HITCHHIKING A COMET TO HEAVEN

Victor Bloom MD

The recent news about a strange cult of people who committed suicide with the idea that they were leaving their bodies and going to heaven must have many people rethinking their own beliefs. In Western Civilization the idea that the spirit or the soul lives on after death is quite common, and is considered normal. Now, at Easter time, the symbol of death and resurrection is predominant and the budding of springtime adds to the idea of rebirth.

What distinguishes us from the cult members? Most of us believe that suicide is bad or a sin and that you don't go to heaven after committing suicide. Some believe that if God is loving and compassionate, He will not punish those who cannot bear the pain of life. But the key to normal mental functioning is the ability to differentiate the concrete from the abstract.

The mentally normal adult accepts the fact that the supernatural is beyond our ken, that it is not a separate, physical world. Heaven is an abstraction, a symbol, not an actual place in the universe. The Heaven's Gate cult group succumbed to a tendency characteristic of psychotically regressed people, confusing the abstract with the real. The Hale-Bopp comet is a newly discovered comet which is unusually bright. Our forbears thought the advent of comets signalled major cosmic events, but history does not support this conclusion. The cult members chose to believe that this comet is the signal they have been waiting for to leave their bodies and hitch a ride to heaven on a space-ship riding behind the comet, somewhat like water-skiing.

More evidence of concretization was the fact that many male members were surgically castrated. Somehow they converted the idea of celibacy and abstinence to the blunt fact of surgical excision of their testes. This is particularly interesting, considering that the cult leader was fired from an academic post over twenty years ago for having sex with a male student. It is interesting to speculate how his original sin had to be expiated later in life by an existence of self-denial, and how this penance would hopefully lead to forgiveness, redemption and a place in heaven.

Cult members are almost invariably mentally disturbed. They lose their attachment to their genetic family and seek a new family of persons who are similarly emotionally challenged. It is because some severe mental illnesses make their victims seem humanoid, rather than human. It is as if they are from another planet. Birds of a feather flock together.

This particular group consisted of disturbed, but intelligent folk, many of whom were accomplished computer-freaks. It was a way of making a living, which differentiated these mentally ill from the homeless, who live on the streets. This group rented a luxurious home in an affluent suburb. They wisely kept apart from the rest of the people in order to hide their peculiar eccentricities. It was only learned later that they had a certain uniform dress and killed themselves in a planned, methodical way. It is curious that they packed suitcases. Did they think they would take their material possessions to their other-worldly destination? Their disturbed 'logic' might indicate that if their spirits would leave their bodies after death, the spirits of their clothing and toiletries would follow.

This concrete thinking is not too different from that of the pharoahs who hoped to take their material possessions with them to the next world, along with their servants. Nor was it dissimilar to the Chinese emperor who arranged for a terra-cotta army to protect him and his possessions in the hereafter. Or what are we thinking when we bury our loved ones in a lovely casket, dressed for business or some social occasion? When the corpse is laid out in the funeral home, it looks for all the world like nothing more than a pleasant sleep.

A quarter of a century ago Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was in the Detroit area and stayed at our house in Grosse Pointe. We were impressed with her talk, "Death and Dying in a Death-Denying Society". In those days the fear and denial of death was even more intense than now, as terminal patients were rejected and abandoned in hospitals. It was reported, "there is no one dying here in our hospital". Kubler-Ross made a landmark discovery that there was a great tendency to deny death. She revealed the psychological stages of the dying person, from denial, bargaining, anger and depression to eventual acceptance. The dying person often needed someone to talk to about their dying, but no one would listen.

Ironically, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross turned 180 degrees later in life and came to believe in life-after-death. She studied the common report of those near-death experiences as a dark tunnel with a light at the end. She concluded that at the end of the tunnel was light and love and loved ones, waiting, welcoming. It is a beautiful fantasy, and many believe it. It is a comforting thought. It fits in with Shirley McClaine and New Age philosophy.

The rest of us try to live with the knowledge of our mortality, imperfections and limitations, and hope for whatever redemption or salvation is out there. But we can wait. Hope springs eternal. Hope is essential to life.