LET’S GET METAPHYSICAL
I’ve a friend who’s a doctor. He works in palliative care, he sees a lot of death, and he knows when people are dying with regrets. He says the people who are facing it calmly, regardless of how much money they have, are the ones at peace with their families, or those who have lived a full life or have tried things – marriages, ventures of some kind – even if they didn’t work out. It’s the ‘giving it a go’ that helps us feel more sanguine in the end. The ones who are screwed up are the people with regrets about not doing stuff: ‘I coulda been a contender’ – all that.
I don’t fear death, but I don’t want to be there when it happens. Women and children are definitely tougher than me when it comes to tolerating pain. I’ve watched people die painfully and recently someone said to me, ‘Do you know how boring it is waiting to die?’
When it comes to the other side – God, the afterlife – I think there’s something there but we don’t understand it, so we make up stories about heaven and hell. Look at the whole of nature; apart from one or two exceptions it’s the female who gives birth. When it comes to the creation story, supposedly a man does it. It seems we need these simple stories for our little brains . . . and it’s the same with death. We can’t imagine it, so we tell a story: you go to a place, either good or bad, and you’ll be judged.
Orthodox religion says we are bodies with spirits attached, which I reckon is a crazy way of thinking. You don’t have a spirit – you are a spirit, with a body attached, for a time. We are so centred on the material because we’re here, dragging our bodies around, along with all our stuff.
I’m fascinated by near-death experiences. It doesn’t seem to matter which culture someone comes from – whether Christian, Muslim, punk, anarchist – there are so many similarities. I know someone who was on stage in Spain. It was raining; he touched the microphone, then boom! He was electrocuted. He technically ‘died’. He left his body but when he was finally revived, he said, ‘There is a god – not Jesus or whatever, but there’s something. When I left my body, I could feel my mortgage going; all this stuff, just leaving. It was wonderful. You open like a flower, join the universe. Then you’re sucked back in and you’ve got a backache. And stuff to worry about.’ He didn’t want to talk about it too much because he didn’t want people committing suicide. I did a lot of research on the subject. I wanted to do a TV programme about it but no one wanted to run with it. One of the reasons I’m fascinated by near-death experiences is that I witnessed a profound incident of the unexplained when I was young.
A few of us guys were at Pastor Burris’s sister’s place one day. Aunt Maud had a daughter called Kay – a teenager, about eighteen or nineteen. She was girlie, chatty, friendly. We were all sitting around the table in Aunt Maud’s kitchen and Kay walked in, then walked out the back door without saying hello, which was strange, so we followed her out and couldn’t see her. Not a trace. She couldn’t have carried on walking; she would have had to climb a fence. We were like, ‘Where’s she gone? That’s not like Kay. She wouldn’t ignore us.’ We were Jamaican guys, trying to be down-to-earth. You can imagine. ‘What kinda ting Kay do, man? Why she a hide somewhere?’
Very soon afterwards, one of her nephews came rushing into the house, shouting, ‘Kay’s in hospital, she got run over!’
We said, ‘What?!’ We all looked at each other. We had all seen her, as clear as anything; not only me, all of us. As it transpired, the hospital said her heart had stopped for a short time and they’d had to revive her. We talked to her afterwards and she didn’t remember anything. She was in a coma. She lives in America now. I’m convinced that when her heart stopped she ‘walked’ through the house.
There’s a group of scientists who believe in a concept they call the Science of Eternity. They’re rational thinkers but they also believe in a higher power and spirituality. The simplest way to explain their theory is to apply the analogy of frequencies, like radio waves. Say we listen to Radio 1; we know there are people broadcasting from a studio. That’s real, but it comes to us through a frequency. Turn the dial a bit and it’s a completely different reality – you could be hearing Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. Human beings operate on a frequency too. We have electricity in us; our brains operate on a frequency, but there are other frequencies, where other things exist.
We can be here, but right now something else is happening on a different frequency – the past, the future, the otherworldly. The scientists who believe this are not cranks. I think it’s likely that all this sort of thing will be explained through science at some point. I think people can sometimes attach to a different frequency and see something and come back. And I think that’s what happened with Kay.
If you sit quietly and really get in touch with yourself, you can get in touch with the experience people think of as God. Monks will find it easier because they don’t have lots of possessions. We’ve got all this stuff and all these concerns that make it hard to switch off, even for an hour or so. To get to God, we’ve developed this need for an intermediary – the church, priest, whatever – but I don’t think it’s necessary; we just need to meditate and sit with ourselves. Get in touch with yourself and you’ll get in touch with God.
If I’ve done something bad, I sit with my conscience. I go over my day and think, Do I need to apologise to anyone? I can deal with my own conscience. But some people can’t. They have to go to the priest and tell them they’ve sinned. And that’s a whole other risky business – being in a closed space with a celibate man, telling him your deepest secrets. It’s never going to end well, is it? (Actually, there’s no passage in the Bible where it says a priest should be celibate.)
If for some odd reason you want to understand my religion, it’s important to understand this – I have no religion. I have been very religious in the past, but then only found more religion, and with so much religion upon me I went on pilgrimages to the holy sites of the world. I wanted to meet as many holy people as I could, but I came back with no religion.
My name and my upbringing may link me to Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Rastafari, but I don’t want these things to get in the way of seeing the spirit within. I would like to be remembered as someone who really believed in One Love. You can have the love of your friends, your wife, husband, family and your pets. But I have One Love for every living thing, and that includes the earth itself, because it too is alive.
Sitting silently is what I do. I sit so silently that the noises around me disappear and the loudest thing I can hear is my breath and the sound of my blood moving around my body. I sit some more until these sounds are replaced by the sound of my inner silence, and then I am connected. Why would I need a religion to do that?
I can understand people not going for this. When people talk or write about these things, they can, and almost always do, sound mad, or at least like they’re tripping. But talking and writing about meditation is not where it’s at; it simply has to be experienced. Words don’t do justice to what I experience through meditation, and I have never read an account to match my experiences in meditation. So I’m not going to attempt that here.