As a kid, I was never taught there was an afterlife, so I didn’t believe there was one. Until I was 30.

By the time I was old enough to know that some people didn’t believe what I believed — which was that when you die, you really are dead — the common image of the afterlife sounded ridiculous to me. The notion that death merely transports you to a better place, where you can once again chat with grandma and play fetch with all of your dead pets, sounded exactly as plausible as the rumor that my Christmas gifts were manufactured at the North pole.

When I was thirty or so, I discovered a slightly more sophisticated case for an afterlife. It’s a fairly common one in Spritual-But-Not-Religious circles: consciousness seems to be an intrinsic property of the universe, not just of the human brain, so there’s no reason to think your experience ends when the brain does.

In meditation groups, they often describe a human life as a drop of consciousness, splashing up from an infinite ocean for a brief moment of 70 or 80 years, before dropping back into its source. It sounded good enough to me. Suffice it to say, after a bit of pondering I ended up cashing out the “Dead means dead” belief for “Consciousness probably survives death.”

Sometimes you’re told something you don’t want to hear, but it makes too much sense to deny, and eventually you have to let go of a belief you cherished. This happened a couple of years ago, when I was watching a panel debate about the afterlife.

A neuroscientist on the panel, Sam Harris, whom I would later come to know as one of the more reasonable voices on the topic of belief, said something that took the air right out of my new afterlife belief.

He explained that science isn’t committed to the idea that there’s no afterlife; if we found good reasons to believe it existed, then science would support those findings. But we do have good reasons to believe that consciousness ends when the brain does. We know that if you damage certain parts of the brain, you damage certain parts of the mind. You can damage the part that recognizes faces, the part that understands language, the part that remembers your childhood, or any other aspect of your consciousness. By claiming that it makes sense to believe in the afterlife, we’re claiming that it makes sense to believe that if you were to damage all of the brain so that it ceases to function, all of these faculties would suddenly come back, and you’d be able to recognize your dead relatives and speak to them in English.

So while we can’t yet be certain that consciousness doesn’t survive death, it seems extremely unlikely that this consciousness would resemble anything like life as we know it, or the afterlife as we imagine it. If the light somehow stays on, our identities are almost certainly obliterated, and nobody’s playing Frisbee with their late family dog. And there’s still no good reason to suspect that the light stays on at all.  Read More

Something happens inside many of us when we’re seated on a plane and we see someone get on carrying a crying baby.

My normal reaction used to be a combination of low-level worry and indignation. Flying is uncomfortable enough, and adding a crying baby makes it worse. So I would find myself hoping that the baby and its parent would sit far away.

Intellectually, I know this reaction is ridiculous and self-absorbed. Babies need to travel sometimes. Babies need to cry sometimes. I was a crying baby at some point. Hoping that a boarding baby won’t sit near me is, essentially, hoping that other people would be annoyed instead of me. What a gentleman I am.

While I knew these were unfair thoughts and I didn’t act on them, I still didn’t know what to do with them. I honestly didn’t want a crying baby near me, and I ached with hope that there wouldn’t be one.

At some point, in the years between my flight to New Zealand and my flight to Ecuador, my reaction to other people’s airplane babies changed. Upon seeing a boarding infant, I still had the initial thought of, “Oh great, a BABY! That’s what we need on this airplane!” But that useless and selfish thought began to trigger a more useful (and more defensible) thought: May this baby have an easy and peaceful experience on this flight.

This is just a simple habit of cultivating compassion. After all, if the baby is crying, presumably it’s not having a particularly comfortable flight either. This is not only a more reasonable and diplomatic reaction, but on a totally selfish level it’s actually a better one, because it transforms what would have been an experience of annoyance and discomfort into one of peace and solidarity.

I experienced a softening of my entire flying experience (as well as virtually every other less-than-pleasant category of experience) between 2009 and 2014, and I know I owe it to the practices of meditation and mindfulness I learned during that time.

Something alarming happened during my most recent flight, a few weeks ago. I realized I had lost a step in my ability to stay peaceful and nonreactive. This time there was no baby. However, another common test of compassion was seated near me: a man who would not stop clearing his throat and coughing.  Read More

The inability to be heard is a very disorienting and disempowered state. You can learn that first-hand, as I did, if you accidentally sign up for a silent meditation retreat.

I didn’t know until I arrived on a remote, West coast island, that the course I had signed up for was essentially dawn-to-night Buddhist meditation, for almost a week. We were expected to remain silent the entire time, except when asking questions during the daily dharma talk. For six days we sat, walked, and ate in silence, even avoiding engaging others in eye contact.

The effect is profound. In a silent community, you suddenly find yourself without luxuries you didn’t know you had: the ability to ask questions, to apologize, to criticize, to consult with others, to make your viewpoint known, to suggest a better way to do something — and for others to do these things with you.

In retreats like these, there are practical reasons for this silence. It really aids the meditation, which is what you’re there to do. Discussion can always be had later. But at the same time it made me acutely aware of how vulnerable and isolated we become when we aren’t allowed to talk to each other.

That insight came flooding back to me one afternoon last week, as I listened to an interview between podcaster Dan Carlin, and historian Gwynne Dyer.

During the interview, Carlin asks Dyer whether human “progress” simply amounts to the world becoming more Western, or if we only presume that Western values are more “advanced” because they happen to be ours.

This is a huge, ugly political question and I know it doesn’t interest all of you. But huge questions require huge answers, and part of Dyer’s 20-minute response is fascinating. In a flash it threw my whole role as a writer and a human being into sharp perspective, and could probably do the same for your own too.  Read More