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By Root 1026 0

writing this paragraph I met a Harvard Medical School professor who had discovered an amazing fact. There is a substance that causes cancer cells to activate new blood vessels so that they can get food. Medical research has focused on finding out how to block this unknown substance so that malignant growths can be deprived of nutrients and thus killed. The professor discovered that the exact opposite substance causes toxemia in pregnant women, a potentially fatal disorder in which the blood vessels are “unhappy” that they are undergoing normal programmed cell death. “You realize what this means?” he said with deep awe. “The body can trigger chemicals in a balancing act between life and death, and yet science has totally ignored who is doing the balancing. Doesn’t the whole secret of health lie in that part of ourselves, not in the chemicals being used?” The fact that consciousness could be the missing ingredient, the X factor behind the scenes, came to him as a revelation.

The mystics have preempted science here because one reads in many mystical traditions that every person dies at exactly the right time and knows in advance when that time is. But I would like to examine more deeply the concept of dying every day. To die every day is a choice everyone overlooks. I want to see myself as the same person from day to day in order to preserve my sense of identity. I want to see myself as inhabiting the same body every day because it is disturbing to think that my body is constantly deserting me.

Yet it must, if I am not to be a living mummy. Following the complex timetable of apoptosis, I am given a new body via the mechanism of death. This process happens subtly enough that it passes without notice. No one sees a two-year-old turning in her body for a new one at age three. Every day she has the same body, and yet she doesn’t. Only the constant process of renewal—a gift of death—enables her to keep pace with each stage of development. The wonder is that one feels like the same person in the midst of such endless shape-shifting.

Unlike with cell death, I can observe my ideas being born and dying. To support the passage from childish thought to adult thought, the mind has to die every day. My cherished ideas die and never reappear; my most intense experiences are consumed by their own passions; my answer to the question “Who am I?” totally changes from age two to three, three to four, and so on throughout life.

We understand death when we drop the illusion that life must be continuous. All of nature obeys one rhythm—the universe is dying at the speed of light yet it still manages along the way to create this planet and the life forms inhabiting it. Our bodies are dying at many different speeds at once, beginning with the photon, ascending through chemical dissolution, cell death, tissue regeneration, and finally the death of the whole organism. What are we so afraid of?

Apoptosis rescues us from fear, I think. The death of a single cell makes no difference to the body. What counts is not the act but the plan—an overarching design that brings the balance of positive and negative signals that every cell responds to. The plan is beyond time because it dates to the very construction of time. The plan is beyond space because it is everywhere in the body and yet nowhere—every cell as it dies takes the plan with it, and yet the plan survives.

In the one reality, you don’t settle an argument by picking sides—both sides of any argument are equally true. So I have no trouble conceding that what happens after death is invisible to the eye and cannot be proved as a material event. I concede without question that we normally don’t remember our past lives and can live very well without that knowledge. Still, I don’t understand how anyone can remain a materialist after seeing apoptosis at work. The case against life after death looks strong only if you ignore everything discovered about cells, photons, molecules, thoughts, and the whole body. Every level of existence is born and dies on its own timetable, from less than a millionth of