Paul Robertson - Soundscapes: A Musicians Journey through Life and Death

What do we mean by death? No respiration, no heartbeat and no brainstem reflexes have long been the clinical criteria of death. The brain in this state cannot maintain consciousness or store memories, so one cannot either experience or remember experiences. This state is known to be irreversible after about five minutes, although by cooling the patients brain immediately the heart stops, to reduce the brains need for oxygen, brain function can be restored after up to half an hour without a heartbeat. However, it is known that although consciousness is reversible at this point, this procedure might lead to some degree of brain damage.

But our understanding of the process of dying is challenged when we study the accounts of people who do report experiences during cardiac arrest when their heart has stopped and they have no respiration, no heartbeat and no brainstem reflexes, when they are, in fact, clinically dead. Such experiences are called near-death experiences (NDE). About 10 per cent of all cardiac-arrest patients report fairly detailed phenomena during a near-death experience. Another subset of patients will say they had some experiences during this time. It is now generally accepted that near-death experiences during a profound coma when there is no heartbeat and to all intents and purposes the patient is clinically dead can occur. This makes our understanding of the difference between life and death, from a physical point of view, much more complex.

In this fascinating and enormously insightful book Paul Robertson describes what he experienced in the state between life and death. During a lengthy operation to repair a tear in his aorta, Paul was under a general anaesthetic and unconscious. His heart was stopped and his head cooled to prepare his brain for a period of oxygen starvation.

Paul is very clear about what happened to him. While deeply unconscious, he moved from the full awareness that he was dying, to experience of the potential unification of his consciousness with that of the universe: As I lay there waiting, I felt myself die beautifully, ecstatically, transcendently. I saw eternity and shed the whole of myself joyfully in order to become unified with it.

This is only the beginning of his journey. It is common in near-death experiences for the experiencer to come to a border and realise that if he crosses it he will not return. He might be turned away by relatives who say he still has work to do, or by the Being of Light, the Divine essence of the universe, which sends him back as it is not his time.

Why did Paul, who had seen the transcendent aspect of the universe, its love, its warmth, its bliss, and was doing all he could to join it, decide to come back and rejoin the living? This is not made explicit, but it is evident that he chose voluntarily to return. He describes his return journey in the deepest and most fundamental layers of his mind, up through his psychology, to his final awakening from coma. The understanding that he gained from these experiences of himself and his life, is illuminating for us all. In this book he travels through all the major events of his life and analyses and re-evaluates each of them. One can sense his psychological growth and understanding, his change in maturity, the lessons he has learned and how he has been guided by a universal impulse towards a unity.

Nothing in this state is linear. For time as we know it is different at this level of consciousness. Fragments of Pauls experiences arose, were integrated, only to fall away again and be replaced, maybe by an earlier formative experience, or by a later more major resolution of the causal processes within him which led to the difficulties he had had. He gives insightful accounts of key moments in his musical history, how he met his first violin, how he realised he was musically gifted, how from an early age he saw blocks of his life sketched out in front of him which would lead to a final understanding of musical creativity. His experience while unconscious shows how he stumbled through these, but was always driven to achieve perfection. Few of us can look back on our lives with such insight into our own motivations and how these have led to the successes and failures that we have had. This process is the preparation for death as the ego is cleansed and slowly crumbles, the final freedom.

Throughout this time his wife Chika and his family visited, and Chika continually played CDs she knew were meaningful to him. The family prayed for him and asked him to return, and this was the touchstone that decided him. If there is a next time and he is called beautifully, ecstatically, transcendently to merge with the universe, he will be able to decide to go with the knowledge that his family is reconciled to his decision and can accept his departure.