'Tis the gift to be simple as a cockatoo

It may not have accurred to the Queen, a lifelong Anglican, that perhaps there is no afterlife and no heaven for her to go to when, ere long, her body empties its mysteries into the air. Then again, perhaps she is right. It is not for commoners like this common columnist to tell her what to think.

More in a moment of human expectations of everlasting life, and of a new book about that peculiarly human idea, a notion that almost certainly never crosses the minds of other species - no, not even the gang-gang cockatoos that every day flock to my garden.

First, though, an awed reflection on how epochally long the Queen's reign has been. I was just an urchin of seven at the time of her majesty's 1953 coronation. Every urchin-pupil at our infants' school was given a hard-covered, discreetly grand coronation edition of the New Testament. I still have mine, and with her majesty and her regal twilight much on my mind, I have just taken it down from the bookcase.

How poignant the ways in which our books stay ageless while we grow old! I am 76 now, and alarmingly decayed and unsightly. But my olde New Testament somehow looks much the way it did when in 1953 it sprang freshly minted from the contraptions of the University Press at Cambridge.

On Coronation Day, June 2, 1953, it was placed in my plump and grateful little infant hands. The ink in which the school's headmistress dipped a nib to write my name in the inside cover retains its blueness and seems scarcely dry.

Timeless, too, is the dry fossil of the flattened fly that, one summer day long ago, must have buzzed into the open Testament to be trapped and preserved there between pages 136 and 137. It was a distinguished place for the fly to choose to die, because in this edition it is the spot in John's action-packed gospel where Our Redeemer walks on water.

How seven-year-old Ian marvelled at these true Bible stories! How the 76-year old Ian misses him, that credulous little boy, now that I am an alienated intellectual atheist and scarecrow. If only there were a vaccine that blissfully credulous Christians could receive to fight off the viruses (among them the clear thinking of an inquiring mind) that compromise our make-believe systems and let atheism in.

But us haggard, unhappy atheists are exceptions, and Homo sapiens everywhere generally adhere to religions that inter alia insist we are superior to all other animals and that this superiority includes the superior destiny of an afterlife, an exemption from mortality.

In her new book How To Be An Animal, Melanie Challenger examines this idea that we have a unique-to-humans soul. John Gray's piece "The Mind's Body Problem", a roomy discussion of Challenger's book, is currently gracing the online New York Review.

"Challenger mounts a searching critique of our ingrained sense that we are not wholly animal," Gray distils.

"She considers the possibility that mind-body dualism may be a defence against the awareness of mortality. Denial of mortality fuels religion, which in turn has fostered dualism [the idea that mind and body are separate entities]. But if fear of death is the primary source of a dichotomy between mind and body, it is not easy to see how humans can ever fully accept that they are animals. A sense of difference from other living things may be an incurable human illusion."

MORE IAN WARDEN:

Challenger, looking for the source of the illusion, muses that it might lie in the experience of self-conscious awareness.

"When we concentrate," Challenger trills, "our own thoughts are so absorbing that we can momentarily forget that we have a body. Then something brings us back. A pang of hunger. A noise. This is both bewitching and more than a little odd. Our intuition tells us that we are not really the creature of muscle and bone that stares out from the mirror. We are the conscious thing in our heads. In this way, we don't have to believe in dualism to be under the illusion of it. We are trapped in a sensation of personal experience."

"The implication of this analysis," Gray concludes, impressed by Challenger, "is paradoxical: the human propensity to illusion increases along with conscious self-awareness. The more we are self-conscious, the more we may be liable to think of ourselves as essentially different from other animals. The upshot of Challenger's argument, then, seems to be that we cannot live as other animals do. So far as we know, our animal kin do not imagine themselves to be distinct from their frail and mortal bodies. Humans, on the other hand, seem drawn to a view of themselves that many of us know to be false."

The gang-gang cockatoos, sometimes as many as 16 of them at one time, gather inquiringly around me in my garden. Am I, the haggard, religion-racked reader of troubling books, in any way their superior?

I think of the lovely Shaker's hymn Simple Gifts, which shyly urges "'Tis the gift to be simple/'Tis the gift to be free/'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be," and envy the gifted cockatoos their simplicity.