Good news about Death

Consciousness exists after the body fails

    Just before he died, Daniel Ellsberg said something like, “If I knew dying was going to be this easy, I’d have done it a long time ago.” That struck me as a really positive statement, since I’m tottering towards that edge myself. I like the idea of liking death. That’s why I read and re-read Alex Bladel’s story in The Guardian, ‘The New Science of Death.’

    The explosion of new thinking that came from the ‘60s also touched the field of thantalogy. Bladel wrote, “In the 1970s, a small network … began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. The field of near-death studies was born.”

    At that same time, 1971 or so, I was practicing dying. Back from Nam I didn’t fit in anymore so I decided to do something about it. The old shell that I was before going to war needed to be shucked and to me that meant a form of dying had to take place.