As some may be aware, it’s been hypothesized that when we die a large amount of DMT is released into the brain. DMT can drastically alter one’s sense of time. In general, psychedelic compounds can alter the sense of time. This could also account for the quality of the NDE.
Most dramatically the compound salvia divinorium has been anecdotally reported to extend 45 second trips into what the tripper experiences as, according to at least one report, 8 years of experience.
One man woke up in a trip where he had a new life in a different part of the country. He spent the first four years trying to wake up from the trip. He then accepted the new life. He had a job, friends, he recalls going to sleep, waking up. One day, he recalls going to the park with a bucket of chicken to hang out with friends and he suddenly slipped out of that reality and back into the convulsions on the floor of his basement where he’d smoked the drug.
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Others report a three month experience of living underwater, breathing water, having a girlfriend, a job, etc. and then waking up to find that he’d been tripping for about three minutes.
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This calls into question what the end of life might be like in a purely phenomenological way. What do the “life reviews” that many NDE’s speak of say about the release of DMT into our system when we approach death?
What are the consequences of morality given that the end of life may amount to a review of all the good and bad that we’ve done and may, within the few seconds before death, represent an entire lifetime of memories?
Beyond what mere evolutionary biology tells us about the efficacy of morality in a social group for the purposes of acquiring status, the role of “being ethical”, “giving back to the community”; kindness; non-harm; and benevolent action - all of these things help remove lust, shame, guilt, sloth, and doubt from the mind.
Perhaps our mission in this one and only life we have is to live it to the very fullest extent that we can - in the sense that we can cultivate ethics and morality not for the sake of devotion to God, duty to our religion, or the hope for an afterlife. Rather, knowing in advance that to die with a clear conscience, having made all efforts to be a good person inevitably leads us at the end of life to those few moments in which we can potentially experience an eternity? An eternity of bliss and non-remorse, or an eternity of regret?
Would this create a moral imperative for us?
