Life Everlasting

by Bernd Heinrich

  We don’t believe this story of the afterlife anymore, in part because we understand it to be a toxic one that robs the poor to feed the rich. We want everyone to have the same chance at life and happiness. The problem, however, is that with so many religions, by definition every believer of just one is a heretic to many others. Most religions recognize this serious problem, and the traditional remedy is conversion to the “one” religion, if possible, and imposition of that religion, if not.

  For the ancient Egyptians, as for other cultures, ideas about immortality were related to religion. These ideas often included a belief in recycling in the universe as it was configured at the time and that often involved, as is still the case in some areas, large carrion-eating birds. In the Tsawataineuk tribe in Kingdom Village, British Columbia, a chief’s soul returns to the village in the form of a raven. The raven is still a powerful symbol of the afterlife, as the letter from my friend at the beginning of this book attests. After I received that letter, another friend of mine told me he was trying to figure out how to get eaten by ravens after death: “I’m going to get cremated and have my ashes mixed with hamburger and fed to the birds.” In ancient Egyptian beliefs, the mother goddess, Mut, was a griffon vulture, the medium to birth into another world. However, the dung-ball-rolling scarab beetle played an even more important role in beliefs about the afterlife. The dung beetles’ life cycle apparently served as nature’s verification of the afterlife and provided a model for humans of ways to prepare for it.

  As I mentioned, the beetles bury themselves in the earth to rear their offspring. People planting or plowing land may have found their apparently lifeless pupae with the rigid impressions of the legs and other body parts pressed to the sides. They would have seen no internal organs, only the apparently lifeless body encased in a shell that included food for the animal’s future life after metamorphosis. Observers then as now would have seen how one day a live beetle—a shiny new incarnation—emerges from this apparently lifeless pupa, comes up out of the earth, and flies away. They would have noted that this new beetle really “is” identical (in appearance) to the one that burrowed down into the soil a year earlier. The ancient Egyptians thought that this beetle had only one sex, which must have been an offshoot of the belief that a live one was resurrected directly from a dead one.

  A civilization that had the means and power to build temples and pyramids, make fine fabrics, and fill libraries, one in which animals were configured as gods and beliefs were powerful enough to induce the building of pyramids to secure the afterlife, would have examined dung beetles and known some of their habits and life histories. They wanted to know about these animals that were relevant to achieving the afterlife.

  The ancient Egyptians managed to weave an amazing number of facts from nature into their creation story, but they had it all wrong: the proverbial devil is in the details. We now possess new knowledge of dung beetles and of much more, and we are writing a new creation story. To achieve the afterlife we no longer need to wrap the human body to make it look like a scarab beetle pupa, nor provide it with food in a dark, concealed chamber with a long tunnel (such as that dug by the scarab beetles) leading in or out so that the eventually resurrected life could fly and frolic.

  The ancient Egyptians’ beliefs concerning the recycling of human remains to achieve an afterlife are striking, but they are no more imaginative than those of other, earlier people, who were similarly ignorant of what went on beyond the flashy and arresting façade of nature. The first civilization as we know it in terms of cities, monumental structures, and centralized activities arose more than 2,000 years ago in what is now Iran. Before settling in cities, the people in that area were hunters living in villages. They probably worshiped vultures, ravens, eagles, and cranes or at least were impressed by these large birds. Vultures and eagles would have used the animal remains that were regularly available on village refuse heaps. These birds were apparently emblematic; we know their wings were used in ritual dances that might have been celebrations of life and death. Wall decorations at Çatal Hüyük, a Neolithic town in Anatolia, from 4,000 to 5,000 years earlier, depict almost life-sized vultures with short necks and neck ruffs (probably cinereous vultures, Aegypius monachus) feeding on headless human bodies. The anthropologist James Mellaart, who excavated the site, considered this depiction “proof of burial.” Another wall decoration shows two griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus) with human body parts. The dwellings contained human skulls and sometimes jumbles of bones from incomplete skeletons. Did the people have places where bodies were deliberately set out for the vultures? If so, then the birds would have left de-fleshed skulls and some bones, perhaps those interred in the dwellings. Skulls found in Jericho had cowry shells inserted with clay into the eye sockets. Perhaps they were kept as mementos of the departed.

  One of the Çatal Hüyük murals shows a human swinging something around his head. Mellaart thought that the person was trying to chase the vultures away. However, two vulture experts, Ernst Schüz and Claus König, posit that the person is trying to attract vultures. They base their hypothesis on observed customs in Tibet. One of the first Europeans to enter Tibet, the German explorer Ernst Schäfer, reported in 1938 that vultures there had been conditioned to approach when the ragyapas—professional body dissectors—swung a sling; the ragyapas would then distribute the body parts for quick removal by the vultures. When the birds had finished feeding, the ragyapas returned to crush the bone remains until almost nothing was left. This sky burial was a convenient, fast, and inexpensive way to dispose of the dead, and ideas of the afterlife could naturally then be incorporated into rituals and religious customs.

  Vultures, ravens, and eagles soaring high in the sky would eventually be seen as mere specks, which would then disappear from sight. When these birds descended from the heavens in great spirals, with the wind fluttering through their great pinions, and took the bodies of the departed, it could have seemed logical that they had come from and would return to the home of the spirit world, carrying something vital.

  MOST OF US want to remain part of the physical world for as long as we can, and we want another life we can believe in. The strength of our belief in another life depends on what we think we know. Few of us question the nature of the familiar world around us. And yet modern science is revealing our physical world to be more and more incomprehensible and mysterious the more we try to understand it. Most of us are consciously aware of our direct connections to the biological world and how they link us to history and time. Yet as the physicist Stephen W. Hawking explains in A Brief History of Time, ever since Albert Einstein challenged the notion of absolute time in 1905, we have had only a vague notion of what space is. We don’t even really know what time is, yet it affects all of space and hence all matter. From a physicist’s perspective, the universe is “curved” and has no beginning and no end. As a result, asking what came before the Big Bang could be meaningless because, as Hawking remarks, “It’s like asking what lies north of the North Pole.”

  The little that we know brings some of our perceived connections to the physical world into the realm of metaphysics, and current science affirms the notion of mysterious connections. A note by Adrian Cho in the May 4, 2011, issue of Science reports that a $760 million NASA spacecraft mission has confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity, “which states that gravity arises when mass bends space-time.” Get it? I think I do: namely, the universe as we know it is a function of time, but we do not understand time, mass, space, or gravity. But that is what we are made of, what we are a part of. Nature is indeed incomprehensible at that deep level: there is more in our connections to it than meets the eye—and more than may ever be configured by our brain, even with its hundred billion neurons. I try not to be a sucker to our natural tendency to seek pleasure and satisfaction, which causes us to believe almost anything that makes us feel better and then deem it “right.” But I cannot exclude the possibility that there may be other dimensions to the world aside fr
om the familiar ones and that something lives on beyond my physical self. If so, when I pass on, it will be a celebration for some other beginning and not an end. Even if that is not the case, I have lost nothing and gained much.

  Just as space-time connects the cosmos, and the molecules that make up our bodies connect us to past exploding stars, we are connected to the cosmos in the same way we are connected to earth’s biosphere and to each other. Physically we are like the spokes of a wheel to a bicycle, or a carburetor to a car. The metaphor that we are part of the earth ecosystem is not a belief; it is a reality. We are tiny specks in a fabulous system, parts of something grand. We are part of what life has “learned” from its inception on earth and has genetically encoded in DNA that will be passed on until the sun goes out.

  Beyond the most obvious physical-biological connections, we are an amalgam of past lives. This is true for all animals, but it seems especially relevant to us because we can in part consciously direct the trajectory of this inheritance. We know from personal experience, as well as from cognitive science, that we are what we experience and remember; we are a symphony of experiences. Almost every significant turn or change of direction in my life had a mentor behind it—someone who cared and to whom I was bonded and who opened my eyes or instilled spirit.

  During my first year as a runner, when I was a junior at the Good Will School in Maine, I was mediocre at best. But by my senior year I had made a dramatic turnaround. The first meet that year was against the much larger Waterville team, and this time we faced their varsity, not the JV team we had raced against before. I won the race, and we trounced them. I was also first overall in our second race, against Vinalhaven, and we again trounced the competition. In each of the next seven meets I was the first man in. How was this possible? What had happened in the intervening year? I think I know: I was no longer the former Bernd Heinrich. Even my body was not the same; it now held the life spirit of a man named “Lefty” Gould.

  Lefty was the postmaster of the one-room post office in the town of Hinckley. I saw him twice a day when I brought him the school mail in a leather pouch. After he had removed the contents and inserted the incoming mail, I carried the pouch back to school and deposited it at the administration building. To Lefty I was not a bad kid, even though I was a mediocre athlete, had criticized my housemother, splashed red paint on the water tower, earned bad grades, and been booted out once. He was on my side, and he saw that I liked to run, just to be running. He, on the other hand, could barely walk. Whenever I came to the post office, he leaned on the sill of the window through which we exchanged the mail and talked to me as though I was someone who had worth. I think he saw me as an underdog who had gotten a raw deal, as he had, although he would never suggest such a thing. Lefty told me that he had been on his way to becoming the welterweight boxing champion of the world, and I had no doubt that he was telling me the truth. He told me how many pushups he used to do per minute, how many miles he ran every day. But fate intervened; he fought with the army’s Eighty-second Airborne Division in Europe and North Africa and had one leg almost blown off in combat. It was a miracle that enough of it was saved (by a German doctor after he was taken prisoner) that he could, just barely, walk despite all the metal in his body. Sweat would roll off his forehead as he told me of his experiences in the war. I could not believe he was telling it all to me! I started running harder, faster, longer, even if it hurt, to show Lefty what I could do. He would never know, or even suspect, that part of his spirit would live on beyond his death. But it does. His belief in me and his mentoring are an inheritance from him. Every good race I have run, every running record that I have set, traces back to my last year in high school. Through our bonding, Lefty unknowingly set my wings and pointed me in a direction that led me to college and then to the opening up of the world.

  We leave a legacy through our relations with people, mostly our parents and those who become in some way close to us. We are given much but must also receive actively. My father wanted me to carry on his lifelong collection of ichneumon wasps. At the time that seemed like becoming an extension of him, not a real interest in me. Yet much of him is in me. He gave me a masculine, vigorous love of nature, which at this moment is being expressed in my writing this and was a factor in all my previous work. It is the end result of countless excursions into the woods and fields collecting his wasps, listening to his stories, chasing rare birds in far-off, exotic lands, his taking me for a year into the African bush and its jungles. I disappointed him in not becoming an ichneumon wasp taxonomist, but deliberately or not, I took what he did offer.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized the obvious. We are not just the product of our genes. We are also the product of ideas. The shape of my body, the very oxygen-carrying capacity of my mitochondria, the physical circuits in my brain, and the chemicals that move me were in part shaped, if not determined, by others’ ideas and thoughts. Ideas have long-lasting effects on us, as surely as, if not more than earthquakes, droughts, rain, sunshine, and other quirks of nature.

  In springtime I walk on the snow crust formed at night after the daytime sun has thinned it to a fragile wafer; the ravens fly into the tall pines and build their nests of freshly broken-off poplar twigs and line them with deer fur and lay blue-green eggs. After the snow melts away, a riot of flowers—purple and white trilliums, sky blue hepaticas, yellow and blue and white violets, and snow white star flowers—bloom suddenly and disappear just as quickly. Meanwhile, ovenbirds call at dawn, the hermit thrush pipes at dusk, then the woodcock sky-dances over the clearing, and the barred owl hoots its maniacal cries from the deep woods. Summer brings the tiger swallowtails sailing through the woods and the fuzzy bumblebees to the yellow goldenrod in the fields. Come fall the Red Gods call me to the hunt of the rutting white-tails, and I look forward to the tranquility of drifting snowflakes covering all in white and sealing it in for another year, leaving a palette for the tracks of the tiny shrew and the mighty moose. Tiny kinglets with crimson and bright yellow crowns cavort with nuthatches, and brown creepers and chickadees flit among the red spruces, where they shelter from howling winds in blinding blizzards as the winds whip the trees. It’s all in there—the Life—and I experience it and remember it and so become a part of it. You can’t argue with nature. It is the primary context for living and for everything alive.

  IT WAS NOT easy to give a suitable answer to my friend’s letter. I could not receive a human body from a distant state and then lug it into the winter woods and leave it naked for the ravens; they might not show up for weeks. There are laws about proper burial, and such behavior would be illegal, so I could decline his request with a clear conscience. Still, my friend had a point. What better opportunity than death, not to sanctify an end but to celebrate a new beginning? What better time to confirm in ritual a model of the world as we know it, see it, feel it? I had no solution to offer him, and the problem of what to do nagged at me.

  Here is a typical modern commercial burial: it starts with the naked body lying on a steel table, where the embalmer drains the blood and injects the body with a very toxic chemical—formaldehyde—that prevents decay. It is then placed in a metal casket and sealed so that no formaldehyde can leak out, as though it were hazardous waste at a landfill. Then “it” is added to millions of others, eating up more space every year—space that is kept largely free of flowering plants but instead is a monoculture of cropped grass, sometimes with cut flowers brought in that have been grown in a greenhouse. In the United States alone, the burials in our 22,500 active cemeteries annually eat up 30 million board feet of hardwood lumber, more than 100,000 tons of steel, 1,600 tons of reinforced concrete, and nearly 1 million gallons of embalming fluid.

  Cremation was once an excellent sendoff. We can imagine it as a dramatic ceremony conducted at night at the edge of or in the forest, where plenty of wood was readily available. The ashes of the deceased were collected in an urn and then buried. Modern cremation, though, is not a ceremony,
nor does it respect our home, the biosphere. It is more like a disposal. Vaporizing the body by fire creates emissions of toxic chemicals too numerous to list; modern industrial crematoria account for 0.2 percent of the global emissions of dioxins and furans, making it the second-largest source of airborne mercury in Europe. The amount of fossil fuel required to cremate the North American crop of bodies each year has been estimated to equal what an automobile would use in more than eighty round trips to the moon. Cremation is therefore a hugely expensive means of disposal. “Natural” or “green” burials, which are more personal, natural, and inexpensive, are increasingly recognized and practiced. (Anyone interested in green burial can find the most current information on the Internet.)

  We deny that we are animals and part of the wheel of life, part of the food chain. We deny that we are part of the feast and seek to remove ourselves from it, even though we kill and consume animals by the billions and permanently remove the life resources for many more. But not one animal is allowed to consume us, even after we are dead. Not even the worms. We need a new creation story that connects us to nature and to others, one that can give us strength—that can make us real rather than rich. Nature, religions, and science coincide on the real: kinship with each other and with the mountains and prairies, oceans and forests. I am talking about beliefs built on facts that we all can agree to and that transcend individual deaths.