Death Q & A: Does the Soul Learn?
We worked that question for a while today at our weekly Death Q&A.
We host the event every week, my partner Ryan and I, giving people a time and place to talk about death. We’ve been doing it since March, based on our idea that mortality was assuming a higher profile than usual and maybe some people would appreciate a place to come and talk about it.
They have. Thirty or so people flow through our virtual Buddhist Temple for every Death Q&A, which is perfect. If any more avatars showed up and participated, we would have to change the format. We are where we want to be. We don’t want to grow. Can you believe that? We have a really good thing going and no desire to grow it. I love it just the way it is.
I also love that the first person who spoke today talked about his father communicating an acceptance of death his whole life and how that made what was a difficult time during Covid-19 a warm and loving end. His experience could have been awful, because it involved his father’s cognitive decline and the restrictions on care facilities during the pandemic. He did not describe it as awful.
It was great that he was able to say it and even better that so many people heard him say it.
Someone from France commented next that no matter what religion we believe in, we all have to die and none of them knows what happens.
An avatar named Tom said that maybe we do have evidence, from Near Death Experiences. He recited some claims based on NDE research and when he stopped I asked him how reading all that research affected him?
He kept describing the research until an avatar named Wild Grape asked him again: How has learning about Near Death Experiences changed you?
Then he got to it. He said it gave him a sense of assurance that something continues after the death of the body. He also alluded to the quantum effects hypothesized to take place inside microtubules in the brain’s neurons as another science-y example that at least points to a possible field or state of consciousness not in our current paradigm.
The French guy who had marginalized religion earlier took the discussion away from science-y NDEs by asking what we thought about reincarnation.
Because Ryan and I have hosted an event named Death Q&A for about nine months, we are used to people asking us directly, ‘do you believe in God? Or, ‘do you think there is heaven and hell?’
This time, I called on an older man from UK who comes regularly to weigh in on reincarnation. His avatar name is Drumtree and he spoke beautifully. I know that he has come to his beliefs through serious study and internal reflection. I know that he sees them as his beliefs, rather than universal truths.
He believes there is an all-encompassing Spirit. The soul connected to his body is part of the Spirit and inseparable from it. When his body dies, part of the spirit will no longer be connected to it. But the Spirit will come back in other physical forms again and again.
An avatar named Onionman asked Drumtree if he thought the soul was reincarnated in order to learn.
Drumtree didn’t beat around the spiritual bush. He doesn’t think his Soul is here to learn something, because the Spirit already contains everything. It isn’t missing some small detail that needed to be learned.
This is not a unique view, but it is also not a standard perspective. We are hooked on improvement. If learning is not the driving force behind reincarnation, what is?
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Ryan took up the defense of Soul Learning. How could the Spirit know Drumtree, or Onionman, or Pee Wee Herman until they existed? The unique experiences and processing of those incarnations must extend the Spirit, unless you take the perspective that linear time is an illusion and everything is actually happening all at once.
People were more comfortable in general with the idea of goal-oriented reincarnation. I describe it that way because I’m a little suspicious.
Then Drumtree surprised me. He went back to the Near Death Experience thread and asked why this research is not accepted as Best Evidence. Why should we not be inclined to believe that something persists after the body, based on the direct testimony of many people, some in research settings?
I’m pretty well-versed in NDE research and I am aware that reputable scientific researchers have carried out significant investigations into the phenomenon over the past twenty years. The most acclaimed is Dr. Sam Parnia’s, with multiple hospitals participating in a consistent protocol. I do not find the results convincing enough to make me anything more than open minded.
I said something like that in response to Drumtree, not to be argumentative, but to let everyone know that the topic is very contentious. What interests me is how people read and reflect on the information, hopefully from different perspectives, and then how are they influenced?
I noticed a female avatar in the back who I remembered from last week, also from the UK, whose father had died during the pandemic, although not from Covid-19.
When I called on her she told everyone how good she felt last week to speak about her father and also that I had asked her if she would like to share a story about him. She did share some perceptions, some memories. But, she told us, she didn’t feel that she had come up with a real Story.
She thought about it during the week. It helped her organize the whole jumble of ideas and emotions bouncing around in her brain weeks after her father’s death. She realized it would be good for her and anyone she spoke with to have kind of an epitome story.
It was wonderful for Ryan and me to have someone return and share how the event had influenced her internal monologue. She summarized some wise thoughts about people we love. You could see other people filing it away.
It felt like the right time to see if I could knit some threads together.
I thanked her. I encouraged everybody to start collecting and saving up a few stories about people you love. Don’t wait.
NDEs were still hanging out there, so I said how we interpret them is also a story we tell ourselves just like the stories we tell about our parents. They sum up a lot of messy and confusing anecdotes in a way that makes sense to each of us, at that time.
My NDE story is that there are plenty of anomalies in the current model. Anomalies are a good thing, in my opinion, because they make it clear that parts of our consensus reality description are incomplete.
A twin feeling another twin’s heart attack instantly over thousands of miles, for instance. Paradigm-shifting experiences happen in the days and hours before death too — meeting relatives who died and coming back with information it is hard to account for. Anomalies aren’t the problem.
Describing new models without the baggage of old systems, ways of thinking about each other and the world we share that can bring together people who call themselves scientists and people who call themselves spiritual and certainly people who call themselves both — that’s the story I’m working on.
Wouldn’t you know it, we’d been talking for over an hour, and an avatar raised his hand and in about three minutes laid out a Complete New Model of the Universe. He even had a demo involving buttons on the VR headset controller that I didn’t quite follow.
I liked some of his ideas. I do think we emanate personal fields. But he had it all tied up with some secret brain transmitter just a bit too neatly for me. As one of the hosts, I politely found some points to agree with, and called on a friend whose avatar is named Nicerly.
He was barely Nice. His bullshit detector is so sensitive it took all the restraint he could muster to say he probably shouldn’t say anything.
I turned to Ryan, the most mellow person I am currently associated with. He doesn’t care much for simple physical explanations of everything. He found a nice way to say it.
I know that if I do anything to make any guest or participant in our events uncomfortable, or more importantly to make them feel attacked in any way, then everyone will know that could happen to them too, under some circumstances. I told him he must know that his confident exposition with all the answers sends up resistance, right?
Of course he knew that, because he does this rap all the time and he is much better at it than anyone willing to get engaged with his ideas.
I said there is a lot to like in field-based models. When you present a whole system as a complete done deal, it’s fun to listen to for a few minutes then I find myself tuning out because there’s no room to talk. Nothing left to say.
I’d love to see if we can find a way to make your ideas into more of a dialogue. Thanks for being here.
We’d been talking for way over an hour.
I asked Ryan for some closing remarks, which he is so good at. Today the conversation touched on so many deep topics, all with subtle connections.
I led our closing ritual, with the digital flame symbolizing the energy of our talk, the punctuation mark at the end, and the reminder that it will happen again.
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