Boo
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday Bizarro comic above is mine, as are the comments below. The past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics that follow were written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.
And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.
Greetings, Jazz Pickles. How was your week? Was it scary?
We’re in a period of enormous and rapid change, and that puts most of us on high alert. Even if you’re not stumbling around on the verge of panic, at the very least, it’s challenging to remain calm and hopeful when the inmates have taken over the asylum.
A couple of books I’ve read recently have kept me from jumping out of my plane without a parachute. They are books written by scientists about the phenomenon called “near-death experiences,” or NDEs.
I’d heard about these but never looked into them until now. It’s a tremendously compelling topic, and though it dives deep into what knee-jerk skeptics might call “woo-woo” territory, it isn’t nonsense, nor is it easily dismissed. (I was a knee-jerk skeptic for decades, so I know what they’re/you’re thinking.)
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The first book was Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife by Eban Alexander. He’s a highly regarded neurosurgeon who contracted an extremely rare form of spinal meningitis a few years ago and fell into a coma for seven days. The mortality rate for a person in that situation with the biological stats he had is around 97%. For the three percent who survive, there is virtually no chance their brain will recover anything close to normal function. The word often used for such mental states is “vegetative.”
Of course, the point of the book is that, against all odds, he did survive and fully recovered his full mental abilities. Stranger still, during the seven days his neocortex was completely offline, he experienced tremendous things that changed his mindset forever.
Having thoughts or experiences while clinically brain dead has always been considered medically impossible, and, as a neurosurgeon, he explains why. He also explains how theories about how some unknown function of the brain may be causing the experiences he had while “brain dead” cannot be accurate because the specific part of the brain needed to experience stories, visuals, language, and most of the things that make us human and then remember them was non-functioning. It would be like witnessing a person who’s been dead for a week getting up and dancing Swan Lake, then suggesting an unknown quirk of the nervous system was responsible. Biologically speaking, it’s a bridge too far.
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That book was so enthralling that I began a second book, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson, M.D.
This guy is a very successful and highly-credited psychiatrist who has not experienced an NDE but began studying them 45 years ago after hearing similar stories from patients who’d died and been resuscitated.
His research revealed that NDEs aren’t a new phenomenon; many such stories have been recorded since ancient times. And, now that medical science has become much better at resuscitating people after clinical death, it happens surprisingly regularly. There are currently millions of people the world over who’ve recounted similar stories of continued consciousness after their brain was “dead.”
Though the individual stories vary, many commonalities cross cultural and religious borders.
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You can file these experiences however you like, but one thing those who’ve experienced NDEs agree on is that consciousness exists before and after our rented meat sacks arrive and depart this world.
I hasten to add that this has nothing to do with religious faith.
People of all faiths, as well as hardcore atheists, have had these life-changing experiences that they can barely describe with human language. Regardless of their spiritual beliefs or lack thereof before their NDE, they virtually all return with a certainty that consciousness does not cease when the body dies. They typically lose their fear of death and relate to their life and remaining time on the planet more positively.
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I’ve found this topic as encouraging as it is fascinating, but not because I’m afraid of death.
If death is a complete shutdown of my consciousness, like deep anesthesia from which I’ll never awaken, there would be nothing left of me to care. That version of death has never bothered me.
And I long ago gave up any notion that stories about Heaven, Hell, and divine judgment are anything other than myths, and besides that, I’ve been a good boy, so I’ve no fear of being harshly judged anyway.
Instead, I find the concept of being a spiritual being having a temporary human experience comforting because it takes the magnifying glass off of the notion that this is all there is: My one shot at life in which I’d better do all the things I should do, want to do, and am compelled to achieve while I still can.
It also dispels the fear that every spoiled, emotionally broken billionaire who manages to begin vengefully dismantling the country that hurt their feelings is a tragedy of universal proportions from which we may never recover.
Nonsense.
There’s so much more to existence and the universe than politics—before and after this blip of time during which we bumble through life inside this tiny oxygen bubble English speakers call Earth.
Put another way, it’s a relief to know there is more to the real me than this version in which I’m temporarily pretending to be Dan Piraro, so I don’t have to white-knuckle it.
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(Side note: Should you decide to read these books, I encourage you to find somewhere other than Amazon to buy them or anything else. Jeff Bezos has become a complete Trump toadie and is willingly contributing to the dismantling of our democracy. Boycott the bastard.
Let’s turn the corner now to a more humorous avenue of thought with Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week!
I love the “pipe-cano.”
Raise your hand if you remember Dobie Gillis. Now put your hand down before someone thinks you want to ask your device a question.
So is the money you can’t afford to dispose of “posable” income?
Does Iggy’s kid call him “Pop”?
We’ll pause now while those of you who want to participate in communion eat a dry cracker and swig some merlot.
He hasn’t been able to practice in front of a mirror for hundreds of years.
That concludes this week’s Near Comedy Experience. If you enjoy our NCEs, please consider the links below to help us stay in the game. It’s a tough world out there, albeit a temporary illusion.
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