by Sudhir Kakar
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________‘Is santhara against the law?’ In: the Times of India, 20 March 2010, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Is-santhara-against-the-law/articleshow/5704783.cms#ixzz1E6ISmDZb
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Notes
‘Survival of Bodily Death’, Emily Williams Kelly and Edward F. Kelly
1 Two classic works published during the SPR’s first two decades were Gurney, Myers and Podmore (1886), and Myers (1903), both consisting of two large volumes. During the same two decades, in addition to many other books published by members of the SPR, the SPR itself published twenty-two large volumes of a professional Proceedings and eleven volumes of a Journal.
2 The evidence for ESP, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and the like—collectively called ‘psi’—can be considered indirect evidence for survival, demonstrating as it does human capacities that go beyond the normal physical or space-time constraints, although few experimental parapsychologists talk about the phenomena in this way.
3 For an overview of the research and publications of DOPS, see http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops.
4 This would be better labelled ‘scientistic’ fundamentalism, that is, the near-religious faith in physicalism, the currently orthodox world view of many mainstream scientists, as opposed to science, which is a method, not a philosophical doctrine.
5 Under the auspices of this group, we have published one book (Kelly et al., 2007) surveying a large amount of empirical evidence demonstrating that the current scientific orthodoxy of physicalism is not only incomplete, but wrong. We are now working on a second book in which we will offer some alternative theoretical perspectives.
6 Psychical researchers were, in fact, among the first psychologists and social scientists to develop comprehensive and strict standards for the collection of eyewitness testimony, including first-hand testimony and corroboration (Gurney et al., 1886, Chapter 4).
‘Plato’s Phaedo and the Near-Death Experience: Survival Research and Self-Transformation’, Michael Grosso
1 McGinn, C. (23 June 2011). ‘The Tell-Tale Brain: An Exchange’, The New York Review of Books, p. 68.
2 See Braude, S. (2003). Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life after Death, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
3 Kelly, Edward and Emily. (2007). Irreducible Mind, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
4 Thurston, H. (1952). The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, Chicago: Henry Regnery.
5 Nobody knows for sure how much of the thought in the Phaedo is from Socrates and how much from Plato.
6 Patterson, R.L. (1965). Plato on Immortality, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 18.
7 Kelly, Edward and Emily, ibid., pp. 415-21.
8 Van Lommel, P. (2010). Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, New York: HarperOne, p. 194.
9 Greyson has been emphasizing this surprising point in many papers, but the material and the points are very clearly covered in his chapter on NDE in Irreducible Mind cited above. See pp. 367–422.
10 Van Lommel, P., ibid., p. 262.
11 This term is philosophically suspect; surely we can think of it functionally, and hold to our point.
12 Lang, A. (1898). The Making of Religion, London: Longmans Green, pp. 72, 73, 75.
13 Kroll, J. and Bachrach, B. (2005). The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics, New York: Routledge.
14 See Grosso, M. (In progress). Wings of Ecstasy.
15 See the recent biography of Myers: Hamilton, H. (2009). Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death, Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic.
16 See Austin, J.H. (1999). Zen and the Brain, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; see also Foreman, R.K.C. (1990). The Problem of Pure Consciousness, New York: Oxford University Press. Both authors are also serious practitioners.
17 Quoted in Atmanspacher and Primas, p. 15. ‘Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(3), 5–50 (2006).
18 Grosso, M. (1997). ‘Inspiration, Mediumship, Surrealism: The Concept of Creative Dissociation’, pp. 181-97. In Krippner, S. and Powers, S.M. Broken Images, Broken Selves, Washington, DC: Brunner/Mazel, Inc.
19 Plato. (1966). Phaedo, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 376.
20 Phaedo, ibid., p. 377.
21 Phaedo, p. 381.
22 See Hiriyanna, M. (1993). Outlines of Indian Philosophy, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, pp. 267-97.
23 Marshall, P. (2005). Mystical Encounters with the Natural World, London: Oxford University Press.
24 Huxley, A. (1956). Heaven and Hell, London: Chatto & Windus.
25 Wasson, G., Ruck, C., and Hofmann, A. (1978). The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
26 Becker, E. (1973). The Denia
l of Death, New York: The Free Press.
‘“Sorrow More Beautiful than Beauty’s Self”: John Keats and the Music of Mortality’, Ronald A. Sharp
1 See the account in Severn’s letter to John Taylor, in The Keats Circle, 1. 224.
2 The first two are from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (52, 55), and the third from ‘Why Did I Laugh Tonight’(14).
‘Death and Afterdeath in the Writings of Rabindranath Tagore’, Sudhir Kakar
1 K. Kriplani. (1980). Rabindranath Tagore—A Biography, Santiniketan: Visvabharati, 2nd ed., p. 414.
2 R. Tagore. (1994). Selected Poems, Tr. W. Radice, Delhi: Penguin Books, pp. 25-26.
3 On 26 September he writes to Leonard Elmhurst, ‘Returning from this my first and latest voyage to the limitless dark I seem to realize in a brighter light a clearer vision of all the precious gifts of life that (have) come to my share’; on 9 October, to Ernest Rhys, ‘I am slowly recovering from (an) illness which had nearly handed me over to your classical ferryman’; to Leena Sarabhai on 7 December, ‘Though I am myself nearing the other shore of life and one by one cutting off all my moorings with the turbulent waters of its joys and sorrows …’ See R. Tagore. (2003). Prantik, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, p. 12.
4 R. Tagore. (2008). My Reminiscences, Delhi: Rupa, pp. 246-47.
5 See in this book, R. Sharp. (2014). ‘”Sorrow More Beautiful than Beauty’s Self”: John Keats and the Music of Mortality’, in S. Kakar, ed. Death and Dying, New Delhi: Penguin India.
6 R. Tagore. (1916). ‘Fruit Gathering’ in The Collected Works of Rabindranath Tagore, ebook, Mobile References, loc. 2868.
7 R. Tagore. (1921). ‘The Fugitive’ in Collected Works, loc. 4295.
8 Prantik, p. 15.
9 Ibid., p. 27.
10 Ibid., p. 39. Kalindi is the daughter of the god of death.
11 On psychological versus historical modernity, see my ‘Clinical work and Cultural Imagination’. (1997). Culture and Psyche, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 46-59.
12 R. Wollheim. (1984). The Thread of Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
13 R. Tagore. (1913). ‘The problem of self’ in Sadhana: The Realization of Life, London, loc. 14306.
14 Prantik, p. 17. Vindhyagiri is the mountain range separating north from south India.
15 Ibid., p. 53.
16 Ibid., p. 59.
17 R. Tagore. (2011). Gitanjali, tr. W. Radice, Delhi: Penguin, 2011, p. 93.
18 Prantik, p. 15.
19 Ibid., p. 41.
20 Ibid., p. 53.
21 R. Tagore. (1916). Stray Birds, New York: Macmillan, p. 242.
22 Ibid., p. 21.
23 Gitanjali, p. 117.
24 St John of the Cross, Poems, tr. R. Campbell, Baltimore: Penguin, 1960.
25 A. Philips. (1999). Darwin’s Worms, London: Faber.
26 S. Freud. (1920). ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
27 ‘The Fugitive’, Collected Works, loc. 3101.
28 Stray Birds, no. 268.
29 ‘The problem of evil’ in Sadhana, loc. 14038.
30 See R. Schaeffer. (1970). ‘The psychoanalytic vision of reality’ in International J. Psychoanalysis, 51, pp. 279–97.
31 See my The Inner World. (1978). Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 32-33.
32 Tagore, ‘The Fugitive’, Collected Works, loc. 3346.
‘Goodbye and Good Mourning’, Patrick J. Mahony
1 Yet the reports by kataphatic mystics about death and nothingness contain pitfalls for the impatient investigator. Far from simple, nothingness has an intriguing history of its own. In the English Renaissance, for example, thing was a colloquial term for penis and nothing stood for the vagina, a gender bias that Shakespeare often punfully exploited. When so many of my psychoanalytic patients throughout the years have complained that they felt and thought nothing, my long-standing interest in the matter would suddenly pique. I have been wont to ask such questions as: How dark or blank is the nothingness? How light or heavy is it? Are you near the periphery or the centre of the nothingness? Or it is more so in your body, and if so, in what part? When you were just beginning to talk, did you feel the hole in your mouth as empty, or filling up with words, or in the process of verbally emptying? How does today’s nothingness differ from the one you had last week?
The investigator errs in equating the sometimes verbally similar reports of nothingness by psychoanalytic patients and mystics. Kataphatic descriptions have indeed a complexity of their own. To wit, nothing is paradoxically interchanged with all. Neti, neti (‘not this, not this’), the Sanskrit expression of the Brahmins in the Upanishads, underlines the driven-ness and elusiveness that keynotes their quest of ultimate mystery. Were I to meet with a kataphatic mystic, I would be keen to make cognitive and affective inquiries concerning both the evolution of his understanding about nothingness as well as his changing experience of it.
2 Nessun maggior dolore/ Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/ Nella miseria (Inferno, canto 5, lines 121-23).
3 Kijak and Pelento (1986) point out that Sophocles’s Antigone is a classic representative of the duress in such situations. Analysing the grammar and ‘lexicality’ of Sophocles’s text in Greek (Mahony, 2005, 2009), I have expounded further the multi-sidedness of Antigone’s mourning; I have done the same linguistic analysis of Oedipus’s plight (Mahony, 2010, 2011).
4 Freud’s anxiety contrasts startlingly with the positive attitude of the prolific nonagenarian Jean Guitton (1967, p. 79), who described his life in this fashion: ‘I have not gotten old but I have lived several successive youthfulnesses … I have now arrived at the last phase of youth.’ Yet not hesitating to abandon the place of honour for self-vitalization, Guitton (1962) memorably invoked his lifetime hero, Charles de Foucauld, as ‘a man that does not cease being born’.
5 The literal impact of Freud’s German term Frauenherrschaft (Gesammelte Werke, 14: 372) or ‘rule by women’ is diluted by Strachey’s rendition ‘petticoat government’ (S.E., 21: 49).
6 Freud postulated the death drive (or Thanatos) and the erotic drive or Eros) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).Yet, whereas the term Eros is often repeated, the term Thanatos is never mentioned as such. That curious omission relates to the following: Freud’s daughter Anna never liked her name, but he tried to appease her by pointing out that her name is a palindrome; her very name is inscribed in the very word Thanatos. The signifier Thanatos is tabooed, absent in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but since absence itself, as Freud tells us in other texts, represents death, her name is textually in Freud’s essay. More to the point (Mahony, 1992, p. 311): ‘Nowhere else in his corpus is Freud’s prose so reflexively concerned with what was just said and is about to be said. In this manner, the progressive form of the text in its many anticipations and retrogressions is imitative of the textual content, the Janus-faced drives that Freud defines as the forward thrust of Eros and the retrogressive course of Thanatos; and all of this in turn mimetically relates the absent nodal point, the palindromic Anna. Thus, we are greeted with a quasi-phobic and counter-phobic gesture of extraordinary textual economy: Anna, a signifier asserting meaning through its absence, is yet omnipresent as a structural principle within the very textual exposition of Thanatos.’
I should further introduce this dazzling textual complication. In his text, Freud disregarded an orthographical differentiation legislated in Austria in 1904, i.e.,
wider should be used only to mean ‘against’ and not ‘again’, the latter being henceforth differentiated orthographically from wieder, a homonym. Yet, my photocopy of Freud’s holograph shows that he exclusively used wider. Thus, he condensed in the one signifier the polarized meanings of ‘again’ and ‘against’, which intensifies the overall palindromic mimesis distinguishing his textuality.
7 The explicit or implicit subject of death stimulated Freud at various psychic levels, resulting in a spectacular complexity of his textuality. Hence, much like Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the essay ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ sports a sui generis verbal pyrotechnics. As the essay develops, the ‘and’ in its title takes on meanings such as ‘in addition to,’ ‘is similar or equal to’ and even assumes the disjunctive force of ‘or’. Besides being a thesis of Freud’s essay, interminability characterizes its extensive internal verbal play. To quote a summary passage from my lengthy analysis (Mahony, 1989, pp. 80ff) : ‘The unending dialectic of Freud’s polysemous title interplays with a lengthy series of conjunctive/ disjunctive pairs recurring throughout the essay. It is this unloosed syntax and verbal interaction rather than a grand architectonic design that distinguishes Freud’s essay. The work contains the continually shifting perspectives of a conceptual mobile.’
8 At a later turning point in his analysis, he revealed that, though traumatized by the drowning of his beloved sister, he did not cry during the unsuccessful attempts by others to revive her. He also added that he felt abandoned by his dead sister and that subsequently he avoided weeping for her. To my interpretation that perhaps he also identified with her by keeping the water inside, he immediately burst out crying and often did so thereafter. Further insight into his defensive motivation occurred upon his recognition that his not weeping was also a refusal to identity with his sister in that for him, only women displayed their emotions.
‘Celebration of Death: A Jain Tradition of Liberating the Soul by Fasting Oneself to Death (Santhara)’, Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar