Matters of Life and Death

by S. N. Arseculeratne

Humans have only two certainties to worry about: income tax and death. I do not have to worry about tax as I have nothing to be taxed. Death is worth a thought. Of course, that it is inevitable, is a painful axiom. But a thinking person will want to know why we are born and suffer if we are to die. Richard Dawkins has pronounced that it is all because of The Selfish Genes that tricked us here for their ulterior purpose of getting themselves propagated. I’d think that his book is important to the extent that it provokes us to consider the ultimate questions.

But humans have another dilemma – to live or to die, or as Hamlet had it “To be or not to be“?, that dilemma was well portrayed in the beautiful film of the 1950s, A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It was about an airman who crashed and was hovering between life and death; his friends in the Celestial Court in Heaven wanted him up there but his earth-bound friends wanted him back alive on earth. The advocates on both sides gave utterly memorable speeches in pleading their causes. If I have a choice, I’d rather be Nobel Laureate Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Unknown Guest, a Discarnate Entity who from up there, helps his hapless erstwhile colleagues on this troubled earth, as convincingly portrayed by John G. Fuller in his factual accounts of The airmen who would not die and The ghost of flight 401.

My daily walks in our garden bring me to our beautiful flowers. I wondered, they are born, they become so beautiful and they wither and die. Biologists call this process Apoptosis, programmed cell death. And that sight gives me scope for daily meditation and a little philosophizing – on impermanence. Such instances keep prodding me to reconsider the perennial question of what life means and what is Man’s role in this sorry scheme of things that embroils him and his family in a world sodden with tragedies of all sorts. I have thought about these matters, in an essay titled The Phenomenon of Man, in which I considered Man to be just an epiphenomenon in Nature with no importance except as the unwitting carrier of Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Genes, through the fatal attraction for the bribe of a female. That essay merely used Teilhard de Chardin’s catchy title of one of his books but I certainly did not partake of his far-fetched and fanciful views which Nobel Prize winning biologist Peter Medawar shredded. My other essay The Final Testament and A Reconsideration of Rene Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum”) I think therefore I am) through a synthesis of the ideas of Buddhism, Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson and Andrew Newberg, in my book that was recently released “I think, therefore I am – Rene Descartes” referred to Man’s obsession with himself as the centre of the universe. Man’s “self” is of no other significance than as an impetus for rebirth and the perpetuation of genes, a matter discussed in my essay on Rene Descartes. Yet Man keeps wallowing in his selfish fantasy, in the fragile cocoon that he has built for himself with his self-centered pursuits. Authoress of crime stories P. D. James wrote in her Introduction to her book Death in Holy Orders (in which she came upon the body of a dead youth who had fallen off a cliff): “All our lives are as insignificant as a single grain of sand. My mind felt emptied, even of sadness. Instead, gazing out to sea, accepting that in the end nothing really matters, and all that we have is the present moment to endure or enjoy, I felt at peace”.

The ultimate cause of this crazy world with its hapless inhabitants may now be considered as I often do and as I see it, despite the inevitable scorn and ridicule that agnostics, incorrigible skeptics,

and self-acclaimed ‘rationalists’ in their confusion, will heap on me. Some would tentatively blame, the controlling effect, the compulsions of and motivations from the planets on this world and its living things; after all they have some cause as ancient wisdom did, the Sun gives life to things on earth and the moon causes tides in waters. The convincing point in their view that compels credibility, is that their statements including predictions have sometimes proved to be convincingly right. I’d refer readers to the books (1) The case for Astrology, by John West and Jan Gerhard Toonder (1970) and (2) Explaining the Unexplained by H. J. Eysenck and Carl Sargent, my short essay A test for the validity of astrology, and to the comments of Nobel Laureate in Physics Prof. Brian Josephson in his interview with BBC on why he turned from physics to parapsychology– “I started to feel that there was more to reality than conventional science allowed for….”, Lord Dowding “I confidently predict that all these ideas will be commonly accepted in a hundred year’s time when those who reject them will be classed with those who now believe that the earth is flat”, science philosopher Paul Feyerabend “When a representative of the BBC wanted to interview these eminent scientists (on their view that astrology is non-valid) they declined with the remark that they never studied astrology and had no idea of its details”, and the views of London’s engineer Professor Arthur J. Ellison that Britain’s Society for Psychical Research had at one time many Fellows of the Royal Society of London, and 12 Nobel prize winners.

The final word in liberating ourselves from this messy world is perhaps from Buddhist philosophy which dwells on the theme of Impermanence, as the inevitable root of suffering. Need we cogitate on these ultimate questions? or follow the Buddha’s splendid advice and relieve ourselves of these burdens, without bothering about unanswerable questions; a person shot with an arrow should first take the arrow out, without bothering about who shot the arrow and why. Yet, the questions are relentless and inexorable; how do we take the arrow out? Is it through meditation to reach the higher states or Jhanas, of self-awareness and self-realization? Thus, as I wrote in a short essay “My short-cut to heaven“, I think I have the clue, which is to ablate my ‘self’ denying it the option of re-birth.

The prescription for this ablation is to be found in the Buddhist Abhidhamma as referring to the last thoughts at the death off a person, cuti citta [pronounced chuthi chitta], as determining the thoughts at the conception of the next birth (Uppada citta). I would also earnestly recommend to those interested in this means for ‘taking the arrow out’, the article by Sharon Begley, Science and Technology section, Newsweek, May 14, 2001 on the experiences of the American neurologist Dr James Austin who was heading to the Zen Buddhist Retreat in London. “Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like a morning mist in a bright dawn. … His sense of ‘I’, ‘mine’, disappeared “.

Yet, personally I feel compelled to ask myself the ultimate questions, who are we and why are we here? On the one hand philosophers have endlessly argued on why we continue to be re-born as discussed in my essay “A reconsideration of Rene Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum….”, and on the other hand, is the fruitless consideration of what death means. The topic of Karma enters this discussion. All these questions invoke Albert Einstein’s trenchant comment: “To ponder interminably over the reasons for one’s own existence or the meaning of life, in general seems to me, from the objective point of view, to be sheer folly”.

My final thoughts on all this are that we face overwhelming insoluble problems in life – wanton destruction, crime, drugs, Hitler and his monstrous Nazis, Pol Pot, Prabhakaran and their intolerance, racism and absolutism, Corona Virus, HIV and other diseases of all sorts, environmental degradation, and of course spicing this incendiary mix are the determinants of ‘Belief’ that subsume nearly all of humans’ horrific activities. It is even more tragic that people waste their (and others’) time and energy on trivial and petty squabbles that are of absolutely no consequence to anybody.

A further thought is that this mayhem characterizes human societies and not animal ones; animals do not display these evils which only Humans do; if animals squabble it is for understandable and fundamental reasons of survival, hunger and sex for propagation of their kind, which would seem an irreducible mix even for humans but with the added expression of their talents and creativity. But Man has paid a heavy price for his alleged cerebral superiority over animals. It has spawned telling commentaries such as Charles Duff’s This Human Nature.

And that consideration brings me finally to the title of another book by Chardin, without any acceptance at all of its content – The Future of Man, which, in my opinion, is totally bleak; and, Heavens, to think of the ultimate human arrogance as depicted in my essay in my Rene Descartes book, Lets go colonise the planets, prompted by Stephen Hawking’s, perhaps tongue-in-cheek comment: “….. the long term survival of the human race is at risk so long as it is confined to a single planet…..“. Of course the unstated stark fact is that Man has himself created the threat to his own survival on earth. For the moment I will stick my tongue out at Life while exclaiming, as John Gunther did on the untimely death of his son from a brain tumour, Death be not proud.

(The writer is an emeritus professor of the University of Peradeniya)