You are perfect exactly as you are. With all your flaws and problems, there's no need to change anything. All you need to change is the thought that you aren't good enough." ~ J. Cole

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You are perfect exactly as you are. With all your flaws and problems, there's no need to change anything. All you need to change is the thought that you aren't good enough."

~ J. Cole

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Some questions may be intrinsically unanswerable. Or the answers may be contradictory. The “Isha Upanishad,” a Sanskrit text from the first millennium B.C., attempts to describe a reality that escapes common sense: “It moves and it moves not, it is far and it is near, it is inside and it is outside.”

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SCHOOLCRAFT - The Indians do not regard the approach of death with horror. Deists in religion, they look upon it as a change of state, which is mainly for the better. It is regarded as the close of a series of wanderings and hardships, which must sooner or later cease, which it is desirable should not take place until old age, but which, happen when it may, if it puts a period to their worldly enjoyments, also puts a period to their miseries. Most of them look to an existence in. a future state, and expect to lead a happier life in another sphere. And they are not without the idea of rewards and punishments. But what this happiness is to be, where it is to be enjoyed, and what is to be the nature of the rewards and punishments, does not appear to be definitely fixed in the minds of any. If a man dies, it is said, he has gone to the happy land before us—he has outrun us in the race, but we shall soon follow

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dth cafe

To initiate the exchange, she instructs the group to “go around in a circle and say what brought you to death cafe.” It’s a simple enough question, but one that elicits complex, deeply personal responses. Some attendees say they’ve come because they’re struggling with how to care for aging parents, or because they lost a loved one during the pandemic. Others have recently been through a life transition — a move back home, a college graduation, recovery from an illness. Or they’re wrestling with anxieties about their mortality. No matter the reason, everyone seems to be seeking some form of comfort, connection and community.

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A second problem is that perception fundamentally limits our ability to apprehend reality. A prosaic example is the perception of color. Eagles, turtles, bees, and shrimp sense more and different colors than we humans do; in effect, they see different worlds. Different perceptual realities can create different cognitive or conceptual realities

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In 1973, University of Chicago sociologist Andrew Greely asked a representative sample of 1,467 Americans, “Have you ever felt that you were really in touch with someone who had died?” Twenty-seven percent said they had. 3 In 1975, professor of psychology Erlendur Haraldsson asked in a representative national survey in Iceland, “Have you ever perceived or felt the nearness of a deceased person?” Thirty-one percent answered yes. Ten years later Haraldsson asked the question again in the European Human Values Survey: this time every fourth person in Western Europe reported contact with the dead. 

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Foucault’s analysis resonates with me because it reminds me of categories in physics. For example, we routinely tell our students and the public that the world consists of particles called quarks and leptons, along with subatomic force fields. Yet these are concepts that reify a certain approximate sketch of the structure of the world. Physicists once thought that these categories were fundamental and real, but we now understand them as necessarily inexact because they ignore the finer details that our instruments have just not been able to measure.

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In fact, evidence for the survival hypothesis—the idea that our consciousness survives the death of our bodies—is vast and varied, and comes from several different lines of evidence: NDEs, deathbed visions, reported memories of a previous life, apparitions, and even messages from the dead.

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