I watched a great video by Sam Harris on “Death and the Present Moment,” a valiant attempt to find consolation in the face of death that might replace the consolation people find in religion, but without believing anything for which there’s no evidence. He presented it as the beginning of a “new conversation” on the subject, and suggested the possibility that we might learn “to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred, and to cease to have a problem.” I had a few thoughts that I offered on his Facebook page in continuation of the conversation:
The feeling of sacredness is a brain state, and it can be learned like anything else. We can learn to associate that feeling with whatever the content of the present moment is—this breath is sacred; this rock is sacred; this pizza is sacred. The kind of meditation Sam demonstrated is a good place to start, and developing the ability is definitely more worthwhile than “watching the same bad movie for the fourth time.”
But the fact that we can access the feeling of sacredness doesn’t mean that anything inherently is sacred. To say that anything is sacred is a matter of framing it in a particular way. In addition, it isn’t clear that offering religious folk the opportunity to feel sacredness in the absence of their religion will give them the kind of bridge to an evidence-based point of view for which Sam expresses the need. Nor is it clear how it offers consolation in the face of death. It offers a way to not think about death, or any other problem, but sometimes problems have to be solved in context, and sometimes death has to be framed in a consoling way to friends who can’t, at the moment, summon the feeling of sacredness about the death of a loved one.
In the interest of the new conversation for which Sam wants to prepare the way, I’d like to offer a form of consolation that involves both brain states and verbal framing.
One brain state that most human beings can achieve without a lot of effort is empathy—our mirror neurons provide us with a ready-made experience of what other people are feeling. There’s a movement underway to teach children empathy, and anyone can improve their empathic response with practice. The advantage is that we can learn to experience the joy of others as our own—even though I don’t eat sweets, I can enjoy them by empathizing with those who do.
Of course, empathy isn’t confined to joy, and we may experience the pain and suffering of others more intensely as well. What happens with all this empathy is that we can learn to identify with others to the point that the “full catastrophe” of their lives becomes our own. I’m not implying anything “woo” here—when someone else cuts their finger mine doesn’t bleed—I’m simply pointing to our built-in capacity to enlarge our identity. If people can learn to link their emotional lives to the fortunes of “their” favorite sports team, they can learn to identify with the whole of their species, and here’s where the consolation in the face of death comes in, to quote myself from a blog post:
To the extent that we identify with other human beings, we will live on as long as our species survives; as long as babies laugh or forsaken lovers cry. The joys and fears that have propelled us through life will propel those who remain, generation after generation: echoes of ourselves. Our immortality only requires that we de-emphasize those accidents of our personal histories that make us unique, and place greater importance on our commonalities with everyone else.
We can learn to enlarge our identities beyond our own species to include all forms of life, anywhere in the universe, and even to the universe itself and whatever lies beyond.
The feelings of empathy and identity are near relatives to the feeling of love, another pleasant brain state that we can learn to cultivate. We can learn to extend our love for a lost child to all children, and to see the laughter of the lost one living on in those that remain.
Shuffling off this mortal coil is not so grim if we leave loving everything, and knowing that everything we love carries on.
Echoing Palms
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