As a child, I wanted to know what it felt like to be cut bad, to see if I could handle the pain. I would stand in my mother’s kitchen, take a swig of Tangueray and try to cut my face with one of the good knives - a nice, small slit across my cheek or above my eye. I could never make myself press hard enough. So I would press as hard as I knew I’d be convinced that I wasn’t being a scaredy-cat with the amount of pressure I applied, or didn’t apply. ‘This knife must be really dull, I was pressing hard.’ I’ve heard people say they cut themselves so that they could feel something, anything; or they cut themselves because they wanted to physically feel as bad as they felt emotionally. I tried to cut myself to know how much it would hurt and so that I could have a cool scar. Never did get a scar, never did slash myself, but felt like if I ever did puncture my skin I would be so cool and therefore look really tough. ‘I could wear a band-aid on my face, and every one would ask what happened and I could say I got cut in the face with a knife.’
And when I thought about death, I would try to imagine being present one moment and then not here the next. I wondered if it would hurt, how I would handle that kind of pain. I wondered how people would act at my funeral and who would attend the event. I didn’t think so much about the after part of death. I was comfortable with the understanding that people go away after death. Whether it be heaven, hell, purgatory, or some form of spirit here with us on earth, I was clear that people go away from human form, and that made sense to me. It was the during part of death that I tended to focus on. What does it feel like to die? It must hurt. What if I get shot? What will the bullet tearing through my skin feel like? What if I get stabbed? I hope I get attacked from the back, I don’t want to see myself get stabbed.
Recently, four twelve year old girls killed themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The deaths all within a month and a half time span. I lamented, ‘What could these girls have been feeling, to feel they wanted to put an end to feeling at all?’ My sister speculated, ‘Did they have a pact together?’ Maybe they wanted to feel what death felt like. With this in the forefront of my mind, I again wondered wildly about how much it hurts and nervously tried to push myself to my edges to feel the separation of life from my form.
And then I had a wonderful thought.
I thought about child labor. I thought about child labor being the most stressful, strainful, painful and excruciating creative process to my knowledge. I thought that for all the labor of love, the end product is a whole new life. Childbirth is the sum of the total amount of devoted love that all generations and lineage connected right there to that moment of bringing new life into our collective consciousness offer to that new life.
Then I realized that of course death hurts. It hurts in the same way that it hurts to give birth and to be born. It is the transgression to the next phase of consciousness and it is the during that seems to ripple out the most pain to those directly affected. Respecting the cyclic nature of life, I’m comforted by the thought of the processes of birth and death relating so closely in my mind. I’ve been told that we exist and persist in cycles but the cycles are three dimensional and they go round and round and up and up like a spiral. I also feel comforted to know that it is the during part of death that gives us our tough life scar that we take into our next phase of consciousness.
3 comments:
As always you stir the most amazing, unanswerable questions of Earth!
You raise the question of death, the eternal question. Of course you cannot talk about death without talking about consciousness so that is a good point of departure. So what is consciousness? Is death the absence of consciousness or is it the absence of corporeality (or both!)? Your psychic coupling of physical pain with death suggests the former, but then you state you believe the latter. If they are separate can both die?
First is consciousness, I know well you believe that consciousness exceeds the self into other dimensions and even manifestations including disembodied consciousness. So it must be something that is either extra-dimensional (beyond our inferred four) or of a substance that no one has yet at least scientifically identified in these four dimensions we know. This does not agree well with scientific history and really there is no reason why science would not be able to make some kind of physical discovery of consciousness if indeed it rested in these dimensions! Also, relying on metaphysical descriptions is always tempting but lacks any true epistemological understanding... So it must be that if consciousness exists it is extra-dimensional and therefore, transcendental beyond human knowledge.
As a rationalist I am not satisfied with these implications. I tend to see consciousness as a manifestation of the complex energetic non-equilibria of our bodies. What we conceive of as self is our experiences of these complex energetic fluctuations. But since the laws of physics govern the progression of our bodies when it goes, so does everything that we conceived of as self.
The way out of all this is the conception of the mass consciousness. If indeed all the selfs in history that have passed on or will come from (for those not yet born) have originated from this mass consciousness then consciousness must be eternal. There is nothing we have known that is eternal except the very universe itself. So this is to say that the universe itself is consciousness and self is merely a way for the universe to be aware of itself fulfilling its very definition (you cannot be self without being self-aware, ad infinitum). So your focusing on the death of self is merely the universe becoming aware of its own inevitable end. It is a recursive process that can only end upon the inevitable finality.
But unless the future is already predicted and guaranteed there perhaps is a way out. The transformation of self-awareness away from self and towards the other. If the universe is self-consciousness then to be conscious of other would be to extend beyond this universe into the void beyond. So to avoid death and become eternal is to let go of any conception of self and embrace that which is beyond the senses. Its like Robert Anton Wilson said, "I suspect that after 72 years on Earth there is a world beyond my senses but it is only a suspicion. If you give me another 72 years I might be able to give you an answer with more certainty."
I wanted to add this:
I have only seen death once. It was my 90-yr old grandfather who passed away 13 months ago. He had suffered a stroke and said he did not want to live in a state where others had to take care of him (he was a self-sufficient modernist to the very end!). So he was put into hospice and basically endured an assisted suicide which consisted of ramping up doses of opiates until he let go. The whole process took about a week. The family gathered in a relaxing non-hospital environment that was comforting for us all. However, perhaps not for my grandpa. He never took medication, NEVER did drugs, hardly drank most of his life, again the tough as nails modernist. So to experience your final moments in the disorientating haze of opiates must have been even more difficult. But, despite this haze when the dose was the highest, just a day before he was declared dead, he exclaimed very loudly in a half sleep, "I AM DYING!". It was very sudden and we were all startled by it. After a few more moments, he exclaimed even louder, "I AM DEAD!" Those were the last words i heard from him. It took another 24 hours for his body to acknowledge what apparently his consciousness had already decided. He was dead. Since my grandfather was pretty much my father-figure a lot of the the conceptions of what it means to "be a man" come from him; I took that experience as my final lesson from him. How to die. Since then I have accepted my death and become aware that although my body and even my consciousness may die, It is not the end. Since as he lives on in me, I will live on in someone else. But then that means the other (not me) which means perhaps death is merely crossing the void to becoming eternal?
I completely agree Chris, the give and take is eternal and therefore validates the notion that time does not in fact exist!
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