiritual life looks like.  Such a madness that brought ‘life in abundance’, not just for them but for all who listened to their eye witness accounts and trusted and believed them.  A madness that has affected millions upon millions over the past 2000 years.

Our decision of what we believe happens when our bodies physically die has enormous impact on our lives whilst our physical bodies live. Do we trust in the eyewitness accounts of what happened to that man, and hope and expect  that spiritual life is not snuffed out with our decaying bodies?   Do we choose to believe that our spiritual selves will live on, no longer constrained to the two dimensional leaf of this world but soaring into the sky of eternity; that we will be transformed from caterpillars to butterflies.  Do we start putting into practice the words of wisdom that bring spiritual life today?

Madness?  Or the sanest decision that we ever make?  Do we trust or ignore the evidence?  Do we dare to find out?