When is a body dead?

Tuesday 08 Nov 2016

This is an interesting and controversial topic. There are certainly stories in early medicine of premature burials where scratch marks were found inside coffins and even today people waking up in the morgue after being pronounced dead. Fears of being buried alive at one point in time made it fashionable for some to have a bell connected by a cord back into the coffin, for the person inside to ring should they happen to wake after being buried. This is not so much of a problem today with autopsies being so prevalent. However this linked article to a BBC story speaks to the complication of declaring death today, especially around people in comas. It is a good read as a sidebar to this essay.  http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161103-the-macabre-fate-of-beating-heart-corpses  In this writing I would like to look at how a Buddhist view of such things may be seen, given that Buddhism sees consciousness as something external to the body and not something that is created by it.

As a general rule it is fairly easy to know that a person has died. The corpse starts to break up very quickly. Personal experience tells me it is not long before gravity works to settle fluids as the body relaxes and then goes to rigor mortis. If the climate is warm the odours will let you know that bacteria are quickly doing their work to break everything apart. This bacterial conditioning knows that the “particular” mind stream that once held an umbrella influence over this person has finished. Where there was once a personalised conditioning over all the nested and symbiotic feedback loops making up this person, it has now gone. The person’s conditioning or mind stream has moved it on to build a new situation in order to sustain itself. Not unlike a reflex action! This bacterial “left over” scenario is now very different from when the body’s life was sustained by its “owners” individual mind stream. This body is now being returned to the earth. There are of course some strange situations as noted above where the process is interrupted to allow an individual mind stream to reassert its influence, but it is rare. 

NESTED CONDITIONING & SYMBIOSIS

The BBC article gives fascinating insights for us to see and helps us realise the overall symbiotic relationship that our bodies have with the world. (Generally when I say “the world” I am meaning the planet we live on, but I am also including the earth’s relationship beyond our solar system taking in the entire Universe.) The BBC article refers to some of the reflexes that can operate in a body after death along with some cells and groups of cells that can keep operating for a time as they obey their own simpler nested conditioning. While the mind stream of the dead individual has released its conditioning and moved on, the spent and unviable conditions that that made up that particular life can still have a life of their own. This process clearly shows how the mind is able to assemble conditions in a nested way to create the very complicated patterns of life that we cling to as me and mine. It is accurate to say that all creatures and beings have a mind. Like humanity the conditioning that creates them comes from their mind.

CONSCIOUSNESS

The mind is made of consciousness. With practice it can be seen and experienced in its initial state as stillness. This still consciousness pervades the entire universe. Everything in Universe comes out of this “Still Consciousness”.  All of the elementary particles right up to the complicated and compounded particles that make all the gasses, the stars and the planets, it all comes out of still consciousness. Good meditation practice will allow you to see that all of this physical energy is wrapped up inside what can see as more subtle mental energy. We can notice how the still consciousness changes as it moves --- how we perceive the change intellectually and emotionally, which leads us to feeling, initially in the mind but then from inside the body when it “becomes” ours. 

The pattern of our life becomes visible when we practice to make our minds still. When our mind is focussed, clear and mindful, we will notice still consciousness. We realise that we can use this as a reference datum to know and experience how creation works. How it is that everything becomes! We can also notice and experience what it is like when we “let go” and release our views and opinions, including our belief in the conditioning that creates us. We see that still consciousness will penetrate into the heart of our being so we can know beyond any doubt what the truth of our existence is. We know that it is impermanent, we know that is unsatisfactory and we know there is no self to be found. No soul to be found!  We realise that we grasp onto our individual mind streams and create our lives from the vicissitudes of shifting conditions that can never give satisfaction, let alone perfection or truth.  In fact we see how grasping onto these conditions as reality makes us blind and ignorant, robbing us from living a life of truth in the present moment. We notice that we are living our life in a blur across the moment, still attached to the past and craving for the future. Caught up in the conditions without any clarity! 

FUNGIBLE CONCIOUSNESS

This clarity starts to crystallise when we notice that this creative consciousness is fungible. Each element of it can or could go to any other part of creation. Each element of consciousness is equal and could be swapped and changed into any conditioning that is being formed. Its feedback into the present makes it universal and connected. Ultimately it connects us all as one, even though we collapse just our part of its universal and infinite feedback. This realisation leads to the same paradoxes that science encounters in particle physics when trying to explain the “Particle and Wave” nature of reality. It is very analogous as consciousness acts in a similar way. See my blog 14thMay 2015 here:   http://dennissheppard.com.au/news/the-conscious-mind-the-sub-conscious-and-the-double-slit-42  The Buddha expounded the same paradox when he said, “Enlighten yourself and you will enlighten the World” (Universe). Still consciousness has taken us into the heart of truth, deep within the present moment.  It is this realisation that allows us to know we are on the right track to understand the Buddha’s enlightenment. It gives us heart to face our fears and do what the Buddha did.

CONTINUUM

At this point it may be useful to go back to the initial question: “How can we tell when a body is dead?”  When we see things from the perspective that we have now arrived at, one starts to see that this question, like all questions, start to become irrelevant. It is a question that comes from the ignorance of our being stuck in our conditioning. From the Buddhist perspective as outlined above there is never any point when a body, or a part of it, really becomes dead. Everything is always there. It just changes! It is part of a continuum --- part of the comings and goings that exist from moment to moment or from day to day or from life to life. We can expand this view to see it all from epoch to epoch or indeed from Universe to Universe. (The Buddha spoke of universal cycles. He called them Kalpa’s --- see the above link.)  The real miracle here is that the self-reflection of a human being can allow us to reflect and practice to recondition our view towards truth. To have the right view! A view that allows meaningful practice and truthful insight! All this does not diminish the nature of humanity; in fact it thoroughly enhances it. It allows for beautiful lives to be lived with compassion for all sentient creatures and beings, to have compassion for the earth itself and for the conditioning in us that comes from the Universe, right from the beginning of time.

UNIFICATION

In conclusion I would like to go a little further to explain how Buddhism unifies the paradoxes mentioned. When stillness is apparent in the mind and is allowed to just be, it cannot remain in this state without movement. When still consciousness is conditioned to be still one will notice that it finishes. This is its nature! The Buddha called this state Cessation! The practitioner will know that still consciousness is finished and will also realise that the entire universe is now present in this mind. There is no extended conscious field in place to condition any on-going karma. Stillness which is the matrix of the universe has collapsed to be one pointed. The practitioner will know that when and if he or she dies in this state, there will be no more rebirth. The practitioners mind stream will be extinguished along with the entire Universe. The paradoxes are unified! This realisation is the result of following the Buddha’s Noble Eight Fold Path! It is called the Middle Way, a pathway between extremes that leads to perfect balance. It can and should be realised! Then we will know true peace!