Category: Uncategorized

March 4, 2019 /

Our first Death Café, after a hiatus of some six months, occurred shortly after the death of Jon Underwood, the iconic founder of the Death Café social enterprise.

As I sat listening to the conversation, I couldn’t help but reflect on this remarkable man, and that how without him what was taking place today, at this very minute, would never have occurred. He was a visionary who pioneered the community death conversation forum and death literate movement; an informal, agenda-free space for people to come together to have conversations about death-related issues. He was also provocative in that he confronted what for many people in the West is a difficult concept; the meaning of their mortality. In social research terms, we can define this as, amongst other things, community development, community capacity building, and the fostering or strengthening of individual resilience.

But Jon was simpler than that. His objective was and always will be, to “increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives”. How we all do this is uniquely individual, yet there is one thing I can be sure of, new trains of thought were generated in the minds of all those who have ever attended a Death Café I’ve had the pleasure to facilitate. And that is thanks to Jon, the first death activist and advocate I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to know.

As always, people came from all walks of life and brought with them varied life experiences, belief systems, and ways of being in the world. Being a palliative care nurse, one attendee “ponders death a lot”, while a medium gently observes, “I rely on death in order to do my work”. Another is curious and wants to know what Death Café is all about, another has friends with cancer which in turn make her think about her own death, and one works in pastoral care.

Topics ranged from the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill, to palliative sedation and end-of-life or terminal restlessness. “What’s going on?” I wondered, “We don’t know” was the response. The impact of deathbed visions on the dying and their carers was another topic which was explored. How is it possible that these things occur, and how merciful is it that they do. We also explored a quote by E M Forster, American essayist and novelist; “Death destroys a man, the idea of death saves him”.

It is a provocative statement, and one, I feel, intended by the author to evoke a response, to make the reader or listener consider the contradiction in the statement, and to invite us all into a relationship with death in order that we might live our lives a little better, a little more meaningfully, and to work toward our spiritual destiny perhaps a little more consciously.

Thank you Jon, without you, none of this would have been possible.

March 4, 2019 /

Dune, a science fiction novel written by American author Frank Herbert, was originally published in 1965. In 1984 it was released at the cinema to a worldwide audience. The statement, “The sleeper must awaken” is part of a conversation which takes place during a scene featuring two of the main characters, Duke Leto Atreides and Paul Atreides, his son.

It is the eve of what eventuates into death, betrayal and an epic battle for control of a valuable resource found only on the desert planet Arrakis. The two are standing on a rampart of sorts talking about the future when turning toward his son the Duke says, “Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

I’m reminded of this because in May I joined a Work exercise group and as it so happened, the fact that I am psychologically asleep (in the Work sense) was brought home to me yet again, vividly and starkly, as was the reality of the human condition, and in particular of my condition as a member of the human race. Charles Tart captures it as follows:

We are dreaming. We are entranced. We are automatized.
We are caught in illusions while thinking we are perceiving reality …
We need to awaken to reality, the reality of the problems
caused by our fragmented selves, so we can discover our deeper selves and the reality of our
world, undistorted by our entranced condition.

Charles Tart, Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential, 1987.

In attempting to undertake the exercise I learnt a valuable lesson; I had to be awake while being awake. The task of completing the exercise served as a two-way mirror which enabled me to see aspects of the Sleep State and to experience the reality of the profoundly blinding nature of what the Sleep State is, of how its cloying nature seduces the mind and obscures the vision without our even being aware of it.

It seems to me that Tart has captured the intensity and sense of urgency that accompanies all work on oneself – death constantly stalks us and we never know when or how it will strike. Will we die without having awoken to the possibilities of our soul growth and evolution, in the Work sense, or will we die as robotic automatons, always thinking we’re awake yet never realising we are not.

 

March 4, 2019 /

Once upon a time the fishes of a certain river took counsel together and said, “They tell us that our life and being is from the water, but we have never seen water, and know not what it is.”  Then some said, “There dwells in the sea a very wise fish who knows all things.  Let us journey to him and learn what water is.”

They made the journey, found the wise fish, and made their request.  He replied:

O ye who seek to solve the knot!

Ye live in God, yet know him not.

Ye sit upon the river’s brink,

Yet crave in vain a drop to drink.

Ye dwell beside a countless store

Yet perish hungry at the door.

They thanked him and said, “Forasmuch as you have shown us what water is not, we now know perfectly what it is”, and they returned home satisfied.

[Sufi teaching story, source unknown.]

February 25, 2019 /

“As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. 
I love death – not morbidly, but because He explains. 
He shows me the emptiness of Money.
Death and Money are the eternal foes.  Not Death and Life …
Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. 
Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind, lies something so immense
that all that is great in us responds to it.”

E.M. Forster, Howards End, 2002.

There is much ado these days about coffins and skeletons, and using death-related insignia for cause and effect in promoting death awareness, which I too occasionally get caught up in, but when I find that happening I bring to mind that one sentence from Forsters text, “Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind, lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it.”

These are words laden with meaning and complexity, and worth pondering.  What is it that Forster is referring to?  What is that immensity that all that is great in us responds to?  What lays beyond the vulgar mind, which is all too often satisfied with the drossy excitement of life?  The drama of it? The ‘wow’ of it?  The ephemeral shallowness of it?

Eastern teachings tell us that the material world, and we ourselves, are impermanent, and that the only permanence is change.  Yet Eastern teachings also tell us that this can be overcome, that something in us can become permanent, that something in us can transcend this state of affairs.  How do we understand ‘permanence’?  What is ‘permanent’?  And how can we become something other than what and how we know ourselves to be.

Does it have something to do with Forster’s ‘immensity’?  And is there something innately in us, buried deeply within, slumbering perhaps, that is waiting for us to acknowledge its presence?  Could it be that Forster’s immensity calls to us and yearns for us, yet at the same time is denied by us?

And in the solitude of silence the answer comes.