Watson - The Romeo error: a meditation on life and death

Startling new scientific findingson life after death! The mostimportant investigation ever published."Exciting, informed, memorable!" --Publishers Weekly THE ROMEO ERROR A Meditation on Life and Death by Lyall Watson author of the acclaimed bestseller SUPERNATURE When Romeo Found Juliet Pale and Lifeless in the Tomb, He Assumed She Was Dead.ROMEO, OF COURSE, WAS WRONG.Yet how many times is this same error repeatedeach day on earth? How many of those whom wesee as dead are really alive? And even moreimportant, is what we think of as death itselfmerely an error in perception, a cruel and costlymistake?Lyall Watson, a former assistant to noted natural-ist Desmond Morris and a renowned scientist andauthor in his own right, has explored both the in-tellectual world of science and the psychical worldof the most eminent mystics to put together thepieces of one of mankind's most ancient puzzles.The result is a work destined to end once and forall the tragic failure of vision that Lyall Watsoncalls -- THE ROMEO ERROR THE ROMEO ERROR A MEDITATION ON LIFE AND DEATH ______________________________ LYALL WATSON A DELL BOOKPublished byDELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.1 Dag Hammarskjold PlazaNew York, NY 10017Copyright 1974 by Lyall WatsonAll rights reserved. For information address,Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, NY 10017.Dell TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc.Printed in the United States of AmericaFirst Dell printing -- May 1976ContentsINTRODUCTION 7PART ONE ... BODY 13 Chapter One: LIFE and the origin of death 19 Chapter Two: DEATH regarded as a disease 38 Chapter Three: DYING as part of the death cycle 61PART TWO ... MIND 85 Chapter Four: PERSONALITY and the body 92 Chapter Five: ENLIGHTENMENT as a biological process 111 Chapter Six: DISSOCIATION between body and mind 129PART THREE ... SOUL 147 Chapter Seven: SURVIVAL without the body 153 Chapter Fight: POSSESSION within other bodies 174 Chapter Nine: MiRACLES and other realities 198CONCLUSION 219BIBLIOGRAPHY 221INDEX 239
Introduction
When I was ten years old, I went off by myself one day to a wooded ravinenear our home where one could stand on the edge of a cliff and bounce awonderful echo off a curved wall of granite on the far side of the stream.I had been planning the excursion for weeks and finally worked up enoughcourage actually to do it -- to stand there all on my own, high abovethe trees, and shout as loud as I could the rudest and most forbiddenword I knew. Now, a quarter of a century later, I cannot even rememberwhat the word was, but I shall never forget the feeling. Writing a bookabout death makes me feel that way again.
Despite our new freedoms, death is still an awkward subject for discussion.Every day we display further evidence of our discomfort with it and of ourcontinuing uncertainty about the relationship of life and death. With theone hand we try to put the dead "to rest"; we console and propitiate themand attempt to avert their wrath. With the other we try to simulate lifeby painting up their faces in a forlorn attempt to rekindle some lastvital spark.
Our ambivalence is manifest in almost every field. We say that scienceand medicine are giving us dominion over death, but we really stillbelieve that nothing we can do will change the date of that appointmentin Samarra. There is a sense of rightness and inevitability in the storyof the soothsayer Chalchas who died of laughter at the thought of havingoutlived the predicted hour of his death. If anything, our new technologyonly makes the dilemma even more difficult to bear. In September 1973Samuel Moore was certified dead in Oakland, California, with a bullet inhis brain. His heart was removed still beating and shipped by helicopterto Stanford, where it was transplanted into another breast. When thegunman, Andrew Lyons, was charged a month later with Moore's murder,his lawyer insisted that the charge be altered to assault with a deadlyweapon on the grounds that Moore could not be dead if his heart wasstill beating. That part of the case, at least, has now been settled,because the heart in question has finally stopped beating altogether,but there is still some doubt as to whether the murder was done by theassailant or the surgeon.
As a biologist I find this kind of ambiguity embarrassing. It may beold-fashioned, but I believe that a student of life should know whereit starts and have some idea of how it ends. Hence this book. It startsfrom first principles and develops along the lines of a debate, as muchfor the sake of my own sanity as for anyone else's edification. I suspectthat there are logical and biological flaws in many levels of my argument,but for the moment I am content to leave them there, simply because thisis an argument and I hope that it will stimulate further discussion.
Exactly two years ago, I collected a ragbag of biological loose endstogether and created a patchwork pattern that went some way towardestablishing an objective natural history of the supernatural. I triednot to set any artificial limits to the field it covered, but lookingback now, I can see where I drew my mental lines. If Supernature wasmy "life book," then this is its companion volume on death. I start withwhat seems to me to be the most basic dilemma in the field, our inabilityto distinguish life from death, and find that when this is resolved,it merely opens up a number of other problem areas -- and every one ofthem turns out to be something that I had previously refused to consider.
This is not an answer book. It is really not even a question book,but an attempt to establish some sort of solid scientific foundationthat will help to formulate the right kinds of questions. When I talkto friends with an interest in the occult, or to almost anyone under theage of twenty-five, about reincarnation or astral bodies, they just nodreassuringly. And when I persist and demand to know how they can be socertain that these phenomena exist, they simply say that that's how thingsare. I suspect that they may be right and I envy their ability to takeso much on trust, but I cannot do so. I carry the heavy handicap of tenyears' training in the sciences, and I feel compelled to search for someway of reconciling scientific investigation and mystic revelation. I ambeginning to appreciate that there are limits to the scientific methodand that it is impossible to observe some things without substantiallychanging them in the process. To observe is to modify; and to describeand understand is to alter radically. Atomic physics now recognizesthat if something cannot be measured, the question of whether or not itexists is meaningless. I can accept this, and where it becomes necessary,I am prepared to abandon the traditional scientific approach. I find thatmost of the time my line of investigation brings me in the end directlyto the place where my mystic friends have been operating all along,but unlike many of them I know exactly where I am, because I can lookback along the line and see how I got there.
So for those who find it difficult to come to terms with other realities,I offer this imperfect guide that starts out in errancy and ends on theedge of an awesome new frontier. I hope that you will find, as I have,that death can be turned into a lifeline.
Lyall Watson, Ph.D.
Bali, Indonesia, 1973
They said that JULIET was dead.NURSE: She's dead, deceas'd, she's dead!LADY CAPULET: She's dead, she's dead, she's dead!CAPULET: Her blood is settled and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated. ROMEO took their word, and his life... but he was wrong.
Or is the error ours?
PART ONE
BODY
The Romeo Error is not rare, nor is it peculiar to distraught Latin lovers.It was made by even the most celebrated of all anatomists. At the heightof his career in the middle of the sixteenth century, Andreas Vesaliuswas dissecting the body of a Spanish nobleman when the "corpse" came backto life. [213*] The injured don made a complete recovery, but Vesaliuswas reported to the Court of the Inquisition and sentenced to death forhis error. Not long afterward, the Grand Inquisitor himself is said tohave recovered consciousness on the table of another anatomist. [267]This time the error came to light too late to save his life.
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