Awe полностью

In being with the dying, a first principle is not knowing. Quiet the chatter of the default self. We don’t truly know what dying is like. Nor, really, what happens after. Be open. Observe. Wonder.

A second is bearing witness. Let the dying guide the experience. When facing the uncertainty, fear, and horrors of dying, our tendency is to take action, provide a hopeful interpretation, reframe, or turn away. Instead, Roshi Joan says, just be there. Listen. Sit in silence. Rest your hand on the arm of the dying. Breathe. And follow where the dying will take you.

Finally, find compassionate action. Be open to suffering and its companion, kindness. Studies show that we respond to others’ pain in one of two general ways: either with our own distress, which leads us to turn away in cortisol-fueled flight, or with compassion, the latter being better for those who suffer and those who witness such suffering. In a practice Roshi Joan teaches, you breathe in a person’s suffering, and then breathe it out transformed. The cycle of life and death is one of many, like that of our breathing.

In watching Rolf pass that last night of his cycle of life, with pulsating fields of light pulling him away into something vast, I was guided by this wisdom, thanks to reading Roshi Joan’s book and being in conversation with her. I felt open to witnessing this part of the cycle of life. I wondered about the thoughts and feelings that were to be the last of his living brain and body, what Virginia Woolf called the “flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad messages through the brain.”

Seeking to understand those “flickerings,” scientists today are studying the cellular activity in the brain that follows death. Others with a historical bent have compiled stories about consciousness after decapitation, like that attributed to Charlotte Corday. After being beheaded at the guillotine in 1793, Corday showed flushed indignation upon being slapped by her executor. I searched the literature, seeking I know not what exactly, and found solace in the new science of near-death experiences (NDEs).

This science is based on stories of people like Yuria Celidwen who have come back from the brink of death. These are narratives of people who have survived near-fatal heart attacks, strokes, the trauma of a car wreck, or lying broken on a slab of granite after a fall while rock climbing. NDE stories sound like stories of awe, and in fact surfaced in our twenty-six-culture study, as in this story from Australia:

In childbirth I was declared as deceased. While I was in a state of altered consciousness I felt the most incredible sense of peace and calmness. I was watching what was being done to my body to revive me and I remember thinking “Why don’t they stop . . . I am at peace with myself and the world.” My then husband rushed in and I knew that it wasn’t my time as my two young daughters needed me. I immediately returned to my body. It then took around seven hours to deliver my son Kyle.

In the scientific literature on NDEs, as in the story above, people report a vanishing of their default selves. They are merging with a larger force or form of consciousness that feels infinite, pure, fundamental, and benevolent. The unfolding of experience does not seem governed by the temporal and spatial laws of our default mind. Transcendent emotions wash over them, like compassion, love, and bliss. And awe. I sensed this in my brother’s face that last night he was alive.

Months after Rolf’s death, I traveled to Japan with Mollie. In the dusk of our first day in Kyoto, amid heavy rains that followed a record typhoon, I made my way to a cemetery on a hill outside the city. Japanese families honor the deceased in plots of granite tombstones, which stand next to one another, gather moss, and slowly lean and fall to the ground with time—the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi, that the evolution of all forms, from the natural to “man-made,” follows a cycle of creation, birth, growth, decay, and death. Near an earthy, tangled bank of overgrown hills, I stood in front of an arrangement of about fifteen tombstones, three rows in total, each about two feet tall, some inscribed in Japanese, all uniquely patterned. One, a smaller marker with a plain granite face, leaned and tilted into a taller one just next to it. They rested together, touching in the rain.