Q: Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?

A: That no man, though he sees others dying around him, believes that he himself will die.

–The Mahabharata

The common defense against the fact of death is to forget about it. Although death is the one great crisis that lies in the future of every one, most of us are able to keep it out of our minds a very large part of the time. We know most surely that we are going to die, and yet we act as if we were not. If we think about it at all, we cannot escape the fact that death is inevitable and very important. So, we don’t think about it.

Yet every great spiritual tradition has insisted that its disciples do meditate upon death. Why? Because in facing the fact of death man must face the deepest questions of his own identity, origin, existence, and destiny; he must face the question of the nature of time, eternity, and God.

No wonder we want to turn away or at least gain a postponement! And no wonder our spiritual teachers won’t permit us to duck this.one. For how a man lives his daily Life is fundamentally affected by how he regards death. We cannot safely wait for the event of death in order to find our answers. Whether we like it or not our present knowledge of death, or our cultivated ignorance of death, basically influences the course of our life from day to day.

The lazy and fearful mind of course has a fine lot of rationalizations for avoiding the subject of death. To dwell upon the fact of death is “morbid,” “unnecessary,” “a denial of life,” ”negative,” “unscientific,” “not modern,” etc., etc. And yet the clear truth is that a man who will not meditate upon death, who will not go out to meet death, understand death, come to terms with death, prepare for death, who forces death to overtake him in the fullness of deliberate ignorance–such a person injures and starves his soul in its deepest part and cripples his life, right here, right now. How badly he may cripple his ability to conduct himself in the actual event of death is a further and even more serious question. (“Man thinks to himself: Why need I trouble about what happens in the spiritual world? When I die I go into the spiritual world in any case and then I shall see and hear what goes on there! In endless variations one hears this easy­ going way of talking: Why should I trouble about the spiritual before I die? When the time comes I shall see what there is to see. My relationship to the spiritual world will not be altered in the slightest, no matter whether I do or do not concern myself with it. But indeed, this is not so! A man who thinks in such a way will enter a world of darkness and gloom …for it is only by allying himself in spirit and soul with the spiritual world during life in the physical world that man can acquire the faculty of perception in the spiritual world; the preparation  must be made in his life here on earth. The spiritual world is there in very truth– the faculty of being able to see in that world must be acquired on the earth; otherwise there is blindness in the spiritual world” (Steiner, The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers). The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers

Out of sheer self-interest, not to speak of any religious concern, it presses upon every one of us to raise the question and pursue the question: “After death, what?”

Among modem psychologists, Otto Rank has perceived and developed the implications of this key fact with great insight. Ira Progoff (in The Death and Rebirth of Psychology)* describes Rank’s view of the pivotal importance of immortality to modern man’s entire psychic development as one of his “two steps beyond psychology”. * The Death and Rebirth of Psychology

As a theoretical system this aspect of Rank’s work is very complicated, for it involves a severely intellectual integration of conceptions of sociology and depth psychology. On a human level, however, his work is simple and direct, for it is based on an essential and fundamental psychological fact. The human being, Rank says, experiences his individuality in terms of his will; and this means that his personal existence is identical with his capacity to express his will in the world. Death, however, puts an end to the kind of will expression that man experiences in his mortal life. Individual existence seems to terminate; but if there is no will remaining to man, his connection to life is destroyed. Rank’s point then is that the most basic fact underlying man‘ s psychological and cultural history is the observation … that death apparently brings the individual’s existence to an end. One way or another man must come to terms with this simple but unavoidable observation. [Italics supplied.] Not out of idle curiosity but out of a profound psychological need, man interprets and reinterprets it throughout history, constructing and reconstructing his conception of the universe in order   to establish a place for himself after his death. Man does this out of his deepest nature. He cannot live, or he can live only painfully confused and  neurotically unsure of himself, if he does not  possess a clear conviction of  the continued existence of his  will  in  some  form. [Italics supplied.] This, to Rank, is the psychological fact that underlies the development of the individual personality and the variety of man’s works in religion, art, and civilization. The “urge to immortality” is man’s inexorable drive to feel connected to Life in terms of his individual will with a sense of inner assurance that that connection will not be broken or pass away.

A willingness really to look at death and to learn what may be learned about death has marked the end of materialistic atheism, and the end of deep frustration and soul sickness, for many a modern man. The “scientific” attitude which has led some of us to deny immortality, if pursued with sufficient rigor and in the unprejudiced and courageous spirit of real science, may lead us finally to see that as a matter of fact death is not the end for man, after all. The data upon which to reach such an understanding already exist. All that is needed is genuine interest, genuine study, and patient research on our own part. The majority of people today do not realize this, but it is nevertheless simply true. Not only individuals but our society itself can move in this direction, and, if Rank is right, it might greatly relieve our pressing mental health problems to do so.

When a man dies, what happens to him? If you have never seriously looked into it, you may be surprised to find how much is known about this subject.

But first let’s try to understand what we are talking about and get some common misconceptions out of the way. We should be clear at the outset that immortality is not eternal life. To enter eternal life is a spiritual experience, a landmark in the process of salvation, regeneration, liberation; it is to become conscious of and finally united with Him who transcends the temporal manifold, with the Time-free, with Him who creates and dissolves time and the things of time, with the Source of time and the Lord of time, with That which remains when there is time no more.

Eternal life includes immortality, but immortality may not include eternal life. It is possible, as Jesus and some of the disciples and certain other men have done, to experience eternal life before corporeal death. On the other hand, a man may experience immortality, i.e., he may consciously survive physical death, and still be bound by a kind of time or various kinds of time. He may survive physical death only  to be faced later with a second or psychic death (Rev. 2:11, 20:6-14, 21:8). Mystical death, or the spiritual death which precedes spiritual rebirth and the entry into eternal life, seems indeed to be this second death endured before rather than after corporeal death. Evidently there are many possibilities.

But first things first: We are concerned here in the beginning not with eternal life and not with questions within questions of the mystical life and of post-mortem existence, but simply with the question of survival of death.

The evidence for survival is of three kinds: (1) the evidence of history, representing the experience and wisdom of earlier peoples, both primitive and cultured, (2) the evidence of psychic phenomena and extra-sensory perception, and (3) the evidence of religion:  the great spiritual traditions and mystical insight.

There is no evidence that man does not survive death. The notion that death represents the end of the human being is an inference, rather naive and certainly not scientific, arising from the materialist mechanist assumption that man is the physical body and nothing but the physical body. This assumption is seldom submitted by materialist- mechanists to rational examination and review, much less to disciplined experimentation and evaluation. It is one of the crudest of superstitions which nevertheless has somehow attained the dignity of seeming “advanced,” “modem,” and “scientific.” The materialist-mechanist simply “believes” that when the physical corpse disintegrates, that is the final end of the man. This school of thought is strangely and powerfully allergic to the examination of evidence; it is prone to arguments ad hominem and ad populum; it tends to become emotional and rigid when challenged; in short it has many of the characteristics of bigotry and singularly few of the characteristics of the scholarly and scientific outlook which it claims as its basis.

The weakness of the materialistic view is seen in the facts that (1) the very mind which holds the said view is itself demonstrably a trans­ temporal and supra-physical reality (note Rhine’s work); (2) man is just as much mind as body; and therefore (3), if the mind survives, as it very well may, the man himself survives. This is not the whole case for survival, of course, but it is simple and obvious disproof of the assumptions of non-survival-without even raising the more interesting question of the existence of an electronic field or “subtle body, “under certain conditions palpable and observable, which may leave the physical body at death and in which the surviving man may continue his existence.

Man’s survival of physical death is popularly regarded, with some grounds, as scientifically not proved. But this condition exists because many scientists, for reasons seldom clearly stated, have steadfastly refused to undertake a disciplined examination of the large mass of evidence at hand. Modern science has neither disproved nor cast reasonable doubt upon immortality; it has simply and rather successfully ignored the subject of immortality.

There are, however, notable exceptions. Among scholars and scientists who have looked at the evidence for immortality and for the trans physical aspects of the mind are the following: Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Camille Flammarion, the first and second Earls of Balfour, Professor Henri Bergson, Sir William Barrett, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lord Rayleigh, F. W. H. Myers, Professor William James, Dr. L. P. Jacks, Sir William Crookes, G. N. M. Tyrrell, Professor Charles Richet, Sir Joseph J. Thompson, Professor F. C. S. Schiller, Dr. R.H. Thouless, Dr. W. F. Prince, Professor C. D. Broad, Professor Hans Dreisch, Professor Gilbert Murray, Professor William Ernest Hocking, and Dr. J.B. Rhine. Before anyone decides that human immortality is “unscientific” let him examine the reports of some of these scholars and scientists upon their experiments, experiences, and conclusions. Turning first, however, to the over-all nature of the question of man’s survival of death and the broad fields of evidence in answer to the question, let us consider the answers provided by historical data (including literature and cultural anthropology).