Philosophy | Life | Death
The Mystery Of Death
What happens really when we die?
As a strong believer in science and an atheist with little agnostic tendencies, I found plenty of satisfying scientific answers to many questions about life itself. But one topic still eludes me to this day, and I am still in complete wonder about what the true answer to it will be.
The question about what really happens to our mind, our soul, when we die.
No true scientific answer yet
Death embraces everyone. It’s a fate none of us can overcome. No matter who we are in life, death will come to us all. While Religion offers plenty of possibilities like Heaven, meeting your lost loved ones and spending eternity in a paradise (or alternatively a never-ending purgatory of hell), the most reasonable answer science got so far is far more unsettling than hell could ever be.
Nothingness. You die, so you can’t observe. The moment your brain dies, you cease to exist. Since you can’t observe, there is nothing to observe. Nothingness. It’s not even a deep infinite blackness since blackness still counts as something observable. Nothingness means nothing at all.
And it’s hard to visualize, simply because we can’t visualize nothingness. The same counts for our time before birth. We can’t remember, because we didn’t exist. But we did exist. As a sperm cell. As part of another life. Just without any sensory function. But we did technically exist, if not in our current form. What if we did perceive this form, but we simply can’t remember it.
Like a night out after which you awake in your bathroom, desperately hugging the white porcelain of your toilet. How did you get here? What happened? You have no idea.
So is death just like sleep? I remember going to bed, I remember waking up. But I never remember falling asleep. Even if I desperately try to stay vigilant until the moment I fall asleep, it never works. I just wake up the next morning and think “shit, it happened again”.
Can death be like sleep? As far as we know, the brain still shows plenty of activity while we sleep. Both sides of our brain are busy processing the happenings of the day, forming new neuronal connections. And sometimes we dream. In fact, we always dream. It’s only sometimes that we remember our dreams upon waking up. Especially if your sleep gets interrupted during one of its REM-phases.
But death means that our brain activity stops. The electric juices that make up our thoughts, our very being, cease to exist. Like turning off a computer and pulling the plug.
Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)
The closest we ever got to observe “death” is with people who got resuscitated after being clinically dead for some time. But even here, the brain still was active. Brain death would mean certain death. If you can bring back someone whose brain stopped working for even just a brief time, they’d return with serious brain damage and mental defects.
So an NDE is not technically a true death. It’s as close as you can get without crossing the point of no return. Like the event horizon of a black hole, the one point at which you’ll never escape the gravitational pull, being inevitably being pulled into the singularity.
So death and black holes have something in common. No one can confidently say what lies beyond.
I’ve read several NDE reports and most show some similarities. People had out-of-body experiences (OBE), describing being detached from their physical body, observing the ongoings, like paramedics coming to their aid, resuscitating them, and more. They often described to be floating or standing in a corner of the room or location they found themselves in.
Of course, my first assumption here would be that their brain still hears things and creates a dream-like image, combining the sensory information into such an event, basically transforming the limited information they got into a conceivable image of the event.
Some people reported making contact with a being of light, a deceased friend or family member who’d invite them over into the other realm. Others reported seeing angels or Jesus, a tunnel with a light at the end of it, or a pillar of light coming from above. These observations were often made from religious believers, so this could well be a biased imagery, tending to their very expectations of what to see.
What’s interesting is that even people like myself, who initially distanced themselves from religion and openly voiced their disbelief in God, reported seeing godly beings and angels, inviting them into Heaven. Some of them have turned their life around after finding their way back into the realm of the living, turning to a life of unshaken belief in God and all that comes with it. This speaks entirely against the other claims of bias playing a role here.
Scientists argue that the brain during an NDE secrets hormones in order to protect itself from a traumatic experience. Much like drugs, these hormones can induce serious hallucinations and detach the person from reality. This could be the cause of all experienced events during an NDE. An LSD-trip.
A personal account
While I was preparing to write this article, I had an interesting conversation with my mother in law. We never really talked about her incident, but me writing about death and NDEs got her curious.
About two years ago, she suffered a Subarachnoid Hemorrhage, a form of stroke in which a blood vessel between the arachnoid mater and the pia mater bursts, bleeding into the brain. We received a call from her workplace, that she fainted as she was leaving for home. She complained about immense pain behind her left eye before she lost consciousness and dropped to the floor.
She was taken to the hospital and spent two months there, she didn’t regain consciousness for several weeks.
The prognosis was dire, about 50% of patients die, the other half suffers severe impairment in their everyday life. Fortunately for us, my mother in law has recovered remarkably. It’s as if nothing happened, apart from a period of depression and anxiety in the past.
Today we talked about NDEs as she was eager to report a similar experience. Again, this might be the result of her brain failing at that moment, or releasing hormones to keep her sane or whatever. But I find it fascinating nonetheless.
She witnessed her body lying in a forest, alone. Realizing that it must be herself, she panicked. She says she still was fully conscious and aware of the scenario. She realized her own possible death and begged the gods to give her more time. My brother in law recently became a father and came over with his daughter one day. It was my mother-in-law’s wish to see that child one more time. So she clung on to life. She remembers the pain in her eye, but not how she fainted. Next, she found herself in that forest. After that, she remembers only waking up in a hospital bed.
I’m not eager to put my own life at risk, but I’m curious to make such an experience myself, to learn from it.
What happens when we really die
The only people who know the answer to that question with certainty won’t be able to tell us; they’re dead.
And this really annoys me to some extent. Much like with the black hole I mentioned earlier, we’ll never get the answer to that question until we actually cross the frontier ourselves. The only difference here is, I’ll definitely know what lies beyond the horizon of death at some point (not in my life).
So I’ll keep wondering about it until my day finally comes. But what we can and should do until then, is to live our lives to the fullest.
So make the best of your life. We might really only ever have one. Don’t waste it!
Kevin is an editor and writer for the ILLUMINATION and Polyglot Poetry publications. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
