DIE, YOU DIRTY DOG! DIE!

Blog number fifty-six                                                                      Oct 31 2006

If you find this entry morose, I'm sorry.  It is not meant to be.  It is meant to be an assurance that existence is a serene sacred blessing.  It is meant to be an assurance that there are benevolences cleverly disguised as cruelty.

When I was seven years old I stepped off into a deep hole in a water-filled gravel pit and I didn't know how to swim.  The best I could do was to continually push my hands upwards and bring them down to my sides -- over and over.  My head never broke the surface but evidently my struggles brought the attention of a young girl who grabbed me by the hair and pulled me out.

I did not thank her.  I never spoke to her.  I didn't even look at her.  I was embarrassed.  I simply walked to the car where my mother and Aunt Aunie were waiting for me, climbed into back seat and off we went.

While I was underwater I kept trying to wake up.  I thought I was having a nightmare.  At some point I realized I wasn't drowning right because no bubbles were coming from my mouth like I had seen in the movies.  So in order to do it right, I opened my mouth, tilted my face up towards the surface, relaxed with my arms hanging backwards behind me and sank, letting water run down my throat like chugging beer, creating the desired bubbles.  After doing that for a while, I resumed by fruitless churning of the water above me until the girl grabbed my hair.

In the days after that I thought about that experience constantly and this was when I began to experience intense fear.  Not during the ordeal, but afterwards.  A creation of Mind, you see. 

It was at about this time that I had to get to bed before my siblings so that I could go to sleep with the light on.  I slept with my hand over my heart so I could be assured my heart didn't stop beating without my knowledge.  I saw ghosts behind every door at night, especially in the closet next to our bedroom.  My father once took me in there with a flashlight and said, "See?  There's nothing in here."

"Yeah, NOW there isn't," I thought, "big deal.  But just wait 'til you leave."

My fear led me to read all I could on the topic of death or dying and I used to ask new acquaintances if they had ever almost died and if they said yes, I would ask them what it was like.  None of them nor I, had ever felt any fear or pain.  The fear sat in later when we had time to think about it.

I think that maybe while you are dying, there's too much else going on to be thinking about abstractions such as fear or pain.  These things come if you don't die.

I talked to one guy who had got caught in an undertow, and seemingly, from outside his body, a little above and behind, he knew his body was going to take a breath and he would die.  His head broke the surface just as his body took a breath.

I asked him if anything was beautiful, this being reported by all the near victims in the books I had read.

He said, "There wasn't anything to see.  Everything was black. All I could see was black."

I asked him again if anything was beautiful, thinking of the occasional report of beautiful music or peacefulness.  He started to shake his head, "No," again, but then he stopped and got a thoughtful look on his face -- as if he were remembering the incident, and then a look of wonderment as he announced, "Yeah! There WAS something beautiful.  The black!  It was beautiful!"

A man being mauled by a lion, a man falling from rock to rock down a mountain, a man flying through the air after being tossed from his smashed automobile -- each viewing the incident dispassionately amidst vividly beautiful lights and colors in a peaceful silence, as if time had stopped.  Beauty, peace, entertainment.  Dying sounds like it might be more enjoyable than we've been led to believe.

Death is hated and feared not because of what it is -- a natural and necessary blessing, but because of what it takes from us -- our loved ones.  And what it gives us -- sorrow.  Selfishness then.  Other people's deaths affects us personally and negatively.

Every one of us is going to die.  What does it matter to the one who dies, when that happens?  What do the dead care about time spent living?   

Life insists upon suffering being a part of it. Life and suffering, the only wedded couple that will never divorce.  Buy one, get the other free.

I don't understand people who accept the miraculousness of being born a human once, but firmly believe it cannot happen twice.  And if you do believe you will be born, die, born, die, forever, what's the problem with one death?

Or if you are only born once and die once, you go to heaven and live forever there.  Or to hell, and shame on you for that.  It's what you deserve.  What's the problem?

Or you are your body (despite all the evidence against that nonsense) and you die once and the worms eat you and that's it.  What's the problem there?  You become an inert stone.  Does a stone regret death?

No matter how you look at it, death is a certainty that cannot be avoided.  If it's horrible, it'll happen.  If it's a blessing, it'll happen.  Lighten up.

It is a common dictum of Eastern Philosophers that one should ponder on one's own death daily.  That way one doesn't get so torn up when one sees one's life beginning to come to an end.

I once read that if a person fears death, they should look at it and see if it is death they fear, or dying. 

I looked and found that I feared dying.  I looked to see why I feared dying and found out that I was afraid I was going to be afraid when I was dying.  I feared fear. 

Thank God we'll all know the truth about death in just a few years. 

Until then, lighten up.