Nonbelief or Disbelief

I want to share this exchange I had with a friend about my last blog post,  Understanding Death for Those Without Faith.  Daniel objected to my use of the word "Atheist" as its true meaning is one who does not believe in a God. One can disbelieve in God and still believe in some form of afterlife. 

I started by asking if there was a more concise term for "a person who does not believe in an afterlife."

Daniel: Good question. Personally I feel that "materialist" covers it, because that seems to be the gist of it -- the notion that all reality, including consciousness, can be reduced to some crudely material basis.  I think that if one firmly believes this, then any experiences or phenomena that seem to challenge it will be interpreted within that framework even if it means sweeping whole chunks of subjective experience or objective evidence under the rug. That seems to be how anomalies in general are handled by our arbiters of reality.

Michelle: Materialist... sounds more like a consumer or someone after worldly things. This may or may not be true for those who believe we cease to exist after death.

Daniel: That's a common usage of the term "materialist," but in philosophy and science it means someone who believes that matter is all there is. The philosophical materialist believes that consciousness arises from physical matter (specifically, brain matter), or at least from the *behavior* of brain matter, i.e., neurological activity.

The nonmaterialist considers that the brain and its activity may modulate, structure or create imprints in consciousness but sees consciousness itself as essentially independent of matter, and capable of being influenced directly by other consciousness.

Theoretically one can argue on behalf of either point of view and invoke supportive evidence, but the materialist overlay on mainstream science is so invisibly pervasive that self-described scientists will generally accept evidence representing only one point of view. In other words, this overlay is often equated with science itself, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Science is simply a *method of inquiry*. Properly conducted, it should be neutral with regard to particular philosophies, worldviews and subject matter. One might even say that the scientific method is very much a spiritual discipline in that its practice requires setting the ego aside and letting Nature speak without hindrance or prejudice.  (Sure, some distortion is always inevitable -- you just want to minimize it as much as possible.)

Michelle: It may be they have not been exposed to experiences or information that shifts their perspective. Perhaps "nonbeliever" might be more precise. Or "rationalist.

Daniel: I think genuine "nonbelief" is fine because it's neutral and presupposes openmindedness. What I think we're dealing with here is instead DISbelief, which is really just a fixed, unconscious belief in an opposing idea.

Michelle: "I did point out to the participants at the screening that Buddhism is an A-theistic practice.  However, there were at least two people who specifically said they did not believe in an afterlife.  And they are members of a group I truly need to address. They are looking for something.

Daniel: If their disbelief in an afterlife was unshakeable, what do you think they were looking for? For most people with high levels of disbelief, anything that smacks of religion (which would presumably be their only point of reference to an afterlife) is already pretty much off the table.

Michelle:  I think the nonbelievers (disbelievers?) were looking for some way to cope with the fact of their dying, to bring hope back into life when everything seems hopeless.

Some hopeful strategies those who do not believe in an afterlife include: leaving a life legacy for those left behind -- maybe an annotated photo album, an ethical will, videotaped messages to children. Examination of one's life is a good exercise.  Learning to live in the moment, to cherish each moment, to spend time in nature and joy, to feel gratitude, to feel awe.  These are all things available to the nonbeliever. Last, and more difficult for nonbelievers is opening to the mystery of life. And that may a little to close to religion for most.

Daniel: That's a tough one. The materialist/atheist must admit to no mysteries, while believing that science will eventually solve them!

But on the practical, human level, yes. Whatever works to raise the person's spirits and help them open to joy in the moment is a blessing. Philosophy is small comfort unless they've already opened up to interpreting their experiences in a new light and relaxing into them.



Please share your thoughts regarding afterlife. We may be totally off the mark. -- Michelle

Understanding Death For Those Without Faith

A survey of attendees at my last film screening revealed consensus for wanting a deeper understanding of death. While our discussion was amazing in its breadth and coverage of difficult topics such as anger, acceptance, loneliness and the need for help, nothing was said about what happens when you die. No one in the room appeared to have the requisite personal experience.  No near-deathers, no reincarnates, no prophets or seers.

My objective for my workshops is simple-- get people talking about death.  But the survey made me realize that my audience was looking for something more -- specific information about death itself. The traditional place for obtaining an understanding of death is religion. All major world religions have something to say about death whether it flowery fields at the foot of God, the luminous embrace of deceased loved ones, return to the dreamtime, absorption by the mother goddess, or scary visions that send us scurrying back into rebirth for another round. Those with a deep faith may be comforted by the teachings of their chosen path. But this avenue offers little to those who have lost their childhood religious beliefs or never had any to begin with. What can I offer to a person who truly believes at the core of her being that she will cease to exist at the moment of her death? Sixty-two percent of my screening participants either did not report a religious/spiritual identification or said they were Atheist.

In the workshop, I asked people to consider death is an option, a path that might be chosen instead of taking on still more aggressive chemos, more invasive radiation, surgical interventions or high-priced experimental treatments neither tested or approved. My mother had metastatic breast cancer. The surgeons removed 70% of her intestines because it spread there and she could no longer eliminate waste. The surgery gave her about four more months to live. It gave her time to finish up her life. Her oncologist, however, also recommended chemotherapy. I would not have thought her a good candidate. She was extremely underweight, could hardly eat because of a paralysis to the right side of her face and her cancer had spread to her liver. After two treatments, she said "No more." The physical impact was too debilitating, too awful to endure. Physicians will recommend procedures even though the probability of success is miniscule. It is hard to take away hope. Families beg for hope. And well, you never know. Miracles happen. Also, to put it crudely, it's a business model. If a patient never think of death as an option, if he/she never face fears about dying, treatment may continue right up until the very last breath.

Well, why not? If you believe that you cease to exist at the end of that last breath isn't living, even in suffering, preferable to non-existence??? Maybe not. My mother didn't think so. Maybe the atheists at my workshop are not so sure either.  Or maybe they are looking for something else when all hope seems gone.

Besides religion, another way we can learn about dying is from those nearing death. The following list of books look to the experiences of the dying for guidance. Even the confirmed atheist can find something useful here.

• Dying Well, Ira Byock, MD, Berkeley Publishing, Berkeley, 1997 -- Full of heart-opening stories about finishing up relational business, saying good-bye and letting go, this book is primer for dying in peace. His five essential steps are I forgive you; forgive me, thank you, I love you, good-bye.
• Final Gifts, Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Bantam Books, NY 1992 -- Rich and mysterious stories about the leave-taking process of dying collected over ten years by two hospice nurses. Full of the mystery of this amazing transition.
• The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Harper, San Francisco, 1998 -- Pulling together the essence of many world wisdom traditions, (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Zen, Native American religions, Sufism, the Kabbalah) and years of working at the bedside of the dying, transpersonal psychologist Singh formulates a sort of Jungian process of psychospiritual  transformation from ego to "Ground of Being." Interesting and heady, the book extracts the best teachings from our religious traditions. But it is not for someone close to death.  For those near death, she says, "...put the book down. And know that you are safe. ... If you are dying, your mind will come to know this soon. So go and rest or go and pray or go and meditate, so that when you begin to enter the realms of the sacred you will resonate with those realms gently."
• Who Dies, Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Doubleday, NY, 1982 -- Pioneers in the conscious dying movement, Stephen and Ondrea share knowledge and insights obtained from years at the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project. Included are wonderful meditations on forgiveness, pain and dying. There is also an amazing description of what dying feels like from the inside -- mentally transmitted to Stephen from one of his patients. I read this book after my parents died and experienced a profound shift in my understanding of illness and healing. 

Ultimately the message in all these books is to embrace the mystery. Life is an amazing experience and so is dying. Welcome everything. 

Growing Old and Liking It.

At my 60th birthday party

Not until I reached forty did I notice any signs of aging.  I had that youthful appearance that had liquor stores and restaurants carding me until well into my 30s. When I reach 40, however, my eyes started to go.  I resisted, as most of us blessed with 20-20 vision resist. I only wore readers at night when reading in bed. I recall sitting in an Indian restaurant with a friend trying to decipher the menu in the mellow glow of the table lamp. Gradually and insidiously the need for glasses spread to all my reading time. Now I wear progressive except when I'm walking outside where the signs are graphic or large enough to read.

What really got my attention regarding my aging was the day I ran down a mountain trail and at the bottom discovered that my knees hurt and the hurt didn't go away for several days. I was stunned. That had never happened before. I had been a long distance runner for fifteen years.  I understood fatigue, cramped muscles, temporary aches from over extension, but this was new phenomenon. This was aging. This meant I had to be more careful. I had to learn to respect my body's limits. The bad news is that with each passing year, new limits keep adding on.

I still look pretty good on the outside. I eat extremely well -- organic, mostly vegetable. I do yoga and walk everyday. I've kept my weight down. My small breasts do not weigh enough to sag. Yet something is going on inside that I have no control over. It is the time clock of my cells.

A delightful and yet disturbing book, The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, by David Shields, goes into great and at times humorous detail about the process of aging without being tedious or too scientific.

Given a list of 24 words, an average 20-year-old remembers 14 of the words, a 40-year-old remembers 11, a 60-year-old remember 9, and a 70-year-old remembers 7.

After age 30, your digestive tract displays a decrease in the amount of digestive juices. At 20, in other words, your fluids are fleeing, and by 30, you're drying up.

That may account for some of the digestive issues I began to experience in my late 30s which I always blamed on the fasting I did at Sufi camp and the inevitable food bingeing that would ensue afterward. I started taking digestive enzymes in my 40s and never looked back.

Shields' lists of age comparisons are interspersed with anecdote from his own life and that of his father who at the time of the book's creation was 97 and heading for 100.

The maximum rate of your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every years. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine.

You couldn't prove this decline in efficiency by my dad, who, until his early 90s, would awake in darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit. Birds would be just starting to call; black would still streak the colored-pencil soft blue of the sky; my father would be jogging.

The book is also interspersed with the comments of writers and celebrities and interesting stats:

Lauren Bacall said, "When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she's on the slide. It's downhill all the way from then on. It doesn't give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being."

Jack London died at 40; Elvis Presley, at 42.

Don Marquis, an American newspaper columnist who died at 59, said, "Forty and Forty-five are bad enough; fifty is simply hell to face; fifteen minutes after that you are sixty; and then in ten minutes more you are eighty-five.

I have to agree with Marquis about the hellishness of the fifties. For most women, that's when menopause sets in.  There is no exaggerating the impact that chemistry shift has on a woman's body.

As women lose estrogen, their pubic hair becomes more sparse, the labia becomes more wrinkled, and the skin surrounding the vulva atrophies. The cell walls of a woman's vagina become weaker and more prone to tearing; the vagina gets drier, more susceptible to infection, and--with loss of elasticity--less able to shrink and expand, less accommodating to the insertion of a penis.

Most women will recall receiving the book, Growing Up and Liking It from their school around the age of 11 or 12. It give graphic details about the physiological changes about to take place as a girl reaches puberty.  I seem to have missed the follow-up publication for young girls turning 50, Growing Old and Liking It. All my knowledge was gleaned from the locker room discussions of older women.

I also agree with Marquis about the speed with which the sixties follows on its heels. Remember those old movies in which passing times was conveyed by the leaves of a calendar falling away? (If you don't remember, you're probably too young to find this post very interesting.)  That is how time feels to me now. Yesterday, it was January 1st and today it's more than half way through the year. Is that because I'm aging or because time is really speeding up?

David Shields begins his book with birth and continues to old age and death.  It is an engaging read with some very usable information. Here's his recipe for living longer:

If you want to live longer, you should--in addition to the obvious: eating less and losing weight--move to the country, not take work home, do what you enjoy and feel good about yourself, get a pet, learn to relax, live in the moment, laugh, listen to music, sleep 6 to 7 hours a night; be bless with long-lived parents and grandparents (35 percent of your longevity is due to genetic factors); be married ....

Read the book if you want to know the rest. It's probably in your library.

If you want to know about death, which Shields doesn't discuss, check out my website or come to one of my film screenings.