(This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the interaction of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience and express our natural impulse toward the Divine without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)

HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY’S BLOG…
* Is there a time when prolonging life may not be desired?
* Who gets to decide when someone should die?
* Ethics Committees and Courts are having to step in because we are confused
* Is our idea about “death” simply all wrong?

When is it time to die? Good question. Extraordinarily good question.
A bunch of people got together not too long ago to tackle that subject at a bioethics course for health care professionals at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, reports Reuters news service.
Attending the event were doctors, nurses, chaplains, social workers, administrators, lawyers and others. This is the same mix that you will find on ethics committees at hospitals all over the world. During this recent course in Georgetown the participants found what all of us already know…

…end-of-life issues are among the most complex and difficult for those who staff hospitals to work with. And there is no easy resolution, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, there is no simple formula that can be applied to everyone identically.
As the Reuters story pointed out, it used to be that people simply died when they did. But now, with today’s advanced technologies and extraordinarily sophisticated health care options, increasingly it is the courts or hospital ethics committees or doctors that decide when a person dies.
The question, of course, is when to extend an endangered life — and when doing so is only unnecessarily and perhaps even unkindly and maybe even inhumanely stretching out the process of death.
Susan desJardins, a pediatric cardiologist and member of the ethics committee at Arnold Palmer Hospital in Orlando, Florida, was quoted in the Reuters article: “We have to ask when to provide care, when to stop care, when care is futile.”
“Our technology is ahead of our morals,” said Washington Hospital Center medical director John Lynch in the Reuters story. “From an ethical point of view, we haven’t learned when to use our technology.”
“The biggest problem here is futile treatment,” he said. “That’s when it’s clear after some time that a patient, under normal medical circumstances, is never going to get better.
The issue, as we all know, is much more than a medical decision. It is a spiritual consideration. It has to do with how we hold the experience of “death” in our interior reality. It’s about our entire spiritual cosmology.
The problem from a spiritual point of view is that we hold the experience of death as a tragedy — not only for us, but for the person who is dying. No, the problem is even larger than that. The problem, from a spiritual point of view, is that we think that death actually exists, when the truth is that it does not. And that is exactly why death is not a tragedy. The spiritual truth is that death is our Continuation Day, and it is a cause for joyful celebration.
Of course, no one can be certain about this (or at least, not many people can), and so it is difficult for many people to embrace as their inner reality. The result: the largest number of people still think of death as a Great Tragedy. As such, it is something that we seek to steer clear from as long as we can. We try to “hold off” death. We try to live as long as we can. And we try to help our loved ones do the same. Even when it may make no sense to do so.
So agonized and convoluted are we in our thinking about this that we are in some cases actually happy to place the final decision about when a loved one should die in the hands of others. Then we have someone else to blame. Then we have someone else to make wrong. We don’t have today the responsibility for this awesome choice into our own hands.
Statistics show that only 15% of people in the United States have signed a Statement of Preference or a Living Will instructing others what to do with regard to our medical treatment should we be incapacitated and unable to make those decisions ourselves. Yet if we changed our thinking, if we we arranged our ideas, about this thing that we call “death,” we would never allow someone else to enter into the decision-making process around this. Not a doctor, not an ethics committee, and certainly not a court of law.
It is important to understand that perspective creates perception, perception creates belief, belief creates behavior, behavior creates experience, experience creates our reality…and our reality creates our perspective. So a shift in our thinking about death, a rearrangement of our ideas, is not an insignificant matter. Yet what could cause us to so radically alter our point of view about end-of-life matters?
This we will begin exploring tomorrow.
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