HERMAN HESSE SAID...

I would simply like to reclaim an old and, alas, quite unfashionable private formula: Moderate enjoyment is double enjoyment. And: Do not overlook the little joys!In certain circles [moderation] requires courage to miss a première. In wider circles it takes courage not to have read a new publication several weeks after its appearance. In the widest circles of all, one is an object of ridicule if one has not read the daily paper. But I know people who feel no regret at exercising this courage.Let not the man* who subscribes to a weekly theater series feel that he is losing something if he makes use of it only every other week. I guarantee: he will gain.

Let anyone who is accustomed to looking at a great many pictures in an exhibition try just once, if he is still capable of it, spending an hour or more in front of a single masterpiece and content himself with that for the day. He will be the gainer by it.

Let the omnivorous reader try the same sort of thing. Sometimes he will be annoyed at not being able to join in conversation about some publication; occasionally he will cause smiles. But soon he will know better and do the smiling himself. And let any man who cannot bring himself to use any other kind of restraint try to make a habit of going to bed at ten o’clock at least once a week. He will be amazed at how richly this small sacrifice of time and pleasure will be rewarded.

Herman Hesse

WHO AM I

In Simone deBeauvoir's autobiography, ALL SAID AND DONE, 1972, she talks about something that I have often contemplated and indeed felt.  Her words capture this experience far better than I ever could:

"Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But if I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement — why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?

The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the births of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it was chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

Tossed into the world, I have been subjected to its laws and its contingencies, ruled by wills other than my own, by circumstance and by history: it is therefore reasonable for me to feel that I am myself contingent. What staggers me is that at the same time I am not contingent. If I had not been born no question would have arisen: I have to take the fact that I do exist as my starting point. To be sure, the future of the woman I have been may turn me into someone other than myself. But in that case it would be this other woman who would be asking herself who she was. For the person who says “Here am I” there is no other coexisting possibility. Yet this necessary coincidence of the subject and his history is not enough to do away with my perplexity. My life: it is both intimately known and remote; it defines me and yet I stand outside it."

COMMUNICATION AND WORDS

"Nevertheless, this meaning does not cover all that is signified by communication. For example, consider a dialogue. In such a dialogue, when one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical. Thus, when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood. On considering this difference, he may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants. Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together.

But of course such communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other. Each has to be interested primarily in truth and coherence so that he is ready to drop his old ideas and intentions and be ready to go on to something different when this is called for." David Bohm

I-Thou--and--Self. Versus the Authentic Self...the Differences

 

 

Martin Buber

Buber’s philosophy of dialogue views the human existence in two fundamentally different kinds of relations: I-It relations and I-Thou relations. An I-It relation is the normal everyday relation of a human being toward his or her surroundings. A person can also view another person as an It, and often does so by viewing others from a distance. In the I-Thou relation the individual enters into the relationship with another human with his or her entire being. This relationship becomes an intimate meeting, a real dialogue between both partners. Buber saw this as a reflection of the encounter between the human being and God. The I-Thou relationship allows for dialogue between the human being and God.

No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.

This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.

“Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers..”

To the man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.

The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.

The one primary word is the combination I–Thou.

The other primary word is the combination I–It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

Hence the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the primary word I–Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I–It.

I  do not experience the man to whom I say Thou. But I take my stand in relation to him, in the sanctity of the primary word. Only when I step out of it do I experience him once more… Even if the man to whom I say Thou is not aware of it in the midst of his experience, yet relation may exist. For Thou is more that It realises. No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life.

Kahlill Gibran:

My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The “I” in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.

The “friend” Gibran addresses is the idealized self, the self we present to the world, the aspirational self of who we would like to be rather than who we are — a self that invariably obscures our incompleteness and imperfection, which are the wellspring of our richest humanity. Gibran writes:

My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect — and I, too, speak with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone. My friend, thou art not my friend, but how shall I make thee understand? My path is not thy path, yet together we walk, hand in hand.

THE ACHE INSIDE THAT MAKES ME WRITE

When I cannot resolve what is happening, or what has happened in the past, when I can't say clearly to anyone what I am feeling, then it is only in writing that I find my voice. That is why I write. To extract what I otherwise find hard to comprehend at once.  I can dig out of the recesses of my consciousness, that which I already know and explore it with a depth that is unavailable otherwise. Writing whether memoir or fiction is a long slow journey.  We are explorers of the human condition at large and of our own personal self. Our attempt-- my attempt, is to find what makes us most human.

I have used "self" as a way of making what I  write something that hopefully is a universal truth. I hope I have written characters  with compassion, even when they are flawed, even those I perceive as having done me harm. It is the personal experiences we write about which help us discover a small truth about ourselves and a bigger truth about our world. When I write in the first person, I think I may be revealed. Or that someone will recognize themselves.  and when i manage to write without fear of having to be safe I have the chance of finding that amazing moment, the thing that turns on every light in the house Even while the sun is still shining.

DOING SOMETHING THAT IS NOT ESSENTIAL

"The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing. They help to offset the much larger numbers who are ready to sacrifice the ease and the security and the very lives of others in order to do what they want done. "

Walter Lipmann

 

Oliver Sacks on Death, Destiny, and the Redemptive Radiance of a Life Fully Lived

From Brainpickings...

“To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” Montaigne observed in his sixteenth-century meditation on death and the art of living. “The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it,” the late surgeon and bio ethicist, Sherwin Nuland wrote half a millennium later in his foundational treatise on mortality.

Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015

"I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death."

FORGIVENESS IS FOR THE FORGIVER

 "In the end, all forgiveness is self-forgiveness. It shakes loose the calcification that accumulates around our hearts. Then love can flow more freely.
It's a radical form of self-acceptance that allows us to release the holding on that has caused us unbelievable pain. It’s about realizing that as long as you hold onto the hot coal of your anger, resentment, and sense of having been wronged, you are only hurting yourself. Unless you release that burden, you will carry it with you for the rest of your life. You will never be free." "Forgiveness is for the forgiver" (sent to me by Colleen Gray)   Author unknown

LOVE: INTELLECT VS. HEART

"I had believed that I was leaving nothing out of account, like a rigorous analyst; I had believed that I knew the state of my own heart. But our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain."  Marcel Proust

LONELINESS

Olivia Laing from her book: "Lonely City"

 "Loss is a cousin of loneliness. They intersect and overlap, and so it’s not surprising that a work of mourning might invoke a feeling of aloneness, of separation. Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people, the loneliness of mourning.'".

IN MEMORY

Sonnet XCIV. by Pablo Neruda

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waiver,
I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer my love, I will die again.

In memory. Dietrich Baeu

Pablo Neruda_as a young man

Requiem for a Neighbor. How do we deal with loss?

               BY BIL jOHNSON FROM HIS WEBSITE: BILJOHNSON.COM

     A knock on our door at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday is an unusual circumstance.  We had heard some door pounding the night before on our neighbor’s door across the hall --- but it wasn’t enough to elicit significant barking from our dog.  It happened again this morning and then the knock.  Answering, I was met by a young police officer and behind him were the parents (they self-identified) of our young schoolteacher neighbor.  They wanted to know if we had seen Kelly yesterday or heard anything from her.  We had noticed her car was gone all day, as it always was when she was teaching (we are retired teachers) and was home around 3:30 p.m. on Friday.  Beyond that we knew nothing.  The officer thanked us and we learned that her parents had gotten a text from her the previous evening that said she wasn’t feeling well.
      We shut our door, as you do in the suburbs, and then listened and observed, through our peephole and front window, as police were joined by firefighters to break open the front door.  My wife thought she heard a policeman radio “dead body” to someone and an ambulance arrived.  EMT’s made a short visit and our neighbor’s family congregated on the sidewalk in front of our house.  A priest soon joined them.  I waited until the family dispersed and the CMT (which I took to mean Coroner’s Medical Technicians) removed the body (I did not see that --- only viewed their van, here and then gone) before taking the dog out for her morning walk.  The young policeman and the priest, in a “The Sermanator” baseball cap, were the only ones left out front.  By the time I returned with the dog, the priest was leaving and I asked the policeman what had happened.  He assured me there was no foul play and that Kelly had nothing serious in her medical records.  I asked if suicide was a possibility and he ruled that out --- no evidence to believe that.  A heart attack?  An aneurism?  We would have to wait to find out.
The rest of the day was odd for us, with Kelly’s Subaru parked (as it always was, when she was home) right in front of our unit.  It was hard to look at it and not remember the hundreds of times in the past three years I had seen her getting in and out of that car, the countless times we exchanged small talk about weather and teaching and the wonder of vacations.  And, just like that, it would never happen again.
     I remember reading about our ancient ancestors, cave people of some sort, and what it must have been like the first time they experienced death in their tribe.  Finding a lifeless body where, only hours before, it had been a living, breathing person.  What kind of confusion and mind-numbing loss did they feel?  Death intrudes in our daily lives in the news --- but it is a detached and distant event.  When it is your neighbor across the hall --- a vibrant 36-year-old human being --- and there doesn’t seem to be a reason, it is more than baffling.  It reminds us in the most dramatic way of how tentative our grasp on life is, how fleeting it can be.  I am almost twice Kelly’s age.  Why her and not me?  What kinds of cards are dealt that way?  And what are we, who are left, to make of it.  I am as dumbfounded as that cave dweller and there is a sense of loss that is difficult to describe.  We were not “friends,” really --- we were neighbors (I had never ever been in her condo unit, but only guessed it was a mirror image of ours).  We had fleeting, friendly, pleasant conversations and did neighborly favors for one another (“Can you take our newspapers in while we’re on vacation?”  “I signed for your package from UPS”).  Yet there is now some hole in the life of our community, a loss that is quite ineffable. 
     Writing has always been a source of release and comfort for me.  There are times, despite my verbosity, I am at a genuine loss for spoken words.  This is one of those times.  I was not a friend, so I won’t grieve but I do feel a loss that I can’t really express in spoken words.  So this is my requiem to a soul that has left us for reasons we will never understand and certainly at far too young an age to make any sense.  We will watch the grieving parents remove belongings from her home, and eventually drive that car away, and probably, at some point, sell the unit to a new neighbor.  Time is strangely elastic in moments like this and telescoping ahead doesn’t really make the present feel any better.  The world will move on.  We’re sure her students will severely grieve the loss of a beloved teacher; her family will never fill the hollow that must be, at present, a crater.  We are on the outside but close enough to feel the loss of one of our own, a good person now gone and irreplaceable.  This is one of those instances that really makes me aware of being not very smart at all --- there is no (rational) sense to be made of such an event. 

                    April 10, 2016 .  Bil Johnson . Connecticut
 

WHEN YOU CLOSE THE DOOR, IT MIGHT BE NIGHT FOREVER.(The Velvet Underground)

I closed the door by expunging all the little keyholes that were still open,  I asked that he forgive me. My temptations were no worse than the ones he had suffered from and had acted upon, no worse than his own declarations   It was His own temptation that led me on this journey and I am never sure he realized the extent of his trespass into my life.  He died for me yesterday, but the mourning continues.  I obviously died for him some time ago and he moved on and away, no wish to look back. Now even my good memories are sullied by my own hand. it was the extent to which I was able to move into the dark and morbid world I allowed myself to explore.  I haven't learned the lesson of being here, just being.  I am history-onlynow--a memory. But the worst part is that even those memories are tarnished irrevocable and I was the one who tarnished them.  It should have been him.  I was the righteous one.  I once had honor on my side, but no longer. I consciously stepped over the line, and then without watching my own back, I allowed to happen what did happen  This is a stinging lesson. His forgiveness would give me back some dignity, some acknowledgement that he had the capacity to understand my pain, and hope only that I find a different path.  I asked for it, And he eventually accepted my apology with an emoji of a happy face.   preview of a short story.

Marshall Arisman_Light Runners Series

SOLITUDE

“Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude,” young Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth Bishop believed that everyone should experience at least one prolonged period of solitude in life. Even if we don’t take so extreme a view as artist Agnes Martin’s assertion that “the best things in life happen to you when you’re alone,” one thing is certain: Our capacity for what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has termed “fertile solitude” is absolutely essential not only for our creativity but for the basic fabric of our happiness — without time and space unburdened from external input and social strain, we’d be unable to fully inhabit our interior life, which is the raw material of all art.

A POEM'S LAST LINES

Ran across this poem and loved the last lines.
Afterword
BY KATE WALDMAN

Death is a lack, I suppose,
and love more so. One day
(it hurts to think of it),
we may not know each other’s faces.
But I will not falter.
I will drive here alone,
release you into air.

From Anne LaMott. About Writing

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

But I also tell [my students] that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did 

Clara at Sixty is now available through Lulu Publishing, Amazon and Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and your favorite bookstore.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/yvette-nachmias-baeu/clara-at-sixty/ebook/product-22496973.html?ppn=1

David Bowie's Son Shared This Letter From Doctor About Father's Passing.

The world mourned the loss of David Bowie on January 10 - a legendary singer, songwriter, producer, actor, multi-instrumentalist, painter, record producer, and overall human being.

Duncan Jones, Bowie's son, shared a tribute to his father, penned by the palliative care doctor that they came to know throughout Bowie's 18-month cancer illness.

Find the letter below.

Dear David,

Oh no, don’t say it’s true – whilst realization of your death was sinking in during those grey, cold January days of 2016, many of us went on with our day jobs. At the beginning of that week I had a discussion with a hospital patient, facing the end of her life. We discussed your death and your music, and it got us talking about numerous weighty subjects, that are not always straightforward to discuss with someone facing their own demise. In fact, your story became a way for us to communicate very openly about death, something many doctors and nurses struggle to introduce as a topic of conversation. But before I delve further into the aforementioned exchange, I’d like to get a few other things off my chest, and I hope you don’t find them a saddening bore.

Thank you for the Eighties when your ChangesOneBowie album provided us with hours of joyful listening, in particular on a trip from Darmstadt to Cologne and back. My friends and I will probably always associate Diamond Dogs, Rebel Rebel, China Girl and Golden Years with that particular time in our lives. Needless to say, we had a great time in Köln.

Thank you for Berlin, especially early on, when your songs provided some of the musical backdrop to what was happening in East and West Germany. I still have ‘Helden’ on vinyl and played it again when I heard you had died (you’ll be pleased to hear that Helden will also feature in our next Analogue Music Club in the Pilot pub in Penarth later this month). Some may associate David Hasselhoff with the fall of the wall and reunification; but many Germans probably wish that time had taken a cigarette and put it in Mr Hasselhoff’s mouth around that time, rather than hear “I’ve been looking for freedom” endlessly on the radio. For me that time in our history is sound tracked by ‘Heroes’.

Thanks also on behalf of my friend Ifan, who went to one of your gigs in Cardiff. His sister Haf was on the doors that night and I heard a rumour that Ifan managed to sneak in for free (he says sorry!). You gave him and his mate a wave from the stage which will remain in his memory forever.

Thank you for Lazarus and Blackstar. I am a palliative care doctor, and what you have done in the time surrounding your death has had a profound effect on me and many people I work with. Your album is strewn with references, hints and allusions. As always, you don’t make interpretation all that easy, but perhaps that isn’t the point. I have often heard how meticulous you were in your life. For me, the fact that your gentle death at home coincided so closely with the release of your album, with its good-bye message, in my mind is unlikely to be coincidence. All of this was carefully planned, to become a work of death art. The video of Lazarus is very deep and many of the scenes will mean different things to us all; for me it is about dealing with the past when you are faced with inevitable death.

Your death at home. Many people I talk to as part of my job think that death predominantly happens in hospitals, in very clinical settings, but I presume you chose home and planned this in some detail. This is one of our aims in palliative care, and your ability to achieve this may mean that others will see it as an option they would like fulfilled. The photos that emerged of you some days after your death, were said to be from the last weeks of your life. I do not know whether this is correct, but I am certain that many of us would like to carry off a sharp suit in the same way that you did in those photos. You looked great, as always, and it seemed in direct defiance of all the scary monsters that the last weeks of life can be associated with.

For your symptom control needs, you will presumably have had palliative care professionals advise on pain, nausea, vomiting, breathlessness, and I can imagine they did this well. I envisage that they also discussed any emotional anguish you may have had.

For your advance care planning (i.e. planning heath and care decisions prior to things getting worse and before becoming unable to express them), I am certain you will have had a lot of ideas, expectations, prior decisions and stipulations. These may have been set out clearly in writing, near your bed at home, so that everyone who met you was clear on what you wanted, regardless of your ability to communicate. It is an area not just palliative care professionals, but in fact all healthcare workers want to provide and improve, so that it is less likely that any sudden health incidents will automatically result in a blue-light ambulance emergency room admission. Especially when people become unable to speak for themselves.

And I doubt that anyone will have given you Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) in the last hours/days of your life, or even considered it. Regrettably, some patients who have not actively opted out of this treatment still receive it, by default. It involves physical, sometimes bone-breaking chest compressions, electric shocks, injections and insertion of airways and is only successful in 1-2% of patients whose cancer has spread to other organs in their body. It is very likely that you asked your medical team to issue you with a Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Order. I can only imagine what it must have been like to discuss this, but you were once again a hero, or a ‘Held’, even at this most challenging time of your life. And the professionals who saw you will have had good knowledge and skill in the provision of palliative and end-of-life care. Sadly, this essential part of training is not always available for junior healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses, and is sometimes overlooked or under-prioritized by those who plan their education. I think if you were ever to return (as Lazarus did), you would be a firm advocate for good palliative care training being available everywhere.

So back to the conversation I had with the lady who had recently received the news that she had advanced cancer that had spread, and that she would probably not live much longer than a year or so. She talked about you and loved your music, but for some reason was not impressed by your Ziggy Stardust outfit (she was not sure whether you were a boy or a girl). She too, had memories of places and events for which you provided an idiosyncratic soundtrack. And then we talked about a good death, the dying moments and what these typically look like. And we talked about palliative care and how it can help. She told me about her mother’s and her father’s death, and that she wanted to be at home when things progressed, not in a hospital or emergency room, but that she’d happily transfer to the local hospice should her symptoms be too challenging to treat at home.

We both wondered who may have been around you when you took your last breath and whether anyone was holding your hand. I believe this was an aspect of the vision she had of her own dying moments that was of utmost importance to her, and you gave her a way of expressing this most personal longing to me, a relative stranger.

Thank you.

An Earthly Connection

We saw this picture months ago and it captured our hearts. A 20 year old dog with arthritis and his friend…NBC reported that Schoep, died today or maybe yesterday. This picture is a heart stopping,  demonstration of a bond that is beautiful beyond words…Somehow I am not sad..I am in awe

What Is Life? - By Swami Yogananda

WHAT is life? Life is a wave of electrons and atoms, a wave of protoplasm, a wave of power, and a wave of consciousness on the Ocean of Spirit. Life is intelligent, organized motion. It becomes a clod of earth or melts itself into vapor, or becomes a human being or a flower. Stones, living Beings, and dead creatures are all waves on the Ocean of Life. There is no death nor cessation of motion in anything. Everything is living.

Life After Death

IF LIFE is eternal motion, then why does death visit the human body? This is the great question. Death is not cessation nor annihilation, for even matter is indestructible. (At death, the life and intelligence waves, with the Soul, slip away from the body wave.) The burned candle changes form, but its weight and constituent ingredients can be found if the carbonic acid gas is held in a jar. Matter is Life. Life is matter. Life is intelligence. Matter is sleeping intelligence. Since matter is indestructible, all Life is indestructible.

However, that does not mean that Life is not changeable. In fact, Eternal Infinite Life manifests itself through myriads of finite forms of flowers and living creatures. The phenomena of death, or the illusion of change, is reflected in all finite substances, otherwise, the Infinite would be limited and measured by finite substances. The Infinite would lose its nature by becoming finite, definite, circumscribed, and molded.

That is why the beautiful rose and the glorious youth, after expressing certain qualities of the Infinite, disappear as silent waves into the Infinite Ocean of Life. The body is the froth of life on the intelligence and Soul waves. The froth is temporary compared to the individualized Soul wave.

Life is relative. Some waves of Life last longer than others, but they all have to express the Infinite variously and fully. They all emerge from and merge into the Infinite Ocean. The speck of star dust, the sun, moon, clouds, rainbow, the gossamer, the nightingale, and the whippoorwill all have to express the silent Infinite. Natural death comes when each object, each human being, has done its full share in expressing the Infinite. The untimely death of a youth, suggests that he is changing his diseased body vehicle and is existing elsewhere for better opportunities.

That life is not dependent on food or oxygen is proved by verified cases of men living for long periods of time in a state of suspended animation. Life can exist in a corpse in a different form. A chicken heart can live 16 years in a chemical syrup—longer than the life of a chicken. A crocodile lives 600 years. Life is vagrant, like a river appearing and disappearing in the desert of Life.

Death gives new robes to the Soul actors, in which to play new dramas on the stage of Life. Death, above all else, is a transition to a better land, a change of residence. The wise man who has opened his Spiritual Eye finds that the death of earthly life gives him a new beginning in another supernal life. On this earth, seeing, we see not. An X-Ray picture can show the bones of the fingers, which the eye cannot see. In the same way, we do not see the cords of light—blue, violet, aquamarine, orange, yellow, and white, which bind the atoms of the earth together. We hear the gross noise of the world and a few sweet melodies, and nothing more.

The wise man beholds in this Life, and after death with his Spiritual Eye, not a region of chaos and dark sleep, which is all that the Soul in ignorance experiences after death. Death is very attractive to the former, for instead of terror he finds infinite freedom. The Soul-bird-of-paradise finds it freedom from the limitations of the cage of manifestation. The Soul, appareled in searchlights of multi-hues, soars in infinite directions searching, claiming its lost territory of Eternity.

Terrible thought! If there were no death, fifteen hundred million people would monopolize the infinite. The planets and the universes would trade-mark God with the seal of finitude. The Infinite would be exhausted. Life and death would lose the taste of charming mystery. Everything would grow old and stale. The Infinite is ever-new, so by God’s Infinite Magic Wand of renewing death, He keeps everything ever expressing, ever remodeling itself into more suitable vehicles for Infinite expression.

Hence this paradox—the dance of death—shattering worlds, pulverizing skulls, crumbling roses, destroying fifteen hundred million people every hundred years, killing billions of fishes, trillions of bacteria, and powdering sextillion countless atoms. The life beautiful is evolving, training Souls in the factory of mighty death. Death is the Cosmic furnace in which the dross of all objects and living Souls is purified. Death comes to a dutiful Soul as its promotion to a higher state. It comes to an unsuccessful Soul to give it another chance in a different environment. The wise man experiences through death an infinitely better, safer haven.

Only those who have practiced the control of the heart-beat and learned to live without oxygen—by eating less carbonized food and preventing decay of tissues in the body through definite training in meditation—can consciously experience death at will as a rest from constant muscular activity, and specially Life’s involuntary activity of the heart, lungs, diaphragm, circulation, etc.

In heaven there are no crackers or soup, no breakfast, lunch, or dinner, no water, no oxygen, or sunshine. Mortals should learn to live more by inner energy, unattached to the body. Those who learn in this Life to live by Spirit, and are unattached to the body, quickly realize the freedom of the Soul from the bondage of oxygen, food, and water, after death. Death is a fear to the ignorant human animal, but it is a transition to a higher state to the wise—a promotion to higher grades of Life.

In the mellow light of the other world, the wise person perceives the inner nature of stars, stones, living Beings, dust, iron, gold, earth, and planets, dazzling with Infinite brilliancy. Every object which we perceive has two sides—the gross ugly outer side, present before the physical eyes, and the inner, exceedingly beautiful side, revealed to the eye of wisdom.

The crude brick seen by the physical eye appears to be like a garden of electrons when viewed through the Spiritual Eye. Human beings with skeleton bodies, ugly sinews, and red blood appear as beautiful, many-hued living Beings made of visible, mellow, materialized love. The rose of the human garden looks like a paper rose compared to the inner rosy luster of its whirling atoms.

Nothing fades in that world so quickly. Everything talks there silently. The roses talk to the Souls with the language of Spirit. The garden of roses lives by the breath of the Souls, and the Souls breathe the aroma of the roses. The gentlest earthly flower—the lily or violet—drunk with gross sunlight, is not allowed to tread the sanctity of that fair garden of the gods.

The mortal, enslaved by oxygen and sunlight, and gorged with material food, faints at the delicate airless atmosphere of that Divine supernal region. Darkness and gross lights equally lose their relative dualities in the darkless dark, in the lightless but all-revealing Soul-light of that sphere. Yogis practice control of Life and the breathless state to be able to live in airless regions of living light, unburdened by the body.

Souls in that region do not encase themselves in bundles of bones with fleshly covers. They carry no frail, heavy frames to collide and break with other crude solids. There is no war there between solids, oceans, lightning, disease, and man’s frail frame. There are no accidents there, for all things exist in mutual help and not in antagonism. All forms of vibration are in harmony. All forces live in peace and conscious helpfulness. The Souls, the rays on which they tread, the orange rays which they drink and eat—all are living. They live in mutual cognizance and cooperation, breathing not oxygen, but the joy of the Spirit. There they live as long as they want to live, playing like waves on the Infinite Ocean of Light, and there they melt into one another by celestial love, as the Ocean of Light.

No bacteria, no thirst, no selfish desires, no heartaches, no lust, no pain nor sorrow, no boisterous fleeting joy, no accidents, shattered bones or skulls, and no excruciating pain of parting, can ever exist there.

In that better region change is not decay, but change exists like a Cosmic magician, to entertain with variety through Infinite expression. There the law of change is governed by the will of Souls and is not forced upon them.

Let us not bury the Soul in the grave and call death annihilation, but let us see it as a door through which bravely-marching Souls of earthly Life can enter to find the all-alluring, all-charming region of our ever-luminous, ever-peaceful Common Cosmic Home. Mortal fears, heartaches, dreams, and illusions fade, and the darkness of death changes into another infinitely more beautiful universe. Why pity the dead? In wisdom, they pity us. They can see their super-region and us at the same time with their Spiritual Eyes, while we cannot see them with our gross spiritually-blind physical eyes.