Issue 16 | The Sun Magazine
The Sun Interview

The Case For Survival

An Interview With William Roll

To determine whether consciousness continues, as far as I am concerned, the best approach is to explore it where we are certain of finding it, that is in ourselves. Since we are concerned with the continuation or survival of consciousness, then this consciousness also exists before death and presumably can be studied there.

By Robert H. Ashby
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Sports

“The Boundary”

To many sport is another word for television or packed stands and six packs. To others it is a reminder of tanned muscles and small brains. Sport is quite simply thought of as entertainment and athletes tend to assume the properties of race horses or even motor cars.

By David Royle
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Transformative Experience

A determining characteristic of a transformative event is its immediate, absorptive, focalizing power. It dominates and literally becomes the field of awareness. In one overwhelming moment of being, a pattern is perceived and imprinted, providing the awareness with a model for unitive functioning.

By Jainindriya
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

In The Web Of Illusion

The Tibetan Wheel Of Life

The Tibetan Wheel of Life is a graphic representation of basic Buddhist philosophy. Though some say it was drawn first by the Buddha, historians say that it originated in India around the second century A.D. as a means of exposing an illiterate people to the Buddhist ideas of reincarnation and the cause of suffering.

By Sue Coffey
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Eye Of The Needle

The small gathering of students listened with a quiet awe to the wizened professor. Research techniques had become very sophisticated. They were about to travel on a series of levels within the volunteer lying smiling on the surgery table. She looked a little embarrassed.

By Nigel Fleming
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

In The Eye Of The Beholder, Or Death Is What You Make It

First of all, let us consider the fact just mentioned. There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death. Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming.

By Seth
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Rehearsal For Dying

Is there a way to practise, or rehearse, for the supreme adventure none of us can avoid taking — dying? Plato thought so — in fact he defined philosophy as the art and knowledge of dying — and modern-day parapsychology shows the way towards what Grosso calls “an experimental science of death.”

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Blood, Sweat And Tears

Photographs of birth capture what an intense physical event it is: lots of grimacing, blood, nakedness and sweat. A film can transmit much of the emotion of the experience: pants, groans and cries, the anxiety and the joy.

By Cedar & Stephen Koons
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Taking Responsibility

You want to give birth to your child naturally. You want childbirth to be a positive experience. You have read about, talked about and surely thought about the labor and birth that lie ahead. Maybe you have taken childbirth classes to prepare yourself.

By Cedar Koons
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Natural Birth: From Whiskey To Lamaze

It wasn’t long ago when all births were “natural” home deliveries. The birth of a baby was a common family affair attended by husbands and midwives for the most part. It was the exception when a doctor was present.

By Mike Mathers
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Home Vs. Hospital: Everyone Loses

Traditions are cornerstones in any society. They develop out of what are usually common-sense responses to common needs. Usually, the needs are basic and deeply felt, and the responses are simple, becoming more sophisticated and complex as time passes and the society evolves.

By Dan Domizio
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Soul On Ice?

If you’re looking for a way to control your money from the grave and religious promises of spiritual immortality don’t grab you, then your brass ring may be cryogenic internment.

By Priscilla Rich Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Channel One

I imagine that you associate other people’s desire of you as determining your own worth. This is common for most Homo sapiens, as we were raised to believe that what other people thought was good or bad, desirable or undesirable, loveable or unloveable were the correct criteria for evaluating our own behavior.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

And What Remains

Selecting a coffin for my father, I noticed that the salesman, solicitous at first, turned cool when I asked for the cheapest box. This was hidden in a closet.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Experience Of Dying

Although — with the possible exception of mediumistic communications — no one has returned from the dead to give an account of his experience, reports of people who have nearly died suggest that it is a profoundly transcendent experience.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Another Appetite

While nursing my rosey two-month-old, I read of the death by starvation of a three-month-old child in — no, not India — but within the “Golden Triad,” in Winston-Salem. The child lived one block from a federally-sponsored health center and her mother qualified for ADC benefits and food stamps.

By Judy Bratten
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Culpable Cadaver

The author of an article I recently read took up the task of listing the twenty worst news stories of 1975. Despite the evidence produced it was a very amusing business, as indeed, any post-mortem of such atrocious fare would have to be to make it palatable.

By William Gaither
Fiction

Lou, Turn Up Your Hearing Aid

Birth and death is a continual cycle. Like corn, you have a season. You grow, flower, give seed, fade away. But the energy within you keeps going — like the energy of corn. Have you ever been in a corn field and felt that energy?

By Karl Grossman