Barbarians and Lucid Dying

Reading the new science of death alongside a Pulitzer-winning surf memoir

In Enterprise Software Sales, the year revolves around technology conferences. I have long worked for a company with one of the biggest conferences, held in San Francisco every year. In 2019, one hundred seventy-one thousand people came to the city by the bay for this conference, and I was burned out. I had attended this show for most of the prior decade, and I nearly always came home sick and run down. I grew to dread the experience. And this particular year, I was nearly in revolt about being there. I showed up for my booth duty sessions, where I would be on my feet for 6 hours and talking loud (yelling really) over a huge crowd of people. I’d shake a bunch of hands and collect a bunch of business cards and, inevitably, I would forget to wash my hands at some point, and someone’s booger snot would invade my body before my immune system woke up from the jet lag of moving from East Coast time to West Coast time. I’d be sick as a dog for the next week at least.

In 2019, I was going to beat the illness by minimizing my presence with other people, and through attention to my behaviors, including what I put into my body that week. I rented an Airbnb as far away from the backpacks as I could find. That turned out to be Ocean Beach in San Francisco, out near the Zoo. It was wonderful because this place turned out to be a total surfer pad. Surfboards. Surf magazines stacked in aesthetically pleasing piles throughout the apartment. There was a skylight in the bathroom so big that on a couple of days it felt like the whole ceiling was the sky. And there were the front windows of the apartment that stretched across the apartment building’s face between the living room and the bigger bedroom. The ocean was all-consuming. Any sized-television would have felt small in those rooms. I was overwhelmed by that view of the Pacific Ocean, looking out across the Great Highway in San Francisco.

Look, I’m a Midwestern American boy who grew into a man and never left. I love the Midwest because it’s where things grow in spite of themselves. I feel that way about myself. So, as a Midwesterner, I have no concept of what surfing means. I grew up around lakes created by the Army Engineering Corps decades before I was born because FDR had to put young men to work before a Fascist revolt took them into private armies. My waves were manufactured. So, imagine my befuddlement when I became obsessed with watching these surfers and their daily activities. Or should I say lack of activity? Most of what I saw were people sitting around and watching the waves. What the hell were they waiting for? What were they looking at? I became obsessed, and not because there was anything remotely attractive to me about sitting waist deep in freezing ocean water on a wooden waxed surfboard with only a thermal wetsuit between me and instant death at the bottom of an ocean I would likely never behold without jet airplanes.

One of the reasons I had committed to focusing on my well-being through attention that week in San Francisco was because, in years past, I allowed free alcohol and food to direct my behaviors while attending events and conferences. I witnessed many poor decisions made, a couple by myself and many by others. With the exception of the seemingly inevitable flu-like viruses I contracted over the years, I mostly avoided the worst decisions and dealt with the hangovers as an indication of the damage I was doing to my physiology and therefore my mind.

And the older I got, the more depleted I was in the days after those soaked-up nights; I started seriously considering whether these trips were worth it, given the damage to my health. Is a job worth doing if it steals your health and saps your joy? Sometimes, it is. But most times, it’s not. So I was having those kinds of thoughts, and I blame the Transcendental Meditation technique for cultivating the sensitivity to notice the situation. I was aware enough of it to question if there was a better way to live and work during this annual conference. Like a good scientist, I started testing a hypothesis to gather empirical data.

We may not all be able to do the hard maths the most rigorous science requires, but each of us can become aware of our emotional field in relation to the flowing river of our thoughts, and from that awareness, we can start to employ empirical testing with the goal of learning the truth of ourselves, so that we may then make behavioral changes that will shift reality in a more favorable direction for ourselves and everyone who has to deal with us every day.

Let me tell you about two books I’ve recently finished and why you may enjoy them and find value in their journeys. The first book is about dying. More specifically, it’s a book about dying and coming back from the dead.

Parnia, Sam. Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death. New York: Hachette Books, 2024.

Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, is the Director of Critical Care & Resuscitation Research at the New York University School of Medicine. His career is filled with incredible experiences at the edges of life. He is obsessed with death in the best way, meaning he wants us all to understand the process of dying as a biological and psychological phenomenon. And he’s here to tell you that what we’ve believed to be true about dying is largely false and limited, given the emerging scientific research and the empirical data it’s yielding.

“What if what we believe about death is fundamentally wrong and the paradigm we have been operating with no longer exists? Perhaps life and death can no longer be considered as easily separable binary events. Most importantly, what if death itself is not the end we have thought and assumed? What if who we are – our very consciousness and selfhood – is not annihilated with death? And what if science can prove it? What will that mean for us, for society, for religion, for philosophy, for how we live our lives?” (4)

So, here’s the story with this book. And it starts off a bit gross, so apologies, but it’s worth it. In 2018, Dr. Nenad Sestan gave a presentation to a gathering of the world’s leading neuroscientists, ethicists, and legal experts at a symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. What he told them over 25 minutes changed the world, if slowly. Consider how long it’s taken to get to you, which is only slightly longer than it took to get to me. This doctor’s team had successfully restored cellular and metabolic function to the brains of dead pigs. This team was performing biological research on the brain activity of recently deceased animals, who were already by-products of the industry of commercial slaughter. The specimens of study were sentient life forms, likely existing at lower levels of selfhood consciousness than humans, but conscious nonetheless. The neurological activity of their brains is the same neurological activity in human brains, in all mammalian biological systems, and many others. Everything is consciousness manifested within its own limitations. Nature grows until it’s stopped by natural force. At that point, the entity has only to be, to live, to experience their place in this temporary existence. Even stars die, eventually.

So, think of how monumentally important it is to realize that there is a biological process that consistently happens when beings with brains die. Within four hours, they shipped these pig heads (now “specimens”) and, when received, immediately treated them with a cocktail solution containing artificial blood and other brain-protective and -stabilizing drugs. It’s a process called BrainEx. Look it up; it’s weird.

Over 6 to 14 hours after the specimen passed (see how easy it is to transfer violence behind muted words), these doctors consistently observed neurological activity returning to these cut-off pig heads. The longest they kept one active was 36 hours, with all the observable functionality of a normal, living brain. Also, there was no damage to the brain cells; blood vessels and blood flow were not restricted, and all showed signs of normal brain metabolism.

Also, here’s an important point to know: the pigs didn’t feel anything. Those drugs in the cocktail kept the brain activity near-comatose. The doctors were careful to draw an ethical and moral line at risking global-brain electrical activity, which is the common definition of personhood for humans.

So, this book is about a targeted research project that took place after that shockwave started working its way into science. If death is a process that happens consistently across all humans studied, then we can build a science of knowledge around observation, theorizing, and empirical proof. This is how categories of Science are born. And now, we’re in an age where the Science of Death has met the Science of Consciousness.

For the entire history of our species, we have wondered and ached to know what happens when we pass away from this life. This comprehensive study (called AWARE-II) collated data from 567 cardiac arrest patients, with 53 survivors, 28 interviewed, and 11 reporting memories suggestive of consciousness. The researchers transferred both medical and qualitative interviews into subject-aligned data. The researchers used cutting-edge AI to analyze all relevant data to search for common themes, trends, and variations. What did people say consistently happened to them when they had a Recalled Experience of Death (RED), meaning they were fully lucid during the entire experience of dying and coming back again? As you might suspect, not many people who have this experience are willing to talk about it.

I found Dr. Parnia’s description of being “near to death” valuable:

“From a medical science perspective, being “near to death” is a precise and objective event. You are biologically near to death when any life-threatening illness or accident causes your blood pressure to drop to dangerously low levels (also referred to as shock) together with loss of consciousness. This is when intensive care doctors are armed and working frantically to prevent you from actually reaching death. In medical shock, when your low blood pressure drops past a critical threshold, blood flow to the brain drops to dangerously low levels. This leads to confusion and, if severe enough, total loss of consciousness, meaning a deep coma.” (60)

This next quote (from the same page) woke up the Vedic scholar in me.

“Evidence was beginning to emerge that, during this period of a diminished and deepening state of unconsciousness, the person going through death may paradoxically be undergoing an internal, transcendent, hyperconscious, lucid experience, which they would later either totally forget or partially forget and only recall in fragments. Traversing from life to death can be analogized to entering an ocean, where life is land and death is the ocean.” (60)

Let me pause and offer a brief Vedic and metaphysical point of view.

Consciousness is an ocean. At its depth, there is a stillness in manifested reality from which all sounds emerge into vibrations which slow and gather into the accretion of matter. Manifestation is physics working from the unified field of Consciousness, from which all matter, energy, and experience emerge. Human life experiences have a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like our lives. The implication is that our lives are a pile of experiences left behind as our individual consciousness engages in the field of relationship over time. Human time is filled with relationships with other people, the planet, and the other life it supports. The Vedic view is to achieve cosmic awareness about the universal connecting truth that exists beyond opposites and conflict in the waking world, and then act in the world with that knowledge.

To live this life properly, one must constantly assess their behavior and its impact on the world, people, and life happening outside their experience of self.

So imagine my surprise when it was revealed in this book what is experienced after we die, told in fragmented stories across nearly every survivor of death who came back with a story to tell. A consistent process seems to happen in the moments between, when, according to current laws, we are neither legally alive nor dead. Here is a list of twelve sub-themes related to the process consistently experienced for “coming back home” to the body after medically dying and returning to conscious awareness.

1. Traveling back “home.”

2. Traversing through a metaphorical tunnel.

3. Traveling at very rapid speed toward a luminous place.

4. Returning “home”: a place of perfection I had known.

5. Time: nonlinear and not as it would seem.

6. A glance at my past and prior past.

7. Communication: thought is everything.

8. A source, an origin.

9. Feels more real: ordinary life is like a dream.

10. Learning the importance of making amends for infringement.

11. Acquiring knowledge of the future.

12. Suicide: not an end and not an option. (134)

Consider the following quote, because I’m going to reference it when I get into the next book. The part in bold is the key concept to retain:

“More important is what we learned with time. People who undergo a recalled experience of death do so through what can be best described as a field of consciousness. This can be analogized to an electromagnetic field that can carry and at the same time capture information.” (284)

Paraphrasing, the most important of the twelve sub-themes of common Recalled Experiences of Death (RED) is #6, a glance at the past. Subjects consistently revealed that linear time, as we commonly experience it, loses meaning when people in the grey zone experience countless realities like millions of software simulations running in the same context window at a rapid pace. People also consistently report that there is a cause for everything that happens to a human during life.

Responsibility is another key theme. When your consciousness fills the cosmos, there is no blame, only total responsibility and accountability without shame. It seems we will each undergo a life review like the Albert Brooks classic film Defending Your Life. During that life review, we relive our actions and directly experience their impact through the biology and emotions of the lives we interacted with. We will each gain a thorough understanding of the positive and negative value of our actions and the intentions behind them.

Parnia summarizes the pattern:

They realize that even seemingly small moments of genuine kindness, sacrifice, and selflessness are immensely valuable, even if they were not valued by others. The status and values of society are irrelevant. Instead, they judge themselves based on a universal, moral and ethical code, independent of their belief systems. (286-7)

One lady interviewed said she remembered holding her pet guinea pig as a child. When it bit her finger, she threw it across the room, and instantly she was experiencing that memory from the guinea pig’s perspective, being hurled and afraid, landing hurt and confused, unable to fully understand the environmental care going forward. It’s the needle and the damage done. People who died and woke up again with memories return to the world as a different human than those who died. Their perspective on reality has dramatically shifted as it expands.

Another Vedic injection.

The journey of life is about expanding consciousness to its absolute limits, while directly engaging with the universal field of pure consciousness which lies beyond the limits of life manifested in the universe for a limited time. Once we are in constant contact with Cosmic consciousness at this scale, behaviors shift, moving culture with greater force and purpose than any physical lever in the known universe. Aligning with the way nature works when left to its own operations is the primary physical goal of existence. The mental goal is expansion of awareness. This is accompanied by the physical goal of aligning behavior and experience to natural law.

Which brings me to the second book. When I was in my early 20s, I started reading multiple books at a time, all different subjects and genres. My theory was that my mind would work from strange angles to assimilate what I experienced intellectually with the written text of multiple books at once. I have maintained this habit of reading widely and deeply for over 30 years, and I believe it is the foundation for why I think differently than most people around me, and this is something I share with both of these authors.

Finnegan, William. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Penguin Press, 2015.

Let’s go back to those surfers bobbing on the ocean outside my San Francisco Ocean Beach Airbnb. Seriously, check this place out.

Think of them out there in the freezing San Francisco morning, sitting on their surfboards; the only thing between them and the abyss is their insulated suits, their boards, and pure attention, because if you lose focus in the ocean, and the ocean acts on you without your wholly present awareness, you could likely die.

William Finnegan is a brave journalist, essayist, and diarist. But older than all these expressions of vocation, he is a surfer. This 450-page book is about the obsession that drove his life choices during often chaotic times he lived through while traveling around the world in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Finnegan explores more than four decades of chasing waves around the world; while a writing career emerges from that experience, he meets the love of his life, and his most precious relationship with his daughter is revealed as the pearl of his life experience. William Finnegan traveled all over the world to surf the most intense waves he could find. A few almost killed him. His “Barbarian Days” were spent wandering from California to Hawaii, through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa, and back to places he could call home again.

Finnegan spends an entire chapter of the book on his experiences living in San Francisco in the 1980s and surfing what seemed like chaotic wave patterns around the peninsula. And guess where the primary spot he surfed was. Ocean effing Beach! The very same set of waves I woke up every morning that week of the conference to watch these surfers bobbing on their boards, until eventually, they moved into action and caught a wave. Through Finnegan’s recollections and often poetic descriptions of the movement of water, I came to understand what those surfers were doing when they stayed so long in the freezing ocean of the outer dark.

But before he gets to Ocean Beach, Finnegan undergoes a self-imposed odyssey to find…something beyond the waves, beneath them. Something had been speaking through the waves he’d been surfing since he was a child. They became his obsession when life hollowed out after college and meaningful employment with the railroad in Northern California. Finnegan had all the experience he needed to assess whether the world was too damaged to live in. So, he went on an odyssey to find the answer to what spoke to him through and beyond the waves. This is my reading of this period in the author’s life: a critical one that shaped every facet of his future and influenced what we know about the war-ravaged places and events of injustice he’s written about over the course of his career as a journalist and essayist.

Finnegan notes that, during this time, his father expressed fears over specific elements emerging from his son’s behavior. The words the author uses are: “monomania, antisocial, and ill-balanced.” When someone close to you sees you in a way you’re not ready to see yourself, it’s understandable why that person would want to leave and be somewhere else. For many Boomers and Gen Xers, restlessness started early, when we were young. For many of us, that restlessness never went away.

In those days, of the gray early 1970s, human beings could still disappear for a few years, become spiritual outlaws, and roam. Finnegan took that road, setting off with one of his best friends, who was also in a spiritual outlaw phase, and they became dropped-out ghosts of society, existing only to travel and engage with the ocean on surfboards, often staying in place just long enough to make connections and confessions.

Finnegan eventually stares into the mirror of his behavior and accepts he has been living with the philosophy of, “cut school, lose jobs, lose girlfriends, if it’s good,” meaning the relationship with the ocean’s waves propelling them forward through Asia Pacific, down into Australia, then over to South Africa, where the author ended up teaching poor, black children under the shadow of apartheid in order to earn enough money to chase the next set of waves on the other side of the continent.

But something stuck with Finnegan in South Africa, stuck and started growing inside his heart as he taught poor Black children in the country that had recently imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Suddenly, his surfing obsession seemed hollow in the face of the injustice he witnessed with his eyes, mind, and heart. A solid rage against injustice and the desire to witness it and report news to the world. His life started taking a more orderly shape around this newly emerging vocation. It took him to some of the most dangerous places and situations on Earth, where he boldly reported the truth as he found it. And all the while, he kept surfing the waves.

He stopped cutting from the school of life, meaning he started showing up for more than just the waves. He started keeping jobs. He invested in a life partnership with a strong, supportive girlfriend who became his spouse and then the mother of their child, and who made him a father. Finnegan’s unique flowering of life grew from his obsession with chasing waves for a few years, like a barbarian rebel. It seems Finnegan was searching for authenticity in what was fast becoming a plastic world produced by American media, factories, and retailers. And what he found, by taking a short-term job teaching poor black children in one of the most oppressive societies in Western Civilization (at the time), was his mission and his calling.

And surfing became something different for Finnegan: an intense pressure valve through which he exorcised the worst of what he witnessed but could not put into words.

This is the universal hero’s journey, and it’s not just reserved for superhero movies. This is the journey we are each supposed to take, one where we identify the source of joy in our life and follow it to where it’s leading us. But the hero’s journey also comes with risk and cost.

His obsession with the waves nearly cost Finnegan his life in Madeira, an experience he shared with a surfing partner who gave up surfing after an intense near-death set. Later, Finnegan asked his wife why she put up with the risks he took in his career and hobby. She told him he wouldn’t be who he is without the risks he’d taken to get to her and their child. What a sobering revelation that must have been. What a gift!

Life comes full circle when you’re sensitive enough to experience it happening. But you can’t be sensitive when you’re overwhelmed by stress and traveling down the wrong path. We know we are on the wrong path when our lives become leached of joy. The most refined measure of enlightenment is not wearing a robe with beads and chanting verse, while turning away from the world’s suffering. Enlightenment is simple: you appreciate beauty and feel contented joy where others see only ugliness and feel only endless suffering.

Throughout his life, William Finnegan turned to the waves to process that suffering. And then he wrote about it. When I read his book, it answered the question of what those surfers were doing in the silent dark before they sprang into action to catch specific waves they chose based on a million calculations and a single inspiration (to float fast on water and ride it as long as possible).

Surfers, all around the world, read the movement of massive water upon the untamed surface of this planet. Earth is a liquid world that suffers a few dry spots, where unique manifestations of life gather and fight over shared resources. The lands of Earth obey the will of water because water goes where it will. And when it comes to the will of life, humans are like the ocean. We go where we will, but where we will is not always the wisest place, especially when we lose sight of that which is beautiful even if that beauty is sublime.

Finnegan went where he willed himself to go, meaning he chased the killer breaks off a Pacific island called Tavarua, to the killer breaks off some Atlantic island called Madeira, to the waves always assaulting New Jersey and New York, sometimes threatening hurricanes which bring their own unique experiences of massively moving water, to whatever mystical motion happens with the waters around the islands of Hawaii, to the West Coast of North America and Mexico.

San Francisco’s Ocean Beach culture testifies to the act by pulling everyone who witnesses what goes on out there into the water beyond civilization, where barbarians occupy moving spaces for a very limited time. The ocean pulls us all when we see it. Some of us get pulled in physically, but we all get pulled in at the level of imagination.

The idea that these surfers undergo their own versions of life reviews, sitting bobbing on the slapping or roaring water, testifies to sports as meditation. The physical act, merging with the emotional and spiritual movement, all together a singular motion of consciousness, smeared across the plane of living matter through intense relationships between biological beings moving at variable rates of speed and decline.

But my God, it’s beautiful when we can ride the wave and feel completely free while in the motion of our lives.

It’s the life review that connects these two books for me in this particular moment.

Look, I get it. It’s a big leap from cardiac arrests to the plight of the human soul in transition between life and death. These findings have some hair on them. It’s not perfect science yet, but it is compelling science, which is more important when ideas are brewing up to become thesis statements, followed by more empirical study fueling the exchange of ideas and data.

There are many facets of modern life that we know as processes now, but which were mysteries of the past, taken on faith, and accepted with sorrow or gratitude. Jimo Borjigin at Michigan found that when he detected oxygen starvation (hypoxia) in the dying brain, it stimulated gamma brainwave activity as a final action of the primary organ of biological experience. A last burst of energy. Borjigin’s finding, which many read as explaining the whole phenomenon without any need for consciousness to go anywhere, may be the beginning of a much bigger scientific exploration.

Borjigin's finding suggests nothing leaves the human corpse upon death, but energy is neither created nor destroyed; it transfers. Here, the Vedic thinker points out that Consciousness is the Unified Field of all matter, energy, and experience. So, while these observable energy transfers in the final moments of death are not indicative of something leaving, they do allow the opportunity for energy to change into other forms, including dissolving back into the unified field from which everything emerges.

And if you were paying attention to the numbers of subjects studied in the primary research, they were small, highly targeted, and focused. But the potential and impact of what the numbers reveal are staggering and worth becoming obsessed over as a species. Understanding more about dying will make us more sensitive about good living.

The subtext of Parnia’s book is the same as the subtext of Finnegan’s, and it’s the same as the subtext of what those surfers were doing out there bobbing on the darkened water of the Pacific in Ocean Beach, San Francisco, on any given day.

Attention. What kind of attention are we bringing to our lives? These authors and the people they write about put a massive amount of focused attention into filling these books with enough experience to add value to the world. They affected me so much that I’m writing to you about them.

And so it goes.

Here is how I’m currently synthesizing these books together.

For Lucid Dying, the concept of the grey zone of death has already changed how humanity thinks about dying. In the grey zone, beyond the legal and medical definitions of death, there is a process that takes place that is both psychological as well as electro-chemical. Physiology combines both the biological processing of the body and the intellectual and emotional processing; it’s one movement, this whole consciousness thing.

In the film Gladiator, it is said that what we do in life echoes in the afterlife. But what is the afterlife? Is it a life review, where we examine every behavior we executed during our lives without judgment, experiencing the full and total knowledge of our accumulated experiences of being alive along with the direct impact we had on other living beings and the natural world while we were here on Earth kicking around on a piece of ground in our hometown? That sounds reasonable to me, and preferable to living without hope or joy.

If what these individuals commonly come back from dying to tell us is accurate, the goal of living our lives is to expand our individual consciousness until it fills the universe. Our lives are like the briefly flowering leaves on tree branches, all rooted in the same source root and seed before it.

In Barbarian Days, William Finnegan chased waves, but what he was really doing was having a conversation with life about dying and the purpose of being alive. The purpose is to tell the tale you were made to live. Becoming enlightened means becoming sensitive to life. The enlightened human being is one fully present in this waking moment. It is the enlightened ones who bring their whole selves into this life with the fullness and swelling of ocean waves riding the surface of our planet for a short, intense aperture of time, which has no meaning outside the wave's movement.

While Finnegan proved nothing new about the ocean’s movement, he did prove something important about a human moving through the ocean with attention. And Dr. Parnia has offered new knowledge about one of the most important mysteries of human life: how to live a good one and die smiling over it at the end. But it’s the same attention being applied to living and dying.

May we all become loyal barbarians and live so deeply, with purpose, so that we lucidly pass away with honor, dignity, and grace.

CLICK HERE to read my policy on using Generative AI in my writing process.