It's All In Your Mind: The Virtual Basis of Religion, Sex, Time, And Death
GoingtoHeaven.org
I was always different. I never had a casual thought in my life. Even as a child I pondered the mysteries of life. As far back as I can remember, I wondered about death. I would look up at the great amber hanging lanterns in the church during Sunday services and wonder what would happen if one dropped on me. I almost wished it would, just to find out. It seemed that nobody had the answer. I went to confirmation class because I thought Sally Meneely was cute; by then I had other things on my mind. Still, starting from about the age of nine, I would return often to a mystery that gradually became the focus of my intellectual life. What was it really? What actually happened?
What was it really? What actually happened?
My father was a Harvard grad who never missed a Yale game. As an editor of the Harvard Lampoon, he wrote light verse and oversaw the family steel company, handling management while his vice-president oversaw engineering. The fine sand of the Hudson River had once attracted foundries that would bake it into intricate molds for cast iron. Founded as a stove works in 1857, “McKinney & Mann,” soon reincarnated as Albany Architectural Ironworks, won renown for fancy store fronts in the 1880’s, and assumed its third life as James McKinney & Son when my grandfather entered the firm. My father was born in 1891; I was born in his 54th year, the son of the son of the son at James McKinney & Son.
In 1943, he married my mother, the 27-year-old daughter of his friend, the editor of the Troy Record. She’d dropped out of Swarthmore, graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and wrote advertising copy. He had written a Hasty Pudding show, was Albany’s major culture maven, never made much money, and died at seventy-seven of Hodgkin’s disease. He was delighted when Harvard accepted me the year of his 50th reunion and I was still there, at graduate school, when he died. They named the library of the Albany Institute of History and Art after him and ran obituaries and editorials for a week. (McKinneyLibrary.org)
When I was a child, I looked forward to the evenings after he came home from “the plant”. I once thought he worked with vegetables and not at an office. Since my mother said he “made money” there, I assumed they used long strips of copper with a penny die stamp. Every night, he would answer any three questions we had - anything at all. “Where does paint get color?” “From pigments, in a carrier base.” I imagined colored pigs frolicking on the decks of aircraft carriers, safe at home in their naval base. He always had the answers. Every spring the carnival came to town. James E. Strates Shows would arrive and pitch its tents in a huge field at the bottom of the Menands’ Hill. They set up a midway, erected a fun house, the side show, the thrill rides, the coin tosses, cotton candy stands, and rides that towered over our heads, each tethered to a snorting diesel generator with some wild kid at the controls. It was heaven to a ten-year-old with ten dollars to spend.
It was the yogi that I will never forget. With a blowtorch, he heated iron bars red hot and stepped on them; he blowtorched his own moustache and nothing singed. He stood on red-hot swords. The whites of his eyes were yellow. Too much heat, I figured. My mother stayed after the show; she wanted to know how he did it. The yogi stepped forward; we could see he was weary. No, there was no trick; it was the result of a great deal of training. Here, he was just being paid to do it. “Of course,” he said, “It will do me no good, the money. I have used my gifts for financial gain; this should never be done. There is no hope for me.”
I looked into his tired eyes. They were like black marbles: shiny, lifeless, and cold. A sudden chill gripped my mind; this man was telling me a truth. Special gifts are not given or gained to be used for popular entertainment; money made in this way is worse than no money at all. I had met my first Eastern adept, and we communicated just fine. He was working in the sideshow, still faithful to a system which could both empower and undo. I was still in cotton candy land, but I knew that he knew something I dearly wanted to know. Twenty-five years and many lifetimes later it came back to me as I was working on the original manuscript of this book.
Once a prominent drug educator, I found that my interest in the way that molecules could alter perception was leading me deeply into neuroscience and the biochemistry of consciousness. When a small group of frustrated editors, designers and helpers appeared one day, we gave them some space and New Age magazine came together in our offices. Released from the macrobiotic regimens of the East West Journal, they rapidly expanded their scope and I was suddenly meeting and greeting all manner of spiritual traditions on an almost daily basis. My own ancestors included some prominent theologians, and I welcomed learning from roshis and rishis as well as numerous New Age crossovers, observing their differences and commonalities. I once nearly pranked editor Eric Utne with an article about a new group I claimed to be documenting before admitting that “The Way of the Reed” was imaginary, a mix of Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda, and Werner Erhard’s EST seminars logo. At the time, and even now, despite growing interest in altered states of consciousness from religious visions to yoga and meditation, few traditional religious scholars were doing any substantial work in the mind sciences.
At the same time, scientifically trained authors tend to promote only explanations framed within their own areas of expertise, making themselves the gifted interpreters in the tradition of a Roman priest’s ability to find wisdom in eviscerated ducks. Why God Won’t Go Away, for instance, is a radiologist’s interpretation of brain scans as possible evidence of God. Aware of our 1994 classic, or at least the title, author Andrew Newberg twice attempted to affix it to one of his own books to assert his claim. He succeeded in 2018, only by concealing from Columbia University Press that Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century was still in print. Dr. Newberg insists, correctly, that one cannot copyright a book title and we eagerly await his next work, possibly entitled The Origin of Species.
To balance my curiosity, seeking a better grounding in religious belief and practice. I applied to the Harvard Divinity School in 1976 and studied under prominent scholars George MacRae, Harvey Cox, and Richard Reinhold Niebuhr. In 1981, I met the Dalai Lama and founded a small Buddhist institute to allow a scholarly lama to teach in the Boston area. His Holiness has an eager curiosity, and his interest in Western science led him to review parts of this work as it was being prepared. The Institute provided further opportunities to meet and speak with prominent scholars and practitioners from Eastern meditative traditions. I was able compare their methods and theories with typical Western practices, from prayer to ecstatic speech and dance. These observations and experiences from many perspectives revealed striking similarities, just as emerging studies in computer-aided neuroscience were starting to reveal the basic structural connections and capabilities in the physical brain. It was finally making sense.
Our consciousness is always the result of the brain that makes it. There must have been some upgrade that allowed us to ponder the questions that our religions answer, and it seems this occurred as recently as 100,000 years ago. It seemed that we, as a species, gradually acquired the concept of chronological time itself. This alone could generate valid insights into some of the major metaphysical rules underlying the world religions. I was nearly certain now what actually happened in death, and it had completely rearranged my understanding of life. Was this a gift, a reward, or a curse? I wished my father were around to ask, but he had died when I was only twenty-two.
Our consciousness is always the result of the brain that makes it.
After my father died, my mother lived another twenty-six years. She was there to the end as McKinney & Son went bankrupt and was sold for the price of a parking lot. She had taught natural childbirth in the forties, natural foods in the fifties, and campaigned against additives in sixties; always ahead of her time enough to be a amateur savant without the degrees or time to focus on anything long enough to achieve professional respect. Self-taught in medical matters, she had several thousand dollars’ worth of medical textbooks that she filled with underlines, highlights and margin notes.
One article in The Lady’s Home Journal, describing the hormonal and physical effects of unintended pregnancy, sounded a note of caution to single women. Author Helen Gurley Brown was so irritated, as she recounted in When Everything Changed, Gail Collins’ 2009 history of women’s liberation, she decided to write Sex and the Single Girl. Mom never knew she’d been a catalyst for the women’s movement. Her last preoccupation was her eventual stroke, a subject which kept her both stressed and stressful. At seventy-five, she agreed to try some meditative techniques I had learned from the Dalai Lama based on focused mental imagery. It worked, she said, and claimed her Holter Blood Pressure Monitor even recorded it. A year later, she was gone.
Immediately after the stroke, I reviewed the results of her CAT scans and was appalled at the devastation. Fully a third of her right hemisphere was gone for good. The attending neurologist said to expect the worst; no emotional affect and a foggy mind at best. The best thing, he said, would be another stroke. She was still having difficulty opening her eyes, and one side of her body was limp as a rag. She was sometimes speaking in French. By the third day, she was coming back. I bent over her when she seemed lucid. “I checked your scans, Mom. You’ve lost a big chunk in the middle of the right hemisphere, but your prefrontal lobes are fine and the visual cortex is still there.” With her eyes still closed, she whispered “middle cerebral artery.” She was right, of course. Then she asked, “Should I do my vipassana now?” I was floored. I had taught her to recall an image from memory and study it in the mind with the eyes closed. Even with such destruction, the teaching was intact, and so was her logic. I gave her hand a squeeze. “Wonderful, mom. It’s great exercise for the visual cortex. That’s just what you need now.” Facing ahead, her eyes still closed, she said gravely, “What I need now are prayers.”
She had read earlier drafts of this book, and she knew that we had what seemed to be scientific answers for a number of very basic human questions. She had taken the original chapter on death to the dying and had told me of their tears, sometimes of relief when someone saw that the end, when it came, was nearly a guaranteed heaven no matter what. Even those who had led a lifetime of faith were comforted; it provided a little insight that made a mystery less mysterious. My mother was religious, but for her the theories made sense; and she shared them with those whom she knew needed some universal comfort that might appeal to a curious mind. Now, in the anticipation of her own death, my mother was slowly returning to the faith she had always known.
She did not die of another stroke. She died a month later from bacterial and fungal infections that had been diagnosed but not adequately treated. It was as gentle a death as one could imagine as the pathogens slowly turned her brain to Cool Whip one cc at a time. At the very end, the last day I knew she was there, she looked vacantly into my eyes. I looked deeply into hers, and there she was, like a person at the very bottom of a swimming pool. She was looking up, letting me know she was there but, honestly, very far away. It carried another message. “You were right; I’m in another place.” Late that evening, I could feel her soul sighing into the night with the sounds of the late night traffic on the long bridge in the distance. The next day she was flatlined. Her pacemaker had Energizer Bunny batteries, however, and so she stuck around for curtain calls. She was an actress, and she had the whole stage to herself. During that last week, she showed up in four different people’s dreams.
“She said she was satisfied with her life and generally pleased with the way her sons were getting along ,” said Prabha, an Indian neurologist who had become a close friend and confidant during her last four years. “She said that there was one small disappointment, however; she was sorry that your book wasn’t published.” She’d known I was trying to cheer her up but she hadn’t let on, an actress to the end. The next month, the new owner finally gave up trying to stamp out pennies at the steel company he had bought for a dime, and the doors at James McKinney & Son closed forever.
The book has been published now, or you wouldn’t be reading it. Like my father, I wanted to answer a question for all the people; and by the time my mother died, the answers were in hand. At the end, she was comforted in her sincere Christian faith and went, as her friend Judy said, “to the arms of the Savior she knew and loved.” I may well do the same; those are my earliest memories at Sunday school, long before I was interested in girls or metaphysics, and I’m not going to try to modify them. I know where I’m going, and whether it’s called endless lifetimes or the life everlasting, it’s not a bad trip at all. The big question was answered as far as I was concerned, “and the rest”, as Rabbi Hillel once remarked “is only commentary.” In fact, the process of answering one difficult question required answering quite a few more questions along the way.
“Is it possible to come up with a comprehensive philosophy of life and mind and fit the basic theory into six pages?” I had found a scholar who could tell me the truth. It was 1981 and I was still nervous about watching it come together. “Sure,” she replied, “but you might need six hundred to explain just how you got there.” It seems if we can agree to accept the concept of a virtual reality as the basis for our conscious experience of life, we are also witnessing the unexpected appearance of a systematic philosophy based on neuroscience. That begins to explain these ten chapters and why You’re Going to Heaven Whether You Like it Or Not is about much more than the death experience. As to why it took forty years or so, it had to be rewritten and revised a few times. Science tends to advance, and this revision of the originally published version is completely up to date.
The manuscript of the first edition was almost ready when, one day, I noticed the legendary psychologist B.F. Skinner walking through Harvard Square. I knew that he was not well and it might be my last chance to ask him a good question. “Dr. Skinner,” I started, “I was an English major like you who got caught up in neurological detail. You once considered writing as a career. What effect did this have on your later work?” He smiled, and there was a real twinkle in his eye. “I have lived a long and predominantly rewarding life,” he replied, his words flowing in precise intonation, “And I have always taken it for granted that a large measure of my success was due simply to the fact that I could write a great deal better than most of my colleagues.”
I shared a big grin with him. If it was worth the writing - if we were entrusted with that gift - the art meant as much as the science. If I could write, it was important to choose something important to write about; the more challenging, the better. He died a few months later and in honor of the craft of writing, I wrote the whole thing over again just to polish it up. If I’d spent half a lifetime answering one question, there’s no reason not to be elegant about it and put on the best show possible. This book is easy to read, yet it may resonate deeply as it has already with readers all over the world. It took every bit of my skill, and nothing will ever be that hard to do or so rewarding to see completed.
These chapters, individually and as whole, will encourage you think about things you never thought about before in ways you never thought you would think about them. That is my first promise. The second is that if anyone worries that this synthesis attempts to replace faith with science, they needn’t fear. There is nothing new here; all real truths are ancient. We simply change the explanations so that we can believe a little better whenever it’s important to have a reason to believe. In these times, it’s more important than ever.
...if anyone worries that this synthesis attempts to replace faith with science, they needn’t fear.
The night I met the yogi, my mother and I rode the Ferris wheel up into the night, and at the top, it stopped with a shudder to take on a passenger. Rocking quietly in the dark, we looked down at the entire carnival, sparkling and bustling, the games, the tents, the support trucks and supply vans, and behind them the fields, the highway beyond, the Menands hill, and the starry sky reaching over our heads. It was very big and vast; and then, suddenly, the diesel gives a snort, the ride starts forward, and we descend to cotton candy land again. This is not a long book; but for some it will provide a new perspective, a Ferris wheel for the mind. At least that is my hope; and then back to the lights, the action, and all the games of life.
