Point B (a memoir of sorts)

I was listening to Osho earlier this morning and he was talking about the Eastern and Western perceptions of death. How in the West it's thought of as "the end of life" and as a result we struggle on a certain level to do all we can/need to do before that moment comes. It's not hard to see how this reaction to "the end" could be the genesis for an evolving anxiety that manifests to various degrees among different people who may or may not have the training/instinct/perspective to deal with it. In the East and by stark contrast the commonly held belief is that death is, far from being a brick wall that keeps us from moving forward, actually a beautiful experience that initiates us unto another "house". If you can order your thoughts along those lines I'd think it would be easy to live moment to moment and enjoy life without the demands of the Western model, potentially ending the excessive anxiety that spoils our best intentions at every turn. 

But we are conditioned from such a very young age, aren't we? We see other peoples' response to the death of loved ones and we're told that they're never coming back...our innocent minds can't help but decipher all that grief into fear because I mean where can a person go in the world where they couldn't somehow, someday return? What kind of place would that be that could make a person not want to ever see their loved ones again? Are they being held against their will? And if so wouldn't our mission in life be to go out into the world to find and rescue them, ideally bringing them back home? Is that what we're chasing? Even when we get older and learn the hard scientific truth about death are we already so far into that subconscious journey that it doesn't matter? In our hearts and spirits the quest has already begun and as if something deep within has been programmed to complete it, though it be embedded in our psychology and played out in the theater of emotions,thought processes, dreams, et. al. Perhaps without realizing it we choose our belief system as a vessel that we hope will transport us across the chasm to those captured on the other side, in that realm we early on associated as "death", not an occurrence to our child's eyes but a place...and never a good place because, as I described earlier, for whatever reason when you go there you don't come back. 

If this admittedly nonacademic proposition holds any water then it's safe to postulate that we are all, from a very early age, chasing after death. Subconsciously, of course, we may convince ourselves that we look forward to it because we will be re-united with our loved ones; this is partly true but perhaps the motivation on that deep psychological level is not so much a reunion after all. I think it is, and has ALWAYS been, a quest to bring them back. Until the day that you can convince that inner child that it can't be done, which is the day you actually do "pass on", because your inner child doesn't, never has and never will believe in death. It's your inner child that makes you want to believe in a God who raises His children back to life. Maybe it's the inner child that opens the heart to the possibility of reincarnation since it sees the cycle of life playing out in nature...why wouldn't it somehow adapt that experience and couch it in spiritual terminology? 

To insert a short bit of commentary on Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master"...I've been asked what I thought the lead character Freddy Quell's motivation was. I hesitate to offer my opinion, it's too "big picture"-esque, but maybe his motivation was simply to make it from point A to point B with no obstructions. All the while obstructions abound. Though the point of the spiritualists in the film was to find healing through past life regression but in the end that doctrine was just as much an obstruction to his fulfilling his purpose as anything else. Quell's  mistakes were an obstruction (the old man who died drinking too much of his hooch). His primitive sexual instinct and desire for a girl who was too young for him was an obstruction (it wasn't until he admitted that she was too young that he overcame it although that realization probably began to form soon after he left for the Navy, otherwise he would have answered her letters). 

Point A to Point B with no obstructions is the perfect life. It's so obvious I'm embarrassed to point it out. Everybody knows that, but it's how we handle, deal with and hopefully overcome those obstructions that make us who we are. And we get stuck in ruts sometimes, it's a good idea to step back and reckon. Tweak what we can, eradicate what is holding us down while enriching those attributes which make the process more enjoyable or at least provide a smoother ride. 

On a personal note that is only quasi-related to what I wrote about in the first paragraphs (but which I share because the thought was the inspiration)...Until now (as I just checked) I wasn't even sure of how old I was when my maternal grandmother died. I checked. Apparently I was 13. I've always thought I was much younger, like 10. Her funeral was the first traumatic experience I can recall, at least on a personal, familial level. 

I didn't even know Grandma VanZant very well. She seemed like a very strict person. I probably thought of her as "uptight", to use the jargon of the times. She was the very opposite of my Grandma Casey who was very easy to love (and indeed was loved fiercely by everyone in the family). But I loved her too, as a young kid usually has no reason NOT to love their grandparents. She was, however, well loved by her many children (she had one son and five daughters). 

My grandpa Casey died before I was born and I was only seven when Grandpa VanZant passed away so grandma VanZant's funeral was the first I'd ever been to. I've been to more funerals since then but I've never witnessed anything like hers. She, like a formidable number of her hometown's citizenry, was to some extent involved with the Holiness denomination. Now I'm not sure if it's just the way Holiness people express mourning but almost everyone in that place was demonstrably grieving. Wailing and crying throughout the service. When the procession wound down and it was only the family at the coffin I saw my aunts basically break down, one of them threw herself over the coffin and begged her not to go. That's something I distinctly recall, that she didn't beg God to give her back, she begged her mother to stay as if she would just up and step out of the box. They were inconsolable and had to be dragged away, all the while screaming and carrying on. 

Isn't that strange how even in the mid seventies they associated her body and her spirit as so closely intertwined? I guess that haunts me to this day. In many ways Christianity encourages this with it's teaching of bodily resurrection. Though some people read "spiritual bodies" there is just as much, if not more scriptural justification for the regeneration of the physical body in the hereafter. But who can comprehend these things? Certainly not a 13 year old boy on the cusp of puberty. 

Things I experienced on the 4th floor of the Naval hospital convinced me of the importance of the body so I am by no means an ascetic. But like most everyone else in the world I have not found a way to functionally exist on a purely spiritual plane. Perhaps that's something I will come to know or am learning how to do for future reference...

One more personal thing related to my grandma's funeral that for some reason is weighing heavy on my mind as if it has significance, even though I may not understand what that significance is. Other than being a part of a traumatic event that kind of (surely) fucked me up. 

The funeral is just beginning. We've all been seated for quite a while at this point and the entire section of pews where the family has been cordoned off is filled with slobbering, crying adults and children taking it all in. I don't think I cried. It was just too weird. Distracting in a way. My cousin Jeannie was sitting next to me and of course she was a blathering mess. Now that I've found out I was 13 it doesn't surprise me so much what I did. 

I remember taking her hand. She was a good looking young woman at the time, a few years older than me but not by much. Just old enough to where she had been trusted to babysit me and my brother when we were younger. I took her hand and I'm pretty sure my motivation was to comfort her. I say "pretty sure", I'm just not wanting to rule out the possibility that there may have been another motive along with it because in hindsight I can see how that could have been the case. But cross my heart as far as I can recollect I was only wanting to stand by her and be of some help. I'm sure she took it that way...

But I also remember becoming extremely sexually aroused. Admittedly it didn't take a lot at the time to get that way. A glance at a hot woman in skimpy attire on a television commercial could be enough to send me to the bathroom. 

So here I am sitting in a hard church pew holding my cousin's hand trying to hide an erection while my grandmother lies dead in a coffin less than 10 yards from me surrounded by wailing, sobs and more tears than a grown man could shed in a thousand lifetimes. What the fuck? I want a psychologist to help me examine the countless possibilities this scenario provides for dysfunction. The associations that must somewhere exist in my psyche between sex and death, can you even imagine? I mentioned listening to Osho and I think it was something he said that provoked the entirety of everything I've just written about. He was talking about how the acceptance of reincarnation can potentially lead to the eradication of anxiety and the prospect of actually enjoying things we don't typically think of as being enjoyable. 

He even said that we could enjoy death. That concept hit me like a ton of bricks. He said it is merely another great experience of life. Not the first or the last. And I've understood that for a long time, maybe I've ignored reincarnation so long that I'd forgotten, but yes! What if death is just a crossing over from Point B into a new Point A? What if it's just Freddy Quell's emancipation from Dodd's cult into a new set of circumstances? What if it's just the way we naturally keep from getting stuck in a rut? What if it's just the grand obstacle? And what if our life lessons, the curriculum of obstacles we face and overcome throughout the years are culminated in a personal gospel ("good news") that somehow teaches us that death is not to be feared but embraced? It's Point B!

I write stuff like that and I hesitate to share it because it seems obvious to me that a lot of people might take it as celebrating death, putting it on a pedestal, obsessing about it, and worse, DESIRING IT. Of all the liberation I feel through this view of death, the notion of WANTING IT is repulsive to me. Not the idea of NEEDING IT, mind you. I'm an advocate of physician assisted suicide (although there should be a much better descriptor). People in terminal pain should not have to live the rest of their lives in agony. It's cruel, heartless and in some ways tyrannical to expect them to. But ending one's own life when you never know what's just around the bend is inexcusable. Some call it selfish, and on certain levels it probably is, but even that is not the reason I find it so disdainful. I'll never do it and I pray no one I know ever does. I won't because the experience I am in right now is "what it is" for a reason. If I am a reincarnated being it means that I was meant to experience this, indeed perhaps I even CHOSE to experience this. I didn't choose my experiences because I could or couldn't handle them. I am this way because nobody wants to live the same lifetime twice.