Near Death (24 page)

The professors murmured while Cyrus looked puzzled.

Clegg continued. “The God-shaped hole is an expression of the emptiness that exists in the consciousness of nonbelievers or those who’ve lost faith. It’s almost as if this drug fits this God-shaped hole in a metaphorical way.”

Levin leaned forward. “I find this very disturbing, even frightening. This is a drug-induced image of godliness. It’s not arising from faith. It’s coming from pharmacology.”

“I agree it is disturbing,” Sharif said. “And that makes it fascinating. I hardly know where to start.”

“How about
In the beginning
?” Meyer asked, provoking some merriment.

“You’ve all probably read about the striking similarity of the hallucinogenic experience from person to person. The only significant difference is the identity of the greeter, usually a deceased relative or friend. This is the part that’s incomprehensible to me,” Cyrus said. “That’s what I want to understand.”

“Why does it have to be an hallucination?” Meyer asked.

“As opposed to real?” Levin scoffed.

“Frieda is being deliberately provocative, I think,” Sharif said.

“Am I?” she challenged. “Isn’t this the proof philosophers have been searching for? Isn’t this proof that an afterlife is real, that God exists within each and every one of us? Humor me with your thoughts, oh esteemed colleagues.”

Levin chuckled. “Okay, Frieda, I’m game. The rabbis of the first century pointed out that God was utterly incomprehensible. Moses failed to penetrate the mysteries of God. King David threw in the towel, admitting that it was a futile task since God was too much for the human mind. Jews were even forbidden to pronounce his name as a reminder that any attempt to understand him was pointless. His divine name was written YHWH and
Yahweh
wasn’t pronounced in any reading of the scripture. One of the favorite synonyms of God used by the Hebrews was
Shekinah
, derived from the word
shakan
, to pitch one’s tent. Wherever the Israelites wandered, God was there with them, in their own tent, in their own soul. Also, the Torah teaches Jews not to think of God watching over them from above. Instead we are encouraged to cultivate a sense of God within so that our dealings with one another become sacred
encounters. So the concept of God inside of us is very old.”

“Saint Augustine dwelled on this subject,” Clegg observed. “He too believed that God was to be found not on high but deep within, in the mind. He wrote about something he called
memoria
, or memory, which really wasn’t memory in the way we regard it but something closer to what the psychologists would call the unconscious. It was through this unfathomable world of images, plains, caverns and caves that Augustine descended to find his God. He could only be discovered in the world of his mind. He wrote in his
Confessions
a passage I committed to memory some years ago because of its power: ‘Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.’”

“That’s so beautiful,” Emily murmured.

Sharif slurped the last of his tea. “To be sure, there is a dichotomy of revelation within all our religions. The God of the Jews may dwell within; yet, undeniably, one of
the most powerful parts of the Old Testament is where Moses came down from Mount Sinai, having shielded himself from the revelation of his divine presence, which made the skin of his face shine with such an unbearable light that the Israelites could not bear to look at him. That’s an
external
revelation. In my religion, the prophet Mohammed also was on a mountain, Mount Hira, on the seventeenth night of Ramadan in the year 610. He was awoken from his sleep and found himself enveloped by a devastating divine presence, which commanded him:
‘Iqra!’
Recite! And though he protested that he was not a reciter, or holy soothsayer, he was enveloped again by this presence until the breath was squeezed out of his body. After the third command to recite, the words of a new scripture, the Koran, began to pour from his lips. That too is an external revelation. However, in Islam, one can also find writings that suggest that God is within us, indeed within everything. The eleventh-century theologian Al-Baqillani developed a theory known as atomism to give a metaphysical basis for Moslem faith. Simply put, there was no reality but al-Lah, the God. The entire universe was reduced to innumerable individual atoms and nothing had a specific identity of its own. Only God had reality. Only God could save man from nothingness. It was a metaphysical attempt to explain the
presence of God in every detail of our lives and a reminder that faith did not depend on rational logic.”

Levin got up and made fidgety circles around the piano while talking next. “This notion of an inner path to God reminds me very much of the early Jewish mystics, particularly the Throne Mystics of the fifth and sixth centuries, and the Kabbalists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who sought the personal God from within. Mystics through the ages have used various techniques—fasting, vigils, chanting—to attain a state of alternative consciousness to reach the spirituality inside of them.”

Sharif interrupted him. “Yes, Paul, this is true for the mystical Sufi Moslems as well. They used to chant themselves into bizarre unrestrained behaviors.”

“The common denominator among the mystics,” Levin continued, “was their reaction to an increasingly cerebral faith. You know, believe because you are meant to believe. The mystics felt the need to connect more directly to God’s presence, which was constantly with them. They embarked on inner journeys to find him. Rabbi Akiva described his ascent through the heavens to the Throne of God, encountering on his way stones of pure marble. This was a metaphor for a journey to the depths of the mind, involving great personal risk because one may not be able to endure
what is found there.”

“Will you permit me to quote Augustine again?” Clegg asked.

“You can quote him all evening if you wish, Andrew,” Meyer said approvingly.

“All right then. Augustine experienced a personal ascent to God at Ostia, which he wrote about. ‘Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection toward eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporate objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works and entered into our own minds.’”

“Mohammed too had a similar experience when he made his Night Journey from Arabia to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He was transported in sleep by Gabriel on a celestial horse and in heaven he was greeted by Moses, Abraham, Jesus, and a crowd of other prophets. Then Gabriel and Mohammed made their way on a perilous journey up a ladder through the seven heavens until finally they reached the divine sphere.”

“Those who’ve taken Bliss also describe a very specific journey,” Emily said.

“Until they snap out of it and return to reality,”
Cyrus added.

“Or another manifestation of reality,” Meyer said with a twinkle in her eye. “How can we be so sure that these inner journeys aren’t real too? There’s a collective reality I’d like to talk about.”

“Here comes Carl Jung!” Clegg warned.

“It’s an inside joke,” Levin explained to Cyrus. “Frieda is a Jung junkie. We’ve never had a theological discussion without her bringing up Jung.”

“Guilty as charged!” Meyer exclaimed. “You see, Mister O’Malley, my grandfather was a psychiatrist who was friends not only with Sigmund Freud but also with Carl Jung. When Jung and Freud had their famous rift my grandfather acted as go-between to try and patch things up but their differences were more than academic. The bitterness couldn’t be healed. I’ve been a Jungian my whole life.”

“Don’t forget what Jung once said,” Sharif added, ready to laugh at his own words. “Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian.”

“I admit that there have been Jungians who haven’t covered themselves with glory, but I’m not one of them,” Meyer replied, wagging her finger. “Look here. There are inescapable Jungian elements in the Bliss story. Do you recall the terms
archetypes
and
collective unconscious
Mister O’Malley?”

“From your course, professor, a long time ago.”

“Well, Doctor Frost, as a psychiatrist, I’m sure this will bore you to tears, but Jung didn’t coin the term
archetype
. He borrowed it from the Platonic philosophers and applied it to psychology. He described them as ‘typical modes of apprehension’ or patterns of psychic perception and understanding common to all human beings as members of the human race. Jung was a student of anthropology, myth, religion, and art. His broad knowledge of these disciplines allowed him to see that the symbols and figures that continually appeared in his patients’ dreams were identical to the symbols and figures that had appeared and reappeared over thousands of years in myths and religions all over the world. Jung found it particularly significant that he was often at a loss to trace the appearance of such symbols in his patients’ dreams to the patients’ individual lives. You see, Jung bought into Freud’s theory of the unconscious part of the way. He agreed with Freud that there was a layer of the unconscious he called the
personal unconscious
that was identical to Freud’s concept of the unconscious— that is, a repository of repressed personal memories or forgotten experiences. In the Freudian unconscious lay the memories of everything the individual had experienced,
thought, felt, or known that was no longer held in active awareness. Jung, however, felt there was more. He conceived of a second layer of the unconscious—the
collective unconscious
—to account for similarities in psychic functioning and imagery throughout the ages in highly diverse cultures. The collective unconscious was the realm of archetypal experience. Jung believed that becoming aware of the figures and movements of the collective unconscious would bring an individual directly into contact with essential human experiences. He felt the collective unconscious to be the ultimate psychic source of power, wholeness, and inner transformation. Based on his research, he felt he was on strong scientific ground for his assertions.”

“So Frieda, you’re suggesting that this drug is providing a channel into the collective unconscious?” Clegg asked with an amused tone.

“Why not?” she posited. “The dream state takes us there. So does meditation. Why not a drug? Do any of you have a better explanation to account for these phenomena? Look at the archetypes here: to start with, emerging from darkness into the light. Throughout recorded history—in myth, in legend, in the bible, in the Koran—light represents the energy and radiance of the spiritual being.
‘Let there be light!’

“Then there’s the river. The River Jordan? The River Styx? One must always cross a river to get to the other side. And lastly, the gatekeepers: those who wait to escort the person to heaven or the underworld or the afterworld or whatever you wish to call it. Myths and religions are riddled with these images.”

Levin leaned forward. “What about the image of the gatekeeper as a loved one? That sounds more like some of these near death experiences we’ve all read about. Someone almost dies in a hospital emergency room, feels himself hovering over his own body watching the proceedings, enters a tunnel, sees Christ or an angel or some spiritual being, and then encounters a deceased loved one who’s presumably there to ease him down the road. Then the doctors bring that person back and he lives to tell about it.”

“Maybe Bliss is stimulating the same receptors in the brain that are activated in near death experiences,” Emily suggested.

“Or maybe this whole thing is mass hysteria,” Levin said caustically.

“I agree,” Sharif said. “People, especially young people, are eminently suggestible. There’s a spiritual void in our society. People are looking for something to give
meaning to their lives, and organized religion, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t provide the answers to satisfy many of them.”

Meyer lightly pounded the arm of her chair. “Don’t be too dismissive of the phenomenon that’s being described. Perhaps we are witnessing biological proof of the existence of the collective unconscious. Maybe we are witnessing proof of the existence of God! Please gentleman, keep your minds open. As theologians, it’s our responsibility to study this phenomenon with our biological colleagues and offer spiritual interpretation.”

Cyrus saw a youthful exuberance and vitality in Meyer’s face that brought her closer to the way he remembered her. She was enjoying herself, playfully feeding off her colleagues’ skepticism.

Clegg stretched out his long legs and extended his neck to relieve the tension in his shoulders. “This has been an interesting discussion, Frieda. Thank you for inviting me. My bottom line is that I believe in God. I don’t believe in Jung, I don’t believe in molecules and receptors. I do believe God is in each one of us, but in a metaphorical, not a literal sense. I must agree with Paul and Walid that this drug Bliss is causing mass hysteria. We do have a responsibility here but it’s a responsibility to
make sure that religious belief isn’t corrupted and trivialized by a drug experience.” He looked at his watch and vigorously sprang to his feet. “My goodness, where’s the time gone?” The other men followed suit.

Meyer saw the professors out and came back with Cyrus and Emily’s coats.

“Was this useful?” she asked Cyrus.

“Very much so. Thank you.”

Meyer warmly clasped Emily’s hand then took his and vigorously shook it. “This has been one of the most stimulating afternoons I can remember. For an old woman it doesn’t get much better than this! Tell me, Mister O’Malley, what grade did you get in my course?”

“I got an A.”

“Good lad. Well done.”

Thirty-two

Two days later, Alex was in London, bleary from a sleepless night on the Boston to Heathrow flight. He was traveling light, a backpack only, with enough clothes for a couple of days.