In the last year of my late wife Jan’s life at Pleasant Manor, we often talked about her father, Bob, and Aunt Bahts, both long dead but who were among her favourite, most cherished remaining memories, the very mention of whose names lit up her face and but a short step to “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see them again?” followed by another cheerful grin, and affirmative nod.
And, in a flash, we were in the world of the afterlife.
Jan and I were comfortable with the whole notion of an afterlife — a place where we could renew relationships with familiar, much loved family and friends. In those moments, for us, the afterlife was one of those “of courses” in life — “Why wouldn’t it be so?”
We didn’t waste time speculating, surveying the evidence pro and con: Put simply, it was our shared hope that we would be together beyond the grave in some meaningful fashion — whatever and whenever happened to each of us in this life.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, other mainline religions and a wide variety of aboriginal traditions embody a belief in an afterlife and for some, reunion with their creator in the afterlife. For some traditions, there’s also strong sense of continuity with and reverence for their ancestors.
Much has been written about near-death experiences, commonly described as a luminous, bright light accompanied by a deep sense of peace, interpreted by some as foretaste of heaven, and feelings so powerful and comforting that some so affected, were reluctant to return to life.
Related to beliefs in the afterlife are experiences of living encounters with God. For example, the Abrahamic religions include vivid life-changing encounters with God in the Hebrew Bible of, for example, Jacob, who wrestles with God, and descriptions of prophets such as Ezekiel, David and Jeramiah and in the Christian tradition, Jesus’ encounter with the Devil, and in the Quran, the prophet Mohammed who communicated with Allah directly or through the angel Gabriel — all experiences that tested, molded and shaped them for their life’s vocations.
Throughout history there are many accounts of similar sometimes traumatic life-changing encounters with God in the Christian tradition, such as Thomas Aquinas’ revelation near the end of his life, or Thomas Traherne, who one evening alone in a field, desolate and despairing, was suddenly transformed by an implosion of light — an encounter with God — that changed the completely changed the trajectory of his life.
The foregoing and other experiences of the supernatural in life and the belief in an afterlife are almost universals among a wide range of religions and beg two questions. When did these near-universal understandings and experiences begin in human evolution and what explains them?
The question of when is a tricky because there were no written records until 5,000 years ago, leaving a huge gap between the emergence of modern humans roughly 200,000 years ago and written records.
But it’s fair to suggest that a sense for a spirit world in this life and the afterlife would have required nuanced symbolic oral language, vivid imagination and curiosity, a knack for knitting experiences into stories and the requisite talents needed to translate understandings into images and probably music.
The cave art created by modern humans in Europe and Indonesia suggests that modern humans reached the threshold for a rich spiritual life as early as 50,000 years ago in Western Europe and ten-thousand years earlier in Indonesia and even earlier, though less well-developed, for neanderthals in Europe.
Answering the second question — why did rich spiritual lives develop — is, perhaps, easier. Life was high-risk, dangerous and short for most of human history and given our well-developed search for meaning in our lives, it’s not hard to understand why our ancient ancestors might have created stories to explain and cope with the natural world that surrounded them.
Those stories, triumphs and tragedies would have been passed on from generation to generation linking the wisdom of generations past with the present and shared between groups.
Civilization as we understand it required nomadic peoples to settle down and eventually domesticate animals and plants — the beginning of settlements that would eventually lead to city states, nations and records. Through it all to the present, humans were and remain story-tellers and that requires good memories and lots of imagination.
What about the sense for the afterlife? Suggestive evidence are burial sites in which the dead were prepared and buried in a respectful manner as early as 800,000 years ago — long before diverging evolutionary lines led to neanderthals, denisovans and modern humans.
It’s well to remember that for a long time, there probably weren’t more than a few hundred thousand humans — total — and what few they were, lived in small, often widely scattered groups, leaving few traces of how they lived and how they might have viewed life.
Respectful burial suggests a belief — perhaps a hope — that the body or spirit of the dead might live on in some fashion. My imagination, of course, but not so different than the hope that some of us have that beyond the grave, connections with those we loved and treasured in this life, will be renewed in the next.
Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.
