"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
Laplace's Demon and the Quantifiable Universe
Ever since humanity learned to express ideas through language, death has always been an integral part of our canon of knowledge. This is true for every human civilisation in all of recorded human history. Even long before the advent of language, as attended by the burial sites of the Paleolithic, death was certainly an important and integral part of human societies around the world. It is only in very recent times that death is suddenly shunned form our sight. Discussion over death is completely avoided, supposedly out of disinterest, but far more likely due to fear. Our societies are sanitised from the drudgery of death. Most of us wouldn't even know how to skin a rabbit nowadays, let alone cope with our final judgement. We exorcise death through horror movies, video games and revived pagan celebrations such as Halloween, but we refuse to talk about it. Death is ignored in science and philosophy, and it is made alien to us by virtue of this deliberate gap. We are told that there is nothing beyond our mortal realm, or at the very least there is nothing worthy for us to know about it. We need not concern ourselves over death, merely ignore it until the time comes for us to leave this world, unprepared. This modern aptitude towards such an integral aspect of our existence is diametrically opposed to how human beings have always lived their lives in all of human history. So how could such a dramatic change in our social perception of life and death have occured in modern times?
Many things have happened over the last 200 years. Just a little over a century ago, a widespread conviction of a perfect order dominated our perception of the world. Science had steadily progressed to the point we were convinced that we could eventually determine every aspect of Creation. Ours, was a deterministic universe, and it was only a matter of time before humans would unveil every aspect of God's Creation. Laplace's Demon best characterises this period of human history. The French physicist postulated that a man endowed with unlimited power of calculation and full knowledge of the current state of the universe, could determine every event that this universe would unfold. This confidence in our material universe was also reflected in politics and in our social constructions. Yet, in just a few decades over the first half of the 20th Century, the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics and the traumas of two world wars, annihilated completely the reassurance we held in that causal and orderly world that had been building up in the West since the Hellenic period all the way to the postulations of Laplace's Demon. Ironically, whereas our confidence in a material universe did not exclude God at the foundation of the universe, the overturning of such materialistic confidence has. Today, notwithstanding we now know that there is a whole other universe beyond that of our senses, our understanding of the divine has never been so weak and curtailed. It is clear in fact, that not only we have yet to come to terms with the quirkiness of Quantum Mechanics that turned Classical Physics on its head, but we still have to overcome the traumas of two world wars as well as the monstrous horrors that accompanied this dark period of human history. I say this is ironic because notwithstanding the uncertainty generated by Quantum Mechanics, modern physics has categorically and irrefutably demonstrated the deterministic role consciousness plays in the manifestations of our universe. And what greater reassurance could we possibly request of divine intervention than our role in generating the very matter we perceive? Humanity never before enjoyed such extraordinary evidence revealing the fundamental role the divine plays in our lives, and yet we have never been so far removed from its realm as we are today. Certainly this gulf that separates us from God today is caused, at least in part by the collapse of a predictable and deterministic material world, but uncertainty never prevented humanity from speculating on the nature of the divine. Long before Galileo formalised the empirical method, or before Newton completed the body of laws that govern visible mass, human beings had plenty of other resources to interpret God. We did not need the reassurance of a quantifiable universe. I suspect we have seen far too much death and far too much suffering all at once, and we now need come to terms with these realities, in order to restore our confidence in the magnificent orchestra of our universe.
"Praised be my Lord for our sister, the bodily death, From the which no living man can flee. Woe to them who die in mortal sin; Blessed those who shall find themselves in Thy most holy will, For the second death shall do them no ill." — Saint Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun (tr. by Friar Paschal Robinson)
Sora Nostra Morte Corporale (Our Sister, the Bodily Death)
I have become strangely — and comfortably — acquainted with death. I have been washed away by rip tides more times I’d like to admit (fool me once…); I have passed out in the wilderness from dehydration twice (fool me once…); I have been so badly ill stricken by cholera to be pronounced lost by the doctors attending to me, while I wondered in and out of consciousness; I suffered a cerebral ischemia that for several hours flushed out nearly my entire rational cognitive memory; and I have spent far too long hours in the solitude of my adolescence and youth contemplating death’s embrace. Set aside the juvenile speculations on a possible shortcut to elude life's suffering, every time I have been approached by death, I have always felt surprisingly calm. Surprisingly for me, I mean. I am certain that my experiences are far from unique, but as we all can only speak of our own experiences, I can say that I have come to cherish being prepared for death and I have learned not to expect any warning, but be prepared for it at all times. I dare say that for quite some time now, I have become resolute about the importance of being prepared for death. What in my youth was a philosophical speculation on the importance death plays in our lives, as the moment of revelation and resolution of the puzzle of our existence, has now very much become a way of life. I do not wish to die, far from it. I have merely become determined to be as ready as I possibly can be, when that time comes, and I assume that time can come at any moment. Thus, while I would not by any stretch of the imagination consider myself 'fearless', there is one thing I have learned to no longer fear. I do not fear death. And whilst it was not the intention of this practice, I have stumbled upon an extraordinary tool to attain meaning and fulfilment. In fact, I am now convinced that life cannot be fully appreciated lest we overcome our instinctual (yet irrational as we shall see) fear of death. Love cannot be born out of fear. You do not love your spouse for fear of solitude, and lest you overcome the fear of separation, you won't know genuine love. The same is true for life. You cannot truly love life until you have rid yourself of the fear of dying. And what is most revealing of this practice is that fear of dying can only be overcome through the attainment of a clear conscience, that is a conscience capable of setting the soul free. All that we have experienced in our lifetime, trying to understand the riddle of existence, will be revealed to us instantaneously as long as we learn to keep our soul uncluttered and unbridled. In other words it is largely thanks to my acquaintance with death that I have learned to be free. Allow me to share what I have understood of that inevitable moment we shall transit away from our flesh, and what lies beyond that point.
"Consider your origin: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge." — Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Modelling Death
One of the consequences of last century's Quantum shock, aided most likely by the horrors of the 20th Century, was a rising unwillingness to explore meaning. Historically the role of the philosopher had never been severed from that of the scientist. For the better part of our existence there was no distinction between the two practices. Only the refinement of the empirical method begun to separate the function of the philosopher from that of the scientist, so that those who pursued a more Platonic path towards logical enquiry would fall into the category of philosophers, whereas those who pursued a more Aristotelian approach to physical observation would be called scientists. Thus, while the 2 activities were very much indivisible as recently as the times of Giordano Bruno in the 16th Century or Francis Bacon in the 17th Century, it is only with men such as Galileo, Copercnicus and Newton, that history begun distinguishing scientists from philosophers, insofar as the former appears more concerned with the mechanisms of our universe rather than its meaning. Nevertheless it would be simply blasphemous to advocate that Galileo, Copernicus or Newton were not concerned with the meaning underlying their discoveries. And this remained true for the rest of our history until the time of the Copenhagen Interpretation, rolled out between 1925 and 1927. Men like Plank, Bohrs and Einstein were still fully invested in deriving from their findings, meaning for our universe. The role of God remained central to them. It is only after the Copenhagen Interpretation that scientists have been demeaningly reduced to sophisticated book keepers who need not concern themselves over the meaning of their experiments. Or as David Merin famously complained, scientist are now told to "shut up and calculate." It is understandable that the complexity and novelty of Quantum Mechanics is absolutely mesmerising, but no matter how difficult a task, scientists should not be asked to abandon speculation on the implications of their work, for that is the very purpose of the scientific endeavour. Now that we know that our universe is not confined in absolute values of space, mass and time, we need more than ever, project models on what the aspect of this novel universe is. The Greeks did not have spacecrafts to send lovely pictures of our fellow planets orbiting the Sun, yet that did not prevent them from formulating a cosmology capable of explaining the relationship between all elements in the universe. They believed in a Ptolemaic universe where the Earth lied at its very centre, and earth, water, air and fire co-inhabited the universe with a constant desire to return to their natural layer. Thus air would rise through water, and earth would fall through air. At the top of our visible universe was fire, and beyond that layer, shielded by a perforated globe was the ether. The globe shield served to preserve our world from the flames of the ether, which we could see shine, glimmer and sparkle in the form of stars and planets through the shield's array of tiny holes. Similarly today, we should not despair from speculating through models of our own, that which is still to us inexplicable. And by virtue of a large body of literature on the subject, amongst all the things yet unknown to us, death is a far more simple subject to tackle than one would imagine. Throughout history in fact, all the different manners humanity attempted to portray death and illustrate the afterlife, fall in just 3 distinctive models. I will call these the Linear model, the Circular model, and the Ripple model.
The Linear Model
The linear model encompasses a very wide range of scenarios, which are as diverse as they are widespread, both geographically and throughout the ages. The fundamental premise of the linear model is that when our mortal vessels come to their end, there is a singular outcome, be it Heaven, Hell, or nothing at all. The lore of ancient mythology falls in this category. The mythological underworlds of Greece and Egypt fall in this category, as does the Taoist model of the underworld. In these mythological models Heaven exists solely for the Gods. Mortals reside in a land of the dead. The land of the dead is not a form of punishment, merely a place without punishment or reward, often akin to the world of the living. It is a world with no judgement. A land that is neither good nor bad, just another land. Norse mythology also falls in this domain. The greatest viking warriors aspired to be drafted to Valhalla by the Valkyries, but in the end even this heavenly delight was destined to collapse in a great battle, Ragnarok, where gods and mortals would become eternal residents of the land of the dead. Atheism also believes in a linear model. For the Atheist there is no God and no afterlife; no Heaven and no Hell, just nothing. Of course anyone who recalls John Lenon's Imagine can easily understand that the original driver of this otherwise irrational construction, was the desire to evade judgement from religious institutions. With but very few, isolated, and never fully formulated ideas throughout the course of history, Atheism is an entirely contemporary phenomenon. And whereas its objectives were apparently noble in so far that the fundamental desire was to offer greater human freedom, its results are simply catastrophic. Atheism has become the weapon of choice wielded by barbarous rulers who wish to dehumanise their subjects and dispose of human beings as they please, promoting and soliciting ruthless policies from abortion to euthanasia, passing through sadisitic medical experiments such as chemical castration, genetic branding and digital tagging. If human beings have no souls there should be no more moral concern in castrating, tagging and slaughtering them, than those moral concerns that apply to poultry. As so many times before, superficial good intentions mixed with a desire to be rid of accountability, have led to far worse predicaments than the original tenets we wished to escape.
The Circular Model
The circular model is by far the most intuitive for it reflects every other phenomena of our existence. Unsurprisingly it is the most popular model amongst men of science in antiquity. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and the philosophers of Greece all espoused this model. Our earth revolves on her axis alternating Day and night in perfect cycles. She revolves around the Sun bringing each year cycles of bloom and decay. Everything that comes to life will perish and will in turn nourish new life. Everything in our universe is cyclical. In fact early Christians also believed in some form of reincarnation, but the Church is more than just a set of books and a series of liturgical practices. The Church is alive and grows with Her community in a constant effort to promote peace and serenity. Early on our Church Fathers must have realised the moral complications of reincarnation when exploited by evil men. If our actions are the consequences of past lives, we can avoid being held responsible for our actions in this life, and if our sins will be carried by some future version of ourselves in another life, we can tranquilly postpone the need to repent our sins to that next life. Thus the focus on a linear model that the Church adopted must have been most certainly dictated by the desire to encourage Christians to be accountable for their actions now, today, not in some future incarnation.
The Ripple Model
The ripple model is the unique product of the great German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche. It is the outcome of a thought experiment that wishes to focus us on the present, the here and now. Nietzsche, and all existentialist philosophers before and after him, exasperated this desire to bring the mind of men to focus on the here and now. Existentialism focuses on the phenomenology of our physical presence in this world, and asks us to put aside speculation over the future and the past. Yet Nietszche brought the level of such focus far beyond previous imagination. He suggested not only that we focus on the here and now, but that whatever we do in this life will be perpetually repeated for eternity. His Theory of Eternal Return, postulates that whatever manifest phenomenon, whatever sorrow or joy, whatever actions take place in our lifetime are bound to repeat themselves in a infinite series of reincarnations for eternity. As I am born into this life, and all the events that unfold in my lifetime until the time of my departure from this world, so I shall experience once more and in identical form in the next life, and the next, and the one after that, and so forth for eternity. The theory forces us to ponder with great weight on all our actions in this world, for the consequences are always eternal. I am convinced Nietzsche thought of his Theory of Eternal Return as nothing more than a thought experiment to reinforce the importance of our actions, but besides the obvious value of such an endeavour, there are valid reason to consider it potentially true.
"Everything not forbidden is compulsory" — Murray Gell-Mann
All of the Above
Which of these models is indeed the correct one? Our materialistic societies and our pragmatic minds are constantly seeking for a single practical answer to every puzzle, but life is far more complex than a simple mathematical puzzle. Already in my youth wandering in search of meaning to remote corners of our beautiful planet, I came to realise how difficult it is for those of us living in urban areas, to merely imagine what human beings are capable of comprehending when immersed in Nature. Trekking on the high mountains or in the deep jungle, wading barefoot in knee deep mud to discover a pristine mangrove lagoon, or sailing in the vast open ocean, we come into contact with the divine nature of our existence. For Millenia every work of art ever conceived was divinely inspired. Yet even the most inspiring works of man, places such as the Sainte Chapelle built by St Louis to host Christ's Crown of Thorns recovered from the Holy Land, never faithfully reproduce the splendour of God’s Creation.
To a curious intellect, academics seem more preoccupied about proving their theses rather than genuinely figuring things out. They often tend to approach theories as if they were shoes. Once they find a pair that fits comfortably they resist the temptation of trying any other, even at the cost of having to put up a fight. They shun complexity, hoping that their field of study can be simple and predictable. Many are so unwilling to face complexity they prefer the completely irrational premise which assumes our consciousness to be the ‘magical’ byproduct of inanimate substances rather than having to cope with the complexity of a Creator. Without dwelling in abstract matters, a simple and exemplary piece of evidence for academic resistance to challenge conventional wisdom, is the failure of the Aquatic Ape Theory to become widely accepted in academic circles. The Aquatic Ape Theory, popularised by anthropologist Elaine Morgan in the '70s, arises from a most elementary and straight-forward observation. Simply put, unlike other terrestrial mammals whose body heat is secured with fur, human beings maintain their body heat with the same evolutionary instrument common to all aquatic or amphibious mammals, subcutaneous fat. Besides this most compelling piece of evidence, there is a vast and proven body of evidence that corroborates the theory, which nevertheless to this day remains at the very fringes of the academic world for no apparent reason whatsoever, other than the above mentioned annoyance towards new shoes. My former philosophy professor, the prolific and brilliant Daniel Dennett, explained this resistance most succinctly and eloquently, "During the last few years, when I have found myself in the company of distinguished biologists, evolutionary theorists, paleoanthropologists and other experts, I have often asked them to tell me, please, exactly why Elaine Morgan must be wrong about the aquatic theory. I haven’t yet had a reply worth mentioning, aside from those who admit, with a twinkle in their eyes, that they have also wondered the same thing." (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Penguin1995). Oddly enough the Aquatic Ape Theory enjoys great and authoritative advocates outside academia, such as the beloved late British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, who spent his entire life documenting Nature and proselytising Her sublime beauty. I cannot help myself but observe that oftentimes experience is a far better teacher than books.
Along the same lines of the Aquatic Ape conundrum, whoever went to elementary school in North America recalls we were taught that Native Americans migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait. South American children instead were taught that Native Americans island hoped from Asia across the Pacific. And while even something so elementary can become a point of contention amongst academics, both are of course true. There is in fact a third hypothesis of the Atlantic crossing, and whilst academics struggle to find space for the third theory, the historical trans-Atlantic crossing of the Kon Tiki demonstrates it is indeed possible. If there is just one take away from Quantum Mechanics we can all agree on, it is the fact that the array of true possibilities are always far greater than those we can predict. So much so in fact, that the physicist Murray Gell-Mann concluded that we should consider compulsory any scenario that is not forbidden. Thus, I find it compulsory to assume that at some point of our trial and error evolution, human beings did indeed cross the Atlantic on boats similar to those found in Egyptian art and amongst the natives of the Peruvian Andes. The same logic must be true for the afterlife. All that is not forbidden must be true, and if we attempt to imagine what the universe beyond our senses looks like, we can get a good idea of how this happens. We know mass, space and time are relative in the physical world, and we also know that they 'disappear' in and out of it. Thus, if we are to imagine what becomes of our consciousness once freed from the variables of space and time, there is no reason to exclude any of the three models used throughout history. Our state of mind becomes permanent and infinite. Whatever we harbour in our soul, whether it be grief and sorrow, hate and rage, apathy and despair, or joy and compassion, these emotions will become eternal, shaping our Hell or our Heaven. Hence the mental experiment of imagining a land without mass, space and time validates the linear model. But there is more. Some of the greatest minds in Quantum Mechanics are coming to terms with the fact that matter does not actually exist outside of our consciousness, and for those of us who understand this, matter is nothing more than information. Once the infrastructure of space, mass and time collapses what remains is just our consciousness composed of pure information, pure data, in an eternal loop. Nietszche's ripple model is correct. The phenomenological events that succeeded in time throughout my life, are forever repeated in eternity within this mind that has now collapsed within the Mind of the Universe. Finally, no matter how hard we wish to focus on the here and now, we cannot rescind the relationship between life and death from the cyclical patterns witnessed in all other aspects of our Universe. From the cycles of the seasons, to the cycles of birth, death and rebirth witnessed in Nature, and even the interactions between matter and consciousness, everything in this universe is manifested in cyclical patterns. So it must be for life and death as well. In fact, wouldn't those souls trapped in Hell after a lifetime of errors, long for another chance to redeem themselves? And those who have become one with the mind of the Creator, wouldn't they want to assist those of us on Earth who are still struggling to understand the beauty of Creation. Indeed, knowing that love is the key to sanctity, those who have attained perfect unity with the Creative Reason of the Universe, will strive to guide humanity, as Buddha, Christ and the Blessed Virgin have done before. Once again reincarnation, being a mirror of the patterns of the universe cannot be forbidden and thus the circular model must also be true and compulsory. In a universe so complex as to contain a land beyond matter, outside of mass, time and space, all the models of the afterlife hypothesised time and again throughout history coexist. We can only strive for unity with the Heart of the Universe in full knowledge that all of our thoughts and actions will remain with us for eternity.
"I love you Jesus." — Pope Benedict XVI's final words
The Unfettered Soul
He who loves God does not fear death for he knows there is nothing to fear. Love is the key to overcome the fear of death and attain fulfilment in life. Over the course of our lifetime we exist in 3 distinct realms of reality, the universal, dual and plural (where our individual actions and identity reside). Everything is contained within a universal dimension, and every action within it occur through the duality of matter and consciousness to create an infinite array of singular individual outcomes. When we die the interaction between matter and consciousness comes to a halt and the boundaries between these 3 realms disappear. Every night as we fall asleep, we prepare for that occasion when our consciousness permeates the universe beyond duality, beyond mass, space and time. Stand still and perfectly quiet. Turn your focus inward as if there was no space, no mass and no time. If what you feel is restlessness or fatigue, if the thoughts that pour in you are bitter, envious and angry, then you will have caught a glimpse of what eternity looks like in Hell. But if you learn to be calm and serene; if your thoughts are joyful; if you feel love and compassion, then you will begin to unveil what eternal Heaven looks like. You will have started a journey of preparation for the revelation of death, and contemporaneously towards a fulfilled life, rich in meaning. The key to a fulfilling life is to possess an unfettered soul. I have come to realise that in the presence of death I will need my mind clear, my heart pure and my soul unhinged. In the face of death and with the knowledge we will receive no warning of her appearance, our soul becomes the means by which we are immediately recognised by our Creator. Like a soldier's dog tags by which he is recognised on the battlefield, we should always keep our soul in clear sight for our Creator to acknowledge us when death knocks on our door uninvited. A candid person will wear his heart on his sleeve, yet I dare suggest to also wear your soul on your sleeve. In order to do that, it helps to remember that death will arrive of her own accord, possibly when we least expect her. A hedonist will tempt you to live each day as it were your last day in order to indulge fully in the riches and beauty of this world, but if you truly wish to be fulfilled, do not live as it were your last day, live as you could die in a moment’s notice. You cannot truly live unless you overcome fear of death, and you cannot overcome fear of death unless you clear your conscience to the point of freeing your soul. Once you have cleared your conscience you will have found the love of God and with this love you shall overcome the fear of death and find fulfilment in life. Clear your conscience of all fear and sorrow. Repent your errors, forgive those who have erred against you, practice love. Your triumph over the fear of death will reward you with a fulfilled life and the eternal joy of Heaven.
Copyright © Carmelo Pistorio 2023
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