On Saturday, August 23, I stumbled on a program on Radio Lab that caught my attention. I rarely listen to the radio on Saturday afternoon, but here was an interview of an astrophysicist, her name, Faith Charity. Her career began as a nurse but she decided to quit nursing and go back to college and get into astrophysics. In the course of all this, she was happily married and gave birth to a boy.
She soon found herself at work in the study of the evolution of galaxies—a fascinating topic. To do this kind of research the telescope had to be focused on dark areas of the sky. It would take days before anything would register via the telescope, and there was no telling how long it would take. But after about ten days of monitoring the dark portion of sky they were studying a host of forms that were now visible. The telescope apparently revealed the presence of thousands of galaxies in that one dark area of the sky! It was a promising set up to research the evolution of galaxies. It speaks to the intelligence and imagination of our species that humans can see so far and think so deeply as to understand the evolution of unimaginably vast and distant galaxies. It turns out that galaxies die gaseous deaths but can be resuscitated and jolted back into flourishing forms of existence.
But now to the analogy of my post title. Apart from the metaphorical turn I’m about to press on you, I have a philosophical—and a scientific—concern. The analogy of gazing into a portion of cosmic darkness, which eventually leads to seeing all those surprising galaxies, is gazing into our selves, and seeing no more than our bodies and the sensory world, behind which, under the right circumstances, appear all kinds psychospiritual agents and entities. We humans are enmeshed in multiple galaxies of physical and mental reality. We inhabit an amazing universe.
But now a sad point from the Radio Lab interview. It was totally unexpected, but Charity was asked to recount what happened when she went with her husband Jason and little boy Woody on vacation at a beach in Oregon. They were unaware of the danger of giant waves that beset that region of the coast. The family of three were overcome and swept away by a giant wave, killing Jason and Woody, leaving Charity who survived crushed by her loss. Much of the remaining podcast covered Charity’s struggle to restore her ability to live. She did so by means of another person who had suffered a similar devastating loss.
The analogy cited above came back to me, this time with a more emphatic slant. Just as the darkness of the night sky conceals a wealth of hidden galaxies, I now reflected on the apparent darkness that we associate with the death of our bodies. Here again science seems rather dramatically to have disclosed an unexpected trove of psychical realities. For example, the near-death experience (NDE). Thanks to advances in medical science and technology, people all over the planet are being resuscitated from cardiac arrest and other forms of near-death. People have experiences of extraordinary vividness and power that radically transform their personalities. The fact that emerges is the absolute conviction of life after death, and of love supreme as the key motif of the next world. All I could do, hearing of Charity’s brutal encounter with fate, is hope that what the NDEs show is for real. In that case, Woody and Jason are not gone forever; they’re just waiting for Charity.
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