Thich Nhat Hanh is one of my major influences. In his book No Death, No Fear, he makes use of an analogy that others have used, suggesting that after death, the energy continues like radio waves that we cannot receive. The absence of physical presence (the receiver) does not stop the transmission. It’s a crude metaphor with major flaws, but it made sense to me when I encountered it in the context of his discussion of non-self. We as individuals are not separate from everything else; we are manifest as our persons while conditions are sufficient, and cease to manifest when they are no longer sufficient. We are made up of things that were other things before, and will be other things later. There is unity, and it is a thing of which each of us is part. That unity continues after each of us ceases to be.
When my mother died in 2002, what I thought of as my mother was much larger than what lived in and through her body. She was all of the generations before, the events, the words, the interactions, the people, the places, the ideas that went before and around and through her. None of that stuff ends when a life ends. That’s what I hear in those inaudible radio transmissions. When the pear tree blooms, or the breeze picks up, or a leaf falls, I often think that some of that could be some of what was once my mother. I hear the signals. When we elected a Black President, when an Orthodox Rabbinical school admits a gay candidate, when I have the courage to apologize, when my friend gets a kidney transplant… I hear my mother. I don’t think you have to know my mother to understand what I am trying to say here, though I know I am expressing it badly. The point is that no person is contained entirely within a physical being; embodiment is essential to the person, but is not the whole person. Something real goes on — not something imaginary or whimsical or metaphysical, but really real.
It is easy to see how my Calvinist friend, or anyone else, would see the “radio wave” metaphor as presenting a dualist perspective. On its face, it sounds like someone is suggesting that an invisible, inaudible spirit leaves the body and remains with us in a non-physical existence. I can’t represent the Buddhist take on the symbolism, but to me it suggests quite the opposite. The person remains with us through integration into our physical lives, albeit in ways that aren’t always physical; it may be through influences on others, through chains of events, through inspiration and ideas, through the power of love that remains not just in the memory of the person, but in a much more substantive way.
My mother continues to influence my thinking and behavior. It is not the memory of her that does this, but the traces of her being on my self and others. It is a difficult distinction to make in words, particularly to someone who may be inclined not to see a distinction. Nonetheless, it is a very different thing from ‘spirit energy’ or a ‘reality beyond the present illusion’ of which I speak. It is real and physical. The dead remain with us, in ways that cannot be denied or dismissed.
Death and the materialist – 2. Conversations
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