Last Quarter: Near-death

Hello. It's Friday, and the red-winged blackbirds have now returned to congregate by the woodland brook. Large patches of grass are visible where feet of snow once piled. My owner and I have started some seeds growing indoors — a bit later than we intended, but still with decent timing for our last frost date in May. So much life is renewing.

But here in the week of the Last Quarter, I must always spare some time to think about wanings, witherings, endings. Death. Even in spring there is a purpose for death and destruction, as I've written about on several occasions. In today's case, I am not referring to the timing of recent geopolitical events; those have no purpose. Rather, I mean something greater, an act of cosmic balance.

Over the past several years I have faced more death than usual, specifically of beings for whose welfare I felt partly responsible: two cats, then two unborn children, then another cat. My parents and relatives in their generation are also reaching an age where I'm thinking more about what it will be like when they die, and what I will have to do as the listed executor (apparently) of at least two estates. Given my existing propensity toward morbid anxieties, and given my occasional sense of being haunted by the recent dead, I've found myself trying once again to resolve or even coalesce some thoughts about an afterlife, if any, now that I have been so committed to cultivating an animist worldview.

So that is what I'm going to write about this week, specifically through examining something that has fascinated me since childhood: near-death experiences. This will be a short post, but it's an important installment among my other writings on death work.

The crux of the matter

Ultimately, the mystery of near-death experiences (commonly abbreviated NDEs) is twofold:

1. Why these experiences happen on a material level, if there's a material reason at all
2. What (spi)ritual meaning can be derived from these experiences, regardless of any rational explanation

Personally, I continue to place enough value in empirical research that I have long been convinced there is a material reason for NDEs to occur; but even reviewing recent scientific hypotheses it becomes plain to see that there is no serious consensus about the precise mechanism. Many impediments exist to ever determining this mechanism, too — such as how challenging it would be to conduct a study of NDEs that passed rigorous ethics requirements, sufficiently eliminated variables, and achieved a worthwhile sample size. Quite a few studies have been conducted over recent decades, but the data quality seems very questionable.

As it stands, I feel skeptical about hypotheses that a NDE is purely a form of depersonalization under stress, because depersonalization itself often does not feel pleasant[1], whereas NDEs are usually reported as soothing; likewise I disagree that a NDE would be fabricated by the brain to just express a "reverse birth" or draw together culturally relevant imagery, because birth does not appear to be physiologically remembered and an NDE's common characteristics strike me as fairly generic even if there may be cultural variants. Overall, I think that a NDE is more likely to physically derive from raw neurological phenomena, through some combination of oxygen deprivation in the brain, damage or stimulation to certain brain regions, and release of certain neurotransmitters or other endogenous chemical compounds.[2]

But even with the hypotheses that feel more convincing to me, there remains a lack of solid evidence. Despite my conviction that NDEs must have some material cause, I am agnostic as to whether this cause would be the only one. Perhaps there is a mystic cause at the same time, and these causes interact with each other somehow. None of this can currently be proven, either, so pragmatically speaking — and in the spirit of William James, referenced in that linked post — I find myself routinely abandoning the "why" of NDEs and turning instead to what meaning they offer.

Afterlife fantasies of a young atheist

I have never had a NDE myself. Nor have I had an OBE (out-of-body experience), which can be experienced either separately or simultaneously. But I remember being utterly fixated on other people's accounts or publications about these things, especially NDEs, when I was a child. As I've related here before, I was raised by one militant atheist parent and another whose beliefs I've never quite understood but were basically overpowered by the atheist side; I spent ages zero to 14 profoundly sure that there were no gods, no afterlives, no ghosts, no fairies. And yet — some part of my personality remained unable to ever follow such logic to the most secular and materialist conclusions. Even having never watched The X-Files until adulthood, I still "wanted to believe" in UFOs, cryptozoology, astrology, and paranormal phenomena of certain flavors, with NDEs being a prominent example.

Overall, I suspect that this tendency speaks to how I was an autistic pattern-seeker and also flailing for a simulacrum of the mystic or the spiritual, given the path of witchcraft I eventually took in my 20s. My attitude toward extraterrestrials and cryptids has changed since childhood, in fact turning much more skeptical[3], whereas I have found myself more open to many things I once rejected. But where NDEs were concerned, I think that I particularly hoped these were material proof of an afterlife, because I wanted to believe in that as well and just couldn't admit it.

It is not an easy thing to accept the prospect of inevitable non-existence — hence the panic attacks I originally developed when thinking about death for too long. I could never accept afterlives offered by any one religion because they seemed like naked lies; I couldn't accept open-ended New Age interpretations of reincarnation because I felt as if past lives' memories would just have to be more accessible than they apparently were; I couldn't assume some kind of ghostly afterlife in this world because I felt as if that way I would surely encounter even a single ghost, which I knew I hadn't. But as for every sign pointing toward the destruction of any so-called "soul" when the body that housed it decomposed, I accepted it yet loathed it.

Once I knew about NDEs, they struck me as potentially some form of evidence to the contrary, not only because of the scientific ambiguity surrounding them but also because of certain impossibilities that seemed to occur for some people who reported them. I vividly remember reading about one case that's been famous in NDE studies: a hospital patient identified only as "Maria" who was clinically dead but after resuscitation reported an experience of leaving her body, exiting the nearby window, and floating up to a ledge where she saw a worn-out shoe sitting there. Supposedly this exact ledge was identified and it did have a shoe matching her description, right down to a hole in it. "Maria" could not have seen this from any location on the ground or elsewhere in the hospital. Could this mean she really only gained this knowledge while she was dead?

We cannot really say, namely because this story was reported secondhand by an NDE researcher. The real "Maria" has never been identified. When I read the story, though, I ate it up. Again, I wanted to believe.

Death as I see it now

It took me a long time for my views on death, ghosts, or an afterlife to shift, and in a way there has not been as much of a shift as you might expect. My views have simply grown more complicated, more curious.

As a fairly dedicated animist these days, I recognize that animacy is a property that goes beyond life itself. It resonates through the relations between things, and in the sense we make out of things. The possibility of a unique life form's persisting conscious awareness after death is therefore not guaranteed, but besides the fact that a NDE could maybe point to those conditions, I find it fortuitous that some humans report NDEs because it suggests that the universe has in some way provided for us to come to terms with death, surrendering our energy back to the cosmos and developing an integrated understanding of our lives before we depart. However, even saying this, I am troubled by the fact that not every human who comes "back from the dead" has any such thing to report.

Similarly, having used psilocybin once — and finding that one powerful trip can be highly transformative on its own — I still cannot directly compare it to a NDE because of the basic features not matching very closely, but it's the closest experience I have to a mystic occurrence triggered through a physical method. In that regard, I find it enlightening to recall how once my trip began, if I had died during it I would have passed about as cogently as someone who has a NDE. I retained some agency, but I was largely at the mercy of what the mushrooms manipulated in my consciousness. I have described it to others as possession, yet even more fundamentally I would just say I was not in consensus reality, and the emphasis is on the I, me, the subject. I had removed myself from my own body while remaining inside it. I felt a kind of impostor syndrome about my own person, and that very person did not exist so much as form a conduit for raw experience and reaction, with some higher inhibitory functions utterly disabled. Often this sent me into fits of euphoria or mania, but I also remember a fragment of distant understanding that if I had for some reason eaten the wrong kind of mushroom and was thus about to die, I would die hallucinating. Afterward, I also viscerally knew how critical it had been to conduct my ritual with someone else physically present at all times, because I would have been literally unable to prevent self-harm if something moved me to do so.[4] Either way, these are alarming things to consider, but I have to ask myself: wouldn't it still be better than dying while fearing death all the way down? And perhaps a NDE is some gift in that regard. I don't know.

I have lastly also spent many years considering the hard problem of consciousness, which I discussed at length here, and I think that one avenue into better understanding that problem is NDEs and their own discontents. We struggle to empirically explain the raw qualia of consciousness even though at the end of the day those qualia are the most empirical thing we have; whatever materially gives rise to qualia is probably also what gives rise to a NDE, but how are we supposed to pinpoint this? And what anyone hopes might persist into an afterlife is basically one's consciousness; some sects may bicker about the resurrection of the flesh, but any life after death presumes a soul, and the soul seems to be that which is conscious within us, but what makes it? Why is it there?

Even as a witch who has come to perceive and grasp many truths since beginning my practice, I cannot answer these questions. Any time I think about dying, I wonder if I myself will behold a tunnel of light, watch moments from my life flash before my eyes, see figures welcoming me. I feel like it's plausible, but not certain; either way, I wish I knew whether such a sight would be a true proof of my consciousness persisting as my body rots, or if this would just be a comforting entertainment while my consciousness is gradually annihilated.

But the great mystery of death remains forever not to know.

[1] Speaking anecdotally, I have only depersonalized under traumatic circumstances or during my own psilocybin trip. In the latter case, at times this depersonalization felt good and I'm sure is the reason why other people enthusiastically describe psychedelics as making them feel "at one" with everything, because the boundary between you and other entities feels so permeable. But my disconnection from my body caused me bewilderment and horror at other points in the same trip, and I can see why this would likewise be a key vector for people whose trips leave them with lasting psychological damage.

[2] A new-ish popular hypothesis is that because human bodies do legitimately produce endogenous DMT (dimethyltryptamine), this may be one of the chemicals released during the active death process. I have problems with how such a notion is presented because it feels like a convenient excuse to further decontextualize DMT use from culturally specific ayahuasca ritual, the consequences of which are superbly detailed at Sigillo Sacro's recent update, which I recommend that ritualists of all kinds read at their soonest opportunity. However, whether or not DMT itself is responsible for NDEs — and at least one neurosurgeon disagrees when comparing his own direct experiences — there's an abundance of other compounds up for consideration.

[3] I do take Carl Sagan's stance that alien life must exist, have existed, or eventually exist somewhere in the universe, but I don't find any convincing evidence that it has contacted us, and I'm very concerned about an ecological Great Filter. As for cryptids, I think they're an entertaining form of modern folklore, but most of the evidence for their existence is horrendously poor quality, and getting hung up on "proving" they exist is also missing the point.

[4] The chemical lethality of "classic" psychedelics is practically zero for people who lack key health conditons. But people can and do die because the drugs make them forget what can kill them — or not care.

Thank you for reading. For those of you paying to support this newsletter, thank you especially. I have been unemployed for over a year, and even after realigning the job market that I'm searching in, I sometimes despair that I'm going to have a consistently paying "career" ever again, which frightens me for a number of reasons. However, whether or not this is a well-founded belief, it helps my morale to receive even a tiny fragment of monthly support for one of my most instinctive activities: writing. In a society that valued writing more, I could simply be making my living off of this. Should even $1/month be a prohibitive cost for you, please at least consider sharing my writing more widely in the hope of finding more readers who can pay. If I were employed again, I would not be so invested in this, but here we are.

Next week, I will have a special, relatively kinky holiday post for Ostara, and then the following week I will be exploring the merits and drawbacks of cultivating land on sedentary plots versus through nomadic lifestyles.