Dropping the Body
Weight loss? Yup, the bodiless person can pretty much certify his diet has been one hundred percent successful. Westerners generally call it “passing on” or “passing over” or “deceased” or “he's history” or “he's dust.” There are endless euphemisms for that four-letter word, DEAD.
Maybe all the linguistic contortions aimed at denying the reality of death are rooted in disbelief that some people who have particularly powerful and charismatic personalities can actually cease to exist.
Bill Graham, who “owned” a hundred yards of whatever space he was in, was one of those people. He was an animated fifty-foot action figure, a mammoth supertoy who was able to consolidate, cajole, entertain, listen, roar, and make mistakes with a larger-than-life burst of energy. At his funeral in 1993, at Temple Emmanuel in San Francisco, a sad but familial spirit permeated the huge temple. The place was filled with people who, along with their grief, were also feeling grateful to have known such a wonderful character who could expand himself for charity, for friends, and for raging anger—all in equal proportions. Ordinarily, I don't like funerals, but the atmosphere at his was unusually harmonious. It featured none of the embarrassingly morbid formalities that turn most funerals into acts of showy bathos.
When someone dies, many of us feel bad that the person's opportunity to enjoy more of life's pleasures has been cut off. But many of us are also sharply reminded of our own mortality, and that is the biggest fear—and the biggest mystery of all. All the religions have a story link about the “hereafter.” Atheists consider you stupid if you think of death as anything other than the end, and most people don't know exactly what to think except that they don't like it. We're programmed to seek survival, and the medical profession considers death a failure.
The French have a phrase, petit mort, which means “little death.” It's most often used in conjunction with post-orgasmic malaise. The ennui or resolution of passion after sex is kind of relaxing and pleasant to me, so I'm not sure why they call it petit mort. But I do like the phrase as a way to describe other events or emotions that don't involve actually stepping up to the spirit world. When people lie to you, it's a little death—the death of trust. When you fail to reach a goal, you feel petit mort. When a lover cheats, when a business folds, when a home is destroyed, when a friendship is ruined by anger or resentment—these are all little deaths, little pieces of your being slowly falling away into a grave of sadness. The loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic. Sometimes, it does a little of both.
I'm not thrilled by the idea of dying, but since I've had several strong experiences of déjà vu, I'm inclined to embrace the “theory” of reincarnation. I have such an affinity for all things Spanish, I feel I must have spent many lives in that country, as well as in California when it was under Spanish rule. Flamenco guitars, the Gipsy Kings—they move me in a way no other music has. I find it's not even a choice. It's not that I think things Spanish are better or worse than things derived from other cultures. It's just part of me somehow, and it's so powerful I can't ignore it.
One example of this mysterious Spanish connection at work occurred when I was watching a movie scene where they cut to a shot of the ocean. When they pulled back into an old church, I started crying because I knew, even before the narrator said where it was, that it was San Juan Capis-trano. And I'd never been there. My tears were not about sadness; I believe they were in response to an over-whelming recognition of some previous experience I had while living on the once-Spanish coast of Southern California.
I'm not inclined to join cults or weird groups (other than rock-and-roll groups), so it's not in my nature to buy into goofy, Hale-Bopp comet stuff. But I do pay attention to things that have repeatedly reinforced their presence in my life. I don't care if other people believe what I'm experiencing. I'm not proselytizing for anything; it's simply a fact that supernatural phenomena—or at least, the hint of such phenomena—have played a strong part in my own life.
Agnosticism is probably the safest position from the point of spiritual debate. The universe is a metasystem, and we are a subsystem that can never completely know the full operation of the more complex metasystem. So when people tell me they know “how it is,” I tend to view it as hubris. I have strong ideas about certain phenomena, but can they be proved? Of course not. How can I possibly know what incredible form of energy organized this cosmos, or exactly why the universe evolves as it does? But I can be pretty sure of one thing:
“It's all going the way it's supposed to be going
Otherwise, it would be going some other way.”
—SANDY HARPER, 1978
Sandy is a normal guy I once met, who made that statement just before giving me several tapes by Ram Dass. Both men are gentle, searching individuals who seem to be as comfortable as the animals with “the way it is.”
When I look carefully, the physical pain of dying is what I fear more than the actual death itself. And then, pride enters into it, too. I don't want the mailman to show up one day and discover a bloated, gassy mess with a rictus grimace. The poised sleeping beauty pose would be nifty, but since it's too late for that, a more artistic alternative has occurred to me. The following is in no way a death wish. I like life just fine, but when the time comes, my favorite way of dying would be by …
EXPLOSION—all over white walls!
I would initially swallow a tiny pill—unfortunately they haven't invented it yet, but imagine it's on a timer. Maybe the duration would be fifteen seconds, just so there's not too much time to think about it. When the thing explodes, I'll be pulverized into so many millions of tiny pieces, nobody will be able to identify me. I'll simply be all over the place, splattered on the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the furniture. And the fragments will be so minuscule, the effect won't be the slightest bit disgusting. You won't be able to identify my brains from my liver from my heart from my fingernails. There'll just be reddish, bluish, yellowish colors all over the place. Body colors. Then you can cover the whole thing with Verathane to preserve it as a one-room art piece. The ultimate art piece. Too bad Andy Warhol is gone; I know he could have gotten into it.
My last idiotic contribution to humankind.
My only stumbling block is the pill. Somebody needs to invent it. If a medical scientist reads this and is interested in getting involved, you know who to contact. Good old Rick.
Until then, concentration on living in balance seems to be the ticket, so I intend to continue my artistic pursuits by drawing and writing because it makes me feel at peace and alive. During this year, 1997, as Andrea and I are writing this book, so many people who've contributed to the happiness of the world have died in just the two months of August and September. It's a grouping of losses that seems to ask all of us to rethink our own priorities, to appreciate rather than deprecate, to enjoy, to laugh, to help, and to try to get to our own truth. A spiritual teacher, Stephen Levine, reminds us: “Live like it's your last year of life.”