For most of us, it’s unsettling to think about our mortality. It makes us think about what (or whom) we’ll lose, and about all that we may not be able to accomplish. Even though we know death is inevitable for all of us, most of us prefer to ignore it, so we can focus on the bright days ahead.
Death is so intimidating, according to the late Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank, that denying it is the only way we can process this information. Rank said it’s too overwhelming for the human mind to realize that it’s merely “lights out” at death, and then… fade to black. The idea of the soul’s immortality was, according to Rank, nothing more than our response to this latent fear. He suggests the real motivation behind the existence of any of the world’s religions is to make sense of our fragility and offer empty promises of life after death. In the 1970s, Ernest Becker popularized Rank’s ideas and won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death. The intention behind his work was noble—it was a scientific breakthrough at the time, intended to lead us into more authentic and meaningful lives here on earth.
While most of the scientific community embraced Rank’s nihilistic premise of life until death, science itself kept marching on. And soon, scientific breakthroughs advanced so deeply into the field of medicine, that people who would have ordinarily died, were now being brought back for another chance at life. These people began sharing empirical evidence that confirmed for us it is not “lights out” in the end after all. The truth was coming full circle, back to what the world’s spiritual traditions had been telling us all along.
There are, by now, so many people who faced death and lived to talk about it, that the phenomenon got its own name: the near-death experience, or NDE. While each of these people has a unique story, it turns out that stories from beyond the veil have elements in common. Research scientists have compiled a growing body of evidence, investigating these overlapping elements. They’ve found commonalities in the NDE that are independent of cultural or religious background. In other words, there are steps in the death experience that happen to every person who goes through it. This gives us a baseline of what we can expect to happen when we die—starting with the obvious common denominator that life does not end at death. In fact, death appears to be a doorway into a realm of unconditional love and light that underpins our very existence.
To me, personally, these were insights I would have loved to have had early on in my life. When I was a kid, I was often worried about death. I had so many unanswered questions, I started to equate death with a black hole, one that could gobble up my loved ones at any time. That feeling bothered me for most of my childhood.
As an adult, I discovered books about NDEs. Finding these documented accounts from people who had died and returned, was the proof I needed that life does not end, and that the realm of Spirit (with which I had so much contact as a kid) is, in fact, a real realm. This was groundbreaking information for me at the time, and it freed me once and for all from the worries and fears of what death might do.
Scientists have been able to quantify that people who’ve had an NDE tend to be more open, caring, and loving. The powerful effect of becoming aware of a realm of unconditional love and light that supports our physical existence, inspires people so deeply that they want to create an ongoing connection. It gives them resilience of heart and an inner compass that keeps them pointing towards this light. With the amount of suffering going on in our world today, that is a beautiful invitation for building a framework of continuity.
And contrary to what Rank believed as a psychoanalyst, it turns out that it’s actually quite natural for a curious child to wonder what happens when we die. Giving them insights into death can make it easier for them to handle the inevitable passing of a loved one. It keeps them open to the possibility that their intuitive, inner experiences are real, and complementary to our physical world. This adds to their emotional depth and resilience. It can also allow children to find a natural place for the role death plays in life in general. That will give them grace under fire, and an inner freedom—a freedom I experienced myself—that can lead to the kind of meaningful and authentic life that Becker envisioned for us when he wrote the book that won him his Pulitzer. But rather than by denying death, we can achieve it by seeing through its mask and finding the truth that lies beyond death’s veil.
