A Language Beyond Reason
Reflections on death, rationality and the mystical
I grew up in a scientific family. My grandmother Irene was the daughter of the physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. She was herself scientifically well educated and had translated the correspondence between the two men — letters of great importance in the history of science — into English. A proud atheist, she always rejected any talk of the spiritual as superstitious nonsense. And yet when I visited her on her deathbed, she admitted with some shame that her lack of faith was wavering. She was afraid to die, and the psychological pressure to grasp at some straw of hope for an afterlife was strong. She recognised this as the desperate ploy of a fearful mind, but nonetheless struggled to resist it. Not long after this, she fell into unconsciousness for the last time, and I never knew if or how she resolved her inner conflict.
On her last night, a vigil of family members including her daughter and my aunt, the singer Olivia Newton-John, had gathered at her home. Olivia, a more spiritually open person than Irene, was alone in the room with her when her mother died. In the silence after her last breath, Olivia spoke, asking her mother for a sign. “If you’re okay, let me know by making the candles flicker,” she said. At that moment the candles did indeed flicker, and in the same instant there was a loud bang in the next room. A glass candlestick holder had exploded.
Such stories are easy to ridicule, and I’m sure Irene would have done just that, had such a tale been recounted to her. From a scientific standpoint, “anecdotal evidence” is an oxymoron. Yet such experiences are harder to dismiss at first hand. I’ve often thought about that particular event. How to account for the apparently spontaneous shattering of a candlestick holder under any circumstances, let alone at that precise moment?
The capacity of such strange episodes to challenge the skeptical mindset is attested to by an article in Scientific American titled “Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core” (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anomalous-events-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core/). It recounts how a previously inoperable transistor radio that had belonged to the grandfather of the author’s wife suddenly came to life and played a romantic song on the day of their wedding, just as his wife was expressing her sadness that her grandfather was not present to give her away. The fact that the author Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a publication devoted to the debunking of pseudoscientific and paranormal claims, shows the powerful subjective impression this experience made on him, challenging beliefs in which the author was deeply invested, emotionally and professionally.
Such experiences are actually not uncommon, and seem to cluster around significant moments, especially death. In a class I run on death and dying for The School Of Life, one participant — a barber — told me a story about how he was cutting the hair of a customer whose grandfather had recently died. Asked if he ever felt that his grandfather was present or watching over him, the customer, a prominent footballer not given to flights of fancy, replied sadly that he didn’t. At that moment, a large blue butterfly flew in the open door, circled three times around the startled man where he sat in the barber’s chair, and then flew out again. He was stunned. Choked with emotion, he explained that his grandfather had had a passionate lifelong interest in butterflies.
Yet despite the power of such experiences to impress us, especially when they happen in our own lives, they remain rather poetic and elliptical in nature. They tease and suggest, but never prove. It is not as if our dead loved ones send us postcards from the afterlife telling us they’re fine, or show up for Sunday roast in ghost form. Rather we are gifted with what psychologist Carl Jung termed a “synchronicity”, a strikingly meaningful coincidence, as fleeting as it is moving and profound. Such experiences have the character of what used to be called “grace”: a moment of divine alignment in which the world arranges itself into a symbol and, like a rainbow, meaning appears, only to fade again moments later. There is nothing here we could hope to trap in a laboratory, or make the subject of a randomised, double-blind study.
In my own life, I have always steered a course between competing crosswinds of rationality and mysticism. As a younger man, life seemed pregnant with significance and symbolism. I studied astrology and gave up a science/law degree to seek enlightenment in a six-month sojourn in India. Yet with age, the sterner, colder winds of science have tended to prevail. So much in life looks cruel and arbitrary, so much can be explained by the purely mechanical picture. Perhaps in an attempt to reconcile these parts of myself, in recent years I have made a deep study of quantum physics and the philosophy of mind, seeking the intersection of matter and consciousness. This journey has been fascinating, yet the reconciliation remains elusive. If some power exists in the universe through which a dead grandfather may reach out to his grandchild through a broken radio, or a Ulysses butterfly, it is not to be found in the subatomic interstices which my ancestor Max Born probed.
The fundamental tragedy of the human condition is that we are sentient, sensitive, meaning-driven beings in a universe that is overwhelmingly mindless, insensate and random. Wildfires burn us, tsunamis drown us. If we fall from a height, our bodies split apart according to Newton’s laws. A cathedral built over centuries may be reduced to rubble in a matter of seconds by a heedless shudder of the earth’s crust. The universe, it seems, is indifferent to all the delicate, fantastical structures of human art and meaning and may blithely wipe them from the board in an instant. It easy to conclude that we are, in the end, just matter in motion.
And yet, somehow, the grandfather’s butterfly. The candlestick holder.
Is the universe, as the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus claimed, just “atoms and the void”? Or is it, as the mystics would have it, some condensation of the breath of God, through which a divine light continues to shine, that which we call love? Our ancestors in the Garden of Eden of scientific ignorance could easily find space for gods and spirits in everything. Poseidon in the waves, Thor in the lightning. The cost of knowledge has been banishment forever from that animistic world. We have become the new gods, and the old spirits have disappeared. And yet perhaps not entirely. Perhaps they continue to speak in a language beyond reason: the strange, poetic language of dreams and the soul.
This article first appeared in Dumbo Feather magazine.