Psyche and Thanatos: Psychospiritual Dimensions of Death and Dying
It would be hard to imagine a subject that is more universal and more personally relevant for every single human being than death and dying. Over the course of our lives, all of us will lose relatives, friends, teachers, acquaintances, and important public figures, and eventually face our own biological demise.
In view of this, it is quite remarkable that until the late 1960s, the Western industrial civilization showed an almost complete lack of interest in the subject of death and dying.
This was true not only for the general population, but also for scientists and professionals involved in disciplines that should have been keenly interested in this subject, such as medicine, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and theology.
The only plausible explanation for this situation is fear and a massive denial of death that exists in modern industrial civilization.
American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker showed in his book The Denial of Death that modern society is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against facing our mortality. He suggested that people are trying to overcome their fear of death by creating “immortality projects,” which make it possible for them to imagine that they become part of something larger than themselves, something that survives death.
According to Becker, the clashes of the immortality projects of different people are responsible for most of the evil in the world—human conflicts, wars, bigotry, genocide, and racism (Becker 1973).
The disinterest of modern society in regard to death is even more striking when we compare it with the situation in ancient and pre-industrial cultures.
Their attitude toward death and dying was diametrically different. Death played a central role in their cosmologies, philosophies, spiritual and ritual life, and mythologies, as well as in everyday life. The practical importance of this difference becomes obvious when we compare the situation of a person facing death in these two different historical and cultural environments.
An average person dying in one of the Western industrial societies has a pragmatic and materialistic worldview or is at least profoundly influenced by their exposure to it. According to mainstream academic Western science, the history of the universe is the history of developing matter. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are more or less accidental and insignificant side products of this development.
They appeared on the scene after many billions of years of evolution of passive and inert matter in an infinitesimally small part of an immense universe. In a world where only what is material, tangible, and measurable is real, there is no place for spirituality of any kind.
Although religious activities are generally practiced, socially sanctioned, or even formally encouraged, from a strictly scientific point of view, any involvement with spirituality appears to be irrational and indicates emotional and intellectual immaturity, stemming from either a lack of education, superstition, or regression to primitive magical thinking. Direct experiences of
spiritual realities are seen and diagnosed as manifestations of psychosis, a serious mental disease.
Religion, bereft of its experiential component, has largely lost the connection to its deep spiritual sources and as a result has become empty, meaningless, and increasingly irrelevant in the life of an average Westerner.
In this form, religion cannot compete with the persuasiveness of materialistic science backed up by technological triumphs. Under these circumstances, religion has ceased to be a vital force during our life, as well as at the time of dying and death.
Its references to life after death, posthumous adventures of the soul, and abodes of the Beyond, such as heaven and hell, have been relegated to the realm of fairy tales and handbooks of psychiatry.
The entire ritual and spiritual history of humanity has been pathologized. At the cradle of all the great religions of the world were perinatal and transpersonal experiences of their founders, prophets, and saints.
We can think here, for example, about Buddha’s encounter with Kama Mara and his army or his reliving of various episodes from his past incarnations accompanied by “tearing of the karmic bonds”. The Old Testament describes Moses’ vision of Jehovah in the burning bush and the New Testament relates Jesus’ temptation by the devil during his stay in the desert, Saul’s blinding vision of Jesus on the Way to Damascus, and St. John’s experience of the Apocalypse.
Islamic scriptures portray the journey of Mohammed through the seven heavens, paradise, and hell in the company of the archangel Gabriel.
According to traditional psychiatry, all these experiences are indicative of severe psychopathology, a mental disease of the individuals involved.
There is an abundance of psychiatric literature in articles and books discussing what would be the best clinical diagnosis for various famous spiritual figures, some of them of the stature of the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Ramakrishna, or Saint Anthony. Visionary experiences of the transpersonal realms are usually attributed to severe psychosis of the schizophrenic type or to epilepsy, as it is in the case of Mohammed.
St. John of the Cross has been labeled a “hereditary degenerate” and St. Teresa of Avila a “hysterical psychotic.” Mainstream anthropologists have argued whether shamans are schizophrenics, borderline psychotics, or epileptics. There is even a paper applying psychopathological criteria to meditation.
It is entitled “Buddhist Training as Artificial Catatonia” and its author is the famous psychoanalyst and founder of psychosomatic medicine Franz Alexander (Alexander 1931).
According to Western neuroscience, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, a product of the physiological processes in the brain, and thus critically dependent on the body. The death of the body, more specifically of the brain, is then seen as the absolute end of any form of conscious activity. Belief in the
posthumous journey of the soul, afterlife, or reincarnation is usually dismissed as a product of wishful thinking of people who are unable to accept the obvious biological imperative of death, the absolute nature of which has been scientifically proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
Very few people, including most scientists, realize that we have absolutely no proof that consciousness is actually produced by the brain and not even a remote notion of how something like that could possibly happen. In spite of it, this basic metaphysical assumption remains one of the leading myths of Western materialistic science and has a profound influence on our entire society.
This attitude effectively inhibited scientific interest in the experiences of dying patients and of individuals in near-death situations until the late 1960s.
The rare reports on this subject received very little attention, whether they came in the form of books for the general public, such as Jess E. Weisse’s The Vestibule (Weisse 1972) and Jean-Baptiste Delacour’s Glimpses of the Beyond (Delacour 1974), or scientific research, such as the study of deathbed observations of physicians and nurses conducted by Karlis Osis (Osis 1961).
Since the publication of Raymond Moody’s international bestseller Life After Life in 1975, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Ken Ring, Michael Sabom, and other pioneers of thanatology have amassed impressive evidence about the extraordinary characteristics of near-death experiences, from accurate extrasensory perceptions during out-of-body experiences to profound personality changes that followed them (Kübler-Ross 1969, Moody 1975, Ring 1982, Sabom 1982).
The material from these studies has been widely publicized and used by the media in everything from TV talk shows to Hollywood movies. Yet, these potentially paradigm-shattering observations that could revolutionize our understanding of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the brain are still dismissed by most professionals as irrelevant hallucinations produced by a biological crisis.
They are also not routinely recorded and examined as an important part of the patients’ medical history, and no specific psychological support is being offered in most of the medical facilities that would help to integrate these challenging events.
People dying in Western societies also often lack effective human support that would ease their transition. We try to protect ourselves from the emotional discomfort that death induces. The industrial world tends to remove sick and dying people to hospitals and nursing homes. The emphasis is on life-support systems and the mechanical prolongation of life, often beyond any reasonable limits, rather than the quality of the human environment.
The family system has disintegrated, and children often live far from their parents and grandparents. At the time of a medical crisis, the contact is often minimal and formal. In addition, mental health professionals, who have developed specific forms of psychological support and counseling for a large variety of emotional crises, have given almost no attention to the dying.
Those facing the most profound of all imaginable crises, one that simultaneously affects the biological, emotional, interpersonal, social, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of the individual, remain the only ones for whom meaningful help is not available.
All this occurs in the much larger context of the collective denial of impermanence and mortality that characterizes Western industrial civilization.
Much of our encounter with death comes in a sanitized form, where a team of professionals mitigates its immediate impact. In its extreme expression, as exemplified by Los Angeles’ Forest Lawn Memorial Park and Mortuaries, it includes postmortem barbers and hairdressers, tailors, make-up experts, and plastic surgeons who make a wide variety of cosmetic adjustments to the corpse before it is shown to relatives and friends.
The media helps to create more distance from death by diluting it into empty statistics when it is reporting, in a matter of fact way, about the thousands of victims who died in wars, revolutions, genocidal raids, and natural catastrophes. Movies and TV shows further trivialize death by capitalizing on violence.
They immunize modern audiences against its emotional relevance by exposing them to countless scenes of dying, killing, and murder in the context of entertainment. Killing and destruction is also the most popular ploy in the digital games played by millions of children, adolescents, and adults.
In general, the conditions of life in modern technological countries do not offer much ideological or psychological support for people who are facing death. This contrasts very sharply with the situation encountered by those dying in one of the ancient and pre-industrial societies. Their cosmologies, philosophies, mythologies, as well as spiritual and ritual life, contain a clear message that death is not the absolute and irrevocable end of everything, that life or existence continues in some form after the time of biological demise.
Another characteristic aspect of ancient and pre-industrial cultures that colors the experience of dying is their acceptance of death as an integral part of existence. Throughout their life, people living in these cultures get used to spending time around dying people, handling corpses, observing cremation, and living with their remnants.
For a Westerner, a visit to a place like Benares, India where this attitude is expressed in its extreme form, can be a profound culture shock.
In addition, people dying in pre-industrial cultures typically die in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe. They thus can receive meaningful emotional support from people whom they intimately know. It is also important to mention powerful rituals conducted at the time of death that are designed to assist individuals facing the ultimate transition, or even specific guidance for the dying, such as the approach described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol).
In Tibetan Buddhism, death is seen as a unique opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth or, if we do not achieve liberation, a period that determines our next incarnation. In this context, it is possible to see the intermediate state between lives (bardo) as being, in a way,
more important than incarnate existence. It is then essential to prepare for this time by systematic practice during our lifetime, ~Stanislav Grof, Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys, Page 225-229
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