One of my favorite films of all time is the 1951 British version of A Christmas Carol, starring Alistair Sim. Sure, he overacted a bit, yet I wouldn't want to add or subtract anything from his performance; his over-the-top acting is part of the charm of the film. Another stellar performance was by Kathleen Harrison, who played the role of Mrs. Dilbert, a charwoman, who, in my opinion, gave the best demonstration of a Cockney accent on film. Her acting, like many others in the film, was superb. After Scrooge's transformation, Mrs. Dilbert thought he went mad and tried to escape. Scrooge caught her on the stairs and gave her some money. I will never forget the astounded look on her face, as she replied, in perfect Cockney, "For me?" The audience undoubtedly understood the source of her astonishment: nobody had been kind to her in a long, long time. That so much could be conveyed with so little in this touching scene provides not only an outstanding example of great character acting by Kathleen Harrison--who, by the way, swam to the other side at the age of 103--but an example of good direction as well.
A Christmas Carol is my Wizard of Oz, a movie seen many times during youth and beyond, which still pleases the kid in me at the ripe old age of 75.
Why am I writing about the film in a serious essay about--my view of it at least--the beyond?
For good reason: at the beginning of the film, Scrooge is visited by the wan Ghost of Christmas Past. We see the young Scrooge alone in his boarding school during Christmas vacation; his father, blaming him for the death of his beloved wife who died shortly after Scrooge's birth, wants nothing to do with him. The ghost has the haunted Scrooge look out the window. The scene below reveals a group of people of all ages afflicted by grinding poverty--a scene not rare in Victorian England, and still, alas! all too common in the dystopian world of today.
The poor people are surrounded by scores of ghost-like figures, desperately trying to help them. Their hearts are finally in the right place: they know that one of the main purposes of life is helping those in distress. But they are dead and are unable to intervene. Their despair is palpable.
The message is clear: help and love while you're still alive and have the opportunity to do the right thing. Good advice.
2.
Dickens and the film make a good point. It is, however, more like a fairy tale with a moral. It's one thing to learn something from the tale of the industrious pig who built his house out of bricks, and quite another to believe that real pigs construct houses. Symbolism isn't science. Neither Dickens, the director of the film, nor you or I need believe that the poor are surrounded by disembodied, invisible spirits desperately trying to help. Belief in the Tooth Fairy would be just as convincing.
The specifics of the afterlife in this episode of A Christmas Carol is fiction, most of us would agree on that. Can there be a science-based theory of what the afterlife is? I think that this is possible, although what I propose is far from certain. At least my theory doesn't flout science; in fact, I will use scientific observations to support it.
What I propose is far from offering pie-in-the-sky. To the contrary, it is agreement with the Buddhist dictum that those who deny life after death are wrong and those who believe in an afterlife are wrong as well. Ultimate Truth might not entail the 'God' you or I may want, but it is Ultimate Truth nevertheless. Is this truth an Aristotelian mean between nihilism and wishful thinking? No, it has little to do with either. You might not be able to get what you want, but, ready or not, you're going to get It. It is of course not completely foreign to human beings whom evolution has provided with consciousness, Lord-knows-how. Deep down, you know this truth already.
3.
Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.--Albert Einstein.
Everything is connected! When this knowledge becomes integrated into the mind, it is called wisdom; another term for it is cosmic consciousness.
The term 'cosmic consciousness' comes from an eponymous book by Richard Maurice Bucke form 1901. In this book, he states the following: "cosmic consciousness is a higher form of consciousness than possessed by ordinary man."
I dispute this statement. I believe that just about everybody has had cosmic consciousness experiences in their lives. This is true even in the physical world: for example, it is very difficult to maintain a sense of separation during orgasm!
Love at its spiritual best cannot help but spill over into feelings of love for others and for the entire world. For me, the most important message from the bible is to love your neighbor as yourself. If you really practice this principle, love reduces the sense of separation between neighbors; cosmic consciousness results when this love is achieved, whether momentarily or for longer periods of time.
I think everyone has had such experiences, however fleetingly. It is said that the great sage Ramana Maharshi entered cosmic consciousness at an early age. The difference between him and the rest of us is that he remined in this consciousness, while we come in and out of it.
Another word for the absorption into cosmic consciousness is Nirvana. The primary purpose of mindfulness meditation is not the lowering of blood pressure and other such benefits, even though they accompany it. The purpose is to free one from the sense of self, from the sense of separation.
The sense of separation, however, has a definite evolutionary purpose. Without the sense of being separate, that is, being an individual, one would fail to practice self-preservation, a key instinct that evolution has drummed into all. If we truly practiced turning the other cheek there would be a lot of red cheeks in a species unable to survive.
Without the sense of individualism, humankind would not have been able to separate itself from the environment; we would not have been able to create tools, art, etc. We would not have been able to construct cities, and alas, not be able to destroy them with implements of war as well.
This is obviously only a wild surmise, but I guestimate that our consciousness is made up of 98% bodily consciousness and only 2% cosmic consciousness. Since cosmic consciousness is the underlying reality, it is no wonder that we've made such a mess of things. Evolution can support various degrees of greed, hate, and delusion, but not cosmic consciousness. Turn the other cheek? Jesus was spot-on as a sage, but very not-on as an individual.
I hold that the purpose of life is to decrease the proportion of 'survival of the fittest' in our consciousness and to increase the proportion of cosmic consciousness. Who would argue against increasing love and wisdom as motivations? Evolution has nothing to fear, of course, since human life is characterized by an overwhelming proportion of evolutionary consciousness. Tilting the needle to the right by loving, wise behavior would not only make us feel better, but be better. More cosmic consciousness is exactly what this world of birth and death needs.
Is cosmic consciousness merely mysticism? Is there a scientific base for it? This is the subject of the next section.
4.
I can't promise you proof, but I can provide a science-based indication that there is more to consciousness than bodily consciousness.
The famous double-slit experiment, (you can look this up online), the proven results of which have been mind-boggling since they were discovered. It has to do with quantum phenomena, and as Niels Bohr said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you most certainly don't. Since the very small dimensions of the quantum world underlies the mega world in which we live, quantum mechanics can't help but shake up our view of the world.
The double-slit experiment consists of a photometer, which can emit one photon at a time, a remarkable achievement, a steel plate with slits behind which is a photoelectric plate which records the paths the photons take.
If only one slit is open, the photons behave as particles and hit the photoelectric plate much as arrows would hit a target. If two slits are open, an interference wave pattern is found on the photoelectric plate. (Like ocean waves, when a peak of one wave meets a peak of another, they add up; if a wave trough encounters a wave peak, they cancel each other out.) The particle photon would have to go through each slit at the same time! Weird--as if one person could enter two houses at the same time!
Photons, as quantum phenomena, are thought by many physicists to consist of a potential field, which can behave as particles or waves, depending on the way they are manipulated, i.e., observed.
This is strange enough, but the point I want to make is even stranger. If a recording device is attached to the second slit, the photons always behave as particles. This means that the recording device, the results of which remain unknown until observed, determines the behavior of the photon. The device does this without any physical contact. An other way of saying this, is that consciousness determines the result.
The great twentieth century physicist, John Wheeler, has posited a "participatory universe;" in other words, the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, in which consciousness not only creates the present and the future, but the past as well.
A quote from John Wheeler: "I do take 100% seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination." Replace 'imagination' with 'consciousness' and you get the mind-boggling idea.
What kind of consciousness are we talking about? Stephen Hawking has taken Wheeler seriously and posited the 'top-down' theory of the universe, a brief explanation of which follows.
The universe was a quantum particle before the Big Bang, which means it only potentially existed. It takes conscious observation to change potentiality into reality. Thus, consciousness not only creates our present, but our past as well. It is objective, however, and has nothing to do with wishful thinking, the past is always created in the same order. (Much to fundamentalists' chagrin, dinosaurs are never contemporaneous with humans, no matter how ardently desired.)
Objective consciousness and cosmic consciousness are two entities which I consider to be one and the same.
The Hindu dictum that consciousness creates the world is thus supported by modern physics.
5. Summary
An objective consciousness or cosmic consciousness underlies reality. This thesis has several possible corollaries. Chief of these concerns what happens after death.
I mentioned earlier that evolution, in accord with its methodology of the survival of the fittest, has inculcated in humans a strong sense of being a separate self. I call the consciousness of self "bodily consciousness." I guestimated that an individual is 98% bodily consciousness and 2% cosmic consciousness. At death, the latter probably rises to 100%.
A consequence of this is that there will be no rectification in heaven for the many evils and sufferings of existence, nor will we meet our loved ones there who have predeceased us.
Karma and rebirth--the opportunity to concentrate more on cosmic consciousness in a subsequent life--may be possible, but are not necessary.
Death erases the vast majority of what we are. The pain of death, whether of the self or of loved ones, remains, well, excruciatingly painful, albeit there is a major consolation.
Death helps to put earthly strivings and concerns in perspective. A cemetery attendant once told me that people tend to visit relatives' graves in the first two years after burial; visits eventually tend to cease completely. All that ambition; all that moodiness; all those obsessions between the ears are as nothing in the cosmic scheme of things.
This sentiment was beautifully put in a poem by Dorothy Parker entitled, "Philosophy."
If I should labor through daylight and dark,
Concentrate, valorous, serious, true,
Then on the world I may blazon my mark;
And what if I don't, and what if I do?
I know few examples where the folly of striving for fame is better expressed. (The posthumous fame of Shakespeare does nothing for the mortal Shakespeare, who died in 1616.)
The consolation is that your cosmic consciousness, reverting at your death to the state before you were born, is immortal.
Will you be conscious of cosmic consciousness after your demise? I don't know. It is hard to imagine a consciousness when you, in effect, become the whole world. Existence, however, is extremely strange and paradoxical. Who knows what really happens in "that bourn from which no man ever returns?"
I, however, like Whitman, am an optimist. I believe there is more than rhetoric to the following line by Whitman:
And to die is different from what any one supposed,
and luckier.
How should we conduct our lives then? Enjoy the things of this world, for they will not come again. Be as wise as you can. Concentrate on the things that are important, human relationships. Support yourself and your loved ones financially and spiritually. And above all, as Augustine advised, Love and do what you want.
No one ever truly disappears; you won't either.
