Today I have taken a portion of a chapter from my published book, "Dream Weaver," and placed it in the Essay section. I am editing other essays for publication late this year or next year, and so will sometimes miss writing new essays for the end of the week. This one is of an incident from my youth, something that I wouldn't run on for president, but facts are facts and those were the days. I marvel at it, the boneheaded stupidity and dumb luck, but think I could, maybe, would do it all over again, god help me.
The longer we live, the more death moves in as a close and unwanted companion, and so it has been in recent years. It is, when it happens, so unbelievably final, an iron curtain that separates the person you once talked to so matter- of- factly. It comes with as much shock as with grief or sadness. Death is reality, but it is also its antithesis, everything that is not real. In the final analysis, is does not exist - that is, the life that was, is gone, absolutely. Things like that don't happen in reality - yet they do. Reality is a paradox; and while daily situations seem normal, the context for normality is anything but. As you drive to work with your cup of coffee, pissed off at the morning traffic, a solar system is turned into something else in a black hole, or another universe is spouted from a universal source of which we cannot possibly conceive. Death, in all this, is not more real than life; but it is more real than how we conceive life. It is a mystery; our conceived reality is not. But real reality is. Death slaps us across the face like some hero in a war movie slapping the hysterical cadet, an event that should wake us the hell up, but seldom does, at least not for long.
It has long been noted that death in the age of science has been cordoned off from normal view, taken from the home and placed in an official space where specialists of death prevail. We are spared its existence, at least its human side, except for the exceptional cases when it directly affects us. And then we are cordoned off, too, until a redemptive period has passed. We, too, become as taboo as death until its lingering mystery is lost in the ether of our conceived reality. We become cleansed by ignorance.
Death to the Greeks was a dismal thing; although they, as with all people before the present, believed in an afterlife, it was popularly pictured as a gloomy place where souls gradually lost all memory of their existence, and then simply disappeared almost literally as mist does in the morning sun. Christianity was for them a great thing, a promise of a shining eternity, and it should come with less wonder to us why it was so eagerly embraced, even as believers were heavily prosecuted. But the Greek wise men for the most part never forgot that there was an eternal reality behind this, ours and theirs and everyone of this age's, conceived realities. They were able to peer behind the iron curtain of false reality to see that continuity, but it wasn't easy - and that, I believe, is the meaning of our Age. Reality for us is shut off from us just as densely as death, which is, in part, unadorned reality. I don't know what makes up this iron curtain - is it fear passed down from some fallen ancestor? Is it Adam and Eve's attempt to gain knowledge? Could it be shifted away at birth, if we were only raised by an enlightened community? Or is it a true age that cannot be escaped by the masses until time wheels us around to another age?
Whatever, there it stands. In my out-of-body experiences, it became shockingly clear that we exist outside of our mortal shells. What exists seems to be personal awareness. Where it goes or how it exists, I do not know. But I think that to get to know reality, we must get to know death. And yet to do so seems so antithetical to life. It isn't, but that is our conceived reality. Yet we can nip around it at the edges. It is, finally, in our beings to know. And so we press on, to expand this reality more and more so that we might one day bring down that iron curtain. FK
The longer we live, the more death moves in as a close and unwanted companion, and so it has been in recent years. It is, when it happens, so unbelievably final, an iron curtain that separates the person you once talked to so matter- of- factly. It comes with as much shock as with grief or sadness. Death is reality, but it is also its antithesis, everything that is not real. In the final analysis, is does not exist - that is, the life that was, is gone, absolutely. Things like that don't happen in reality - yet they do. Reality is a paradox; and while daily situations seem normal, the context for normality is anything but. As you drive to work with your cup of coffee, pissed off at the morning traffic, a solar system is turned into something else in a black hole, or another universe is spouted from a universal source of which we cannot possibly conceive. Death, in all this, is not more real than life; but it is more real than how we conceive life. It is a mystery; our conceived reality is not. But real reality is. Death slaps us across the face like some hero in a war movie slapping the hysterical cadet, an event that should wake us the hell up, but seldom does, at least not for long.
It has long been noted that death in the age of science has been cordoned off from normal view, taken from the home and placed in an official space where specialists of death prevail. We are spared its existence, at least its human side, except for the exceptional cases when it directly affects us. And then we are cordoned off, too, until a redemptive period has passed. We, too, become as taboo as death until its lingering mystery is lost in the ether of our conceived reality. We become cleansed by ignorance.
Death to the Greeks was a dismal thing; although they, as with all people before the present, believed in an afterlife, it was popularly pictured as a gloomy place where souls gradually lost all memory of their existence, and then simply disappeared almost literally as mist does in the morning sun. Christianity was for them a great thing, a promise of a shining eternity, and it should come with less wonder to us why it was so eagerly embraced, even as believers were heavily prosecuted. But the Greek wise men for the most part never forgot that there was an eternal reality behind this, ours and theirs and everyone of this age's, conceived realities. They were able to peer behind the iron curtain of false reality to see that continuity, but it wasn't easy - and that, I believe, is the meaning of our Age. Reality for us is shut off from us just as densely as death, which is, in part, unadorned reality. I don't know what makes up this iron curtain - is it fear passed down from some fallen ancestor? Is it Adam and Eve's attempt to gain knowledge? Could it be shifted away at birth, if we were only raised by an enlightened community? Or is it a true age that cannot be escaped by the masses until time wheels us around to another age?
Whatever, there it stands. In my out-of-body experiences, it became shockingly clear that we exist outside of our mortal shells. What exists seems to be personal awareness. Where it goes or how it exists, I do not know. But I think that to get to know reality, we must get to know death. And yet to do so seems so antithetical to life. It isn't, but that is our conceived reality. Yet we can nip around it at the edges. It is, finally, in our beings to know. And so we press on, to expand this reality more and more so that we might one day bring down that iron curtain. FK
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