some of my early poems were ekphrastic

If I, like Raymond Moody, had learned to my own satisfaction that the soul is real and life is eternal, would I really rush to convene an association of “interested researchers”? I didn’t think so. I’d take up skydiving or scripture. I would not submit my divine revelation for peer review. After all, religious experience has never drawn its power from rational discourse but from the fact that rational discourse has always felt insufficient to explain it. The very notion of “proof of Heaven” is inimical to faith, which depends on the absence of certainty, on a leap into the unknown. Even if you could reconcile epiphanic experience with science, it wasn’t clear to me why you needed to.

I don’t recognize the Mayses in Wolfe’s analysis of the 1970s. They might have been New Agers, but they certainly weren’t narcissists; Suzanne spent years playing therapeutic music for people in palliative care[*]. I did, however, recognize a familiar brand of cynicism. Permeating Wolfe’s assessment of the Me Decade is a contempt for utopian thinking of any kind. He makes no distinction between left utopianism and old-fashioned holy rolling—both, in his mind, are expressions of the same self-obsessed irrationalism. In Wolfe’s analysis, class consciousness had become a joke by the 1970s; the New Left always was one. The utopian politics of the previous decade—of the previous century—had just been the comedic setup for the punchline of the New Age. It’s not an uncommon view. From the standpoint of secular liberalism, utopian beliefs—whether in a worker’s paradise or the Kingdom of God—all flow from the same cracked pot. Religion, despite the supposed Great Awakening of the 1970s, has been in steady decline for sixty years. Marxism strikes many Americans as, at best, an embarrassing anachronism, not much different from believing in spirit mediums or psychics. And yet wages are more or less the same as they were in 1978; income inequality is on the rise; young generations enjoy far worse financial prospects than their parents; the list goes on. Most Americans have discarded the idea of paradise, and yet we’ve come no closer to achieving it here on Earth.

The IANDS may exist to give scientific legitimacy to the claims of near-death experiencers, but I suspect most of its members would believe in Heaven even if it didn’t. Their belief isn’t predicated on scientific research but on the essential strangeness of life and death; I thought again of Chris Kito in his little blue hospital socks, almost killed by a peanut and flooded with love. To my mind, NDEs aren’t proof of Heaven, but they do prove that nearness to death changes you, rearranges your sense of the possible. And so it does. I stopped believing in God in my furtive way after my dad died—some switch was flipped, and that high clear tone, a frequency I could once hear, went dead. God was there and then he wasn’t; my dad was alive and then he wasn’t. And yet the world seems vaster and stranger than I had fully accounted for. Even now, I sometimes let myself imagine running into my dad at the grocery store—I turn the corner and spot him in the dairy aisle, wearing sweatpants with suspenders and trundling along with his shopping cart. Just plainly there, unremarkably alive. To see him resurrected in an Acme would confound my sense of reality, but I’m not sure it would be any more confounding than his death. On any scale, death feels arbitrary and inexplicable. It shouldn’t happen, so when it does, you get to thinking that anything might.

Maybe it’s true, as the NDEers claim, that physical death unites us in the next life. It’s certainly true that it unites us in this one, though largely against our will. At the conference, I was perplexed by Alexander’s dazzled insistence that “we are all deeply connected” in the glittering web of the universe. Strip away the woo-woo embellishments, and you have a basic account of life on Earth. We are strange animals on a shared planet, tethered to each other by our social and biological dependence, by the complex networks that govern our lives and deaths. Only in a society deformed by individualism could this fact be repackaged as a mystical insight.