Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is The Emerald, currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast that we explore in ever changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel in space. Good morning, we're all gonna die.
There's no getting around it if you're listening to this podcast and you're a human being, both of which are fair assumptions, then at some point in some way or other you are going to pass on. As Sogel Rinpoche once wrote, quote, What is born, will die, what has been gathered will be dispersed, what has been accumulated, will be exhausted, what has been built up will collapse, and what has been high will be brought low. And that pretty much sums it up, right? That's a universal law.
No one here in the immortal words of Jim Morrison gets out alive. Last time I checked the mortality rate is 100%. Exercise regularly eat sensibly, die anyway, says Bill Bryson. And of course, we all know this, right? We all know in some kind of conceptual far-off way that this is the trajectory that we're all on. This is the way. If there's one way it is to existence, it's that all things must pass. We know this, but we can go about our lives for the most part, not really thinking about it.
Keeping that rude reality of our assured demise comfortably at bay. Sometimes it's brought a little more to the forefront when a favorite rock star passes, you know, a little twinge of, hmm, first prince. Now, Bowie, something's happening here, and is it just me or does this seem to be happening more and more? Or every year, if you notice, a few more of your old friends, social media pages go oddly silent. A few more each year, but their posts are still there.
Sometimes posts from just days before, before, you know, they passed, and those posts hang there, strangely suspended like phantoms, a residue of words, impressions, glimpses. The person, but yet also not the person, frozen somehow in digital space. And then in certain years, close friends pass, or even relatives. This year, I had a few family friends go on to the other side, and you know, the older you get, the more it happens, and then the closer it is to you, the more undeniable it is.
And you're opened up, raw, the precious, fleeting nature of this existence brought right to the forefront. And suddenly, death becomes undeniable in that raw place, that raw place after that raw place among the living. I was greener than grass, and death was so near. And time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea. You know how it is in that space the weeks after someone dear has passed, when life seems like a dream, and more real than ever before at the same time.
More real, like smells or more vivid, colors are brighter, the shine in the eyes of those that remain as sharper. All this treasure around us so clear. And then at the same time, more like a dream. Like this reality is something we slip in and out of so easily. Here, one minute in the fullness of family and relationality and conversation and established bonds, and the next phew into the great mystery. Have you felt this? How death connects us to that which is
real and ephemeral at once? Is it shock that does this? Is it neural repotterning? Is it at trance? A sweet, liminal time between this world and the other world? Is it a glimpse of how things actually are? Is it all of these things? And of course, after time that raw feeling fades and we move on because brain chemistry dictates that we must move on, because the rhythms of life take us back into our established patterns,
our tried and true ways of being. Living our lives and death is just a distant afterthought again. But he's always there, death, the lingering subtext, the elephant in the room, the unwanted house guests, sometimes showing up when he's not wanted at all. Yes? I am death. Who is it darling? It's a death or something, he's come about the reeping? I have come for you. Now look here, you barge in here quite
uninvited, break glasses and then announce quite casually that we're all dead. Well, I would remind you that you want to guest in this house. And he comes for everyone. Relentless, persistent, he spares no one. Death the old blue song says has no mercy at all. And then somebody becomes, he'll do have no mercy in the land. A woman, Kisa Gotami, comes to the Buddha, distraught over the death of her child, asking him to resurrect him. Bring me a mustard seed that Buddha says from a household that
has never known death and I'll bring him back to life. And of course, Kisa Gotami goes from house to house looking for a mustard seed from a household that has never known death. And she can't find one. Every family, every household comes to know death. And so our ancestors did not have the luxury to just forget death. Our ancestors quite probably spent a whole lot more time in that raw liminality, that simultaneous vivid and dream
like place in which the line between worlds is crossed over and over. Because for them, there was no hiding from death. How much more vivid, more raw, more visceral, more present, more undeniable is death for people who have no ability to shut death away. No dedicated buildings far away from everything else where people go to die comfortably out of sight. So when death happens, it happens right there. In the hut, in the cave, in the shelter, with everyone around to witness it,
amid babies crying and dogs barking death in the midst of life. What is death then? What is death in a time before pain killers? What is death in a culture where there is no convenient way to avoid seeing dead bodies? The first time I saw a dead body, I was 13 years old in India. I can still see him. He was young. He was covered in marigolds. His eyes were still open. He was covered in marigolds. His eyes were still open. Now, where is he?
Our ancestors saw death up close, often, to see and feel death like this, to witness this great crossing over causes its own type of crossing over. There is a vivid trance that comes from being up close with death. It may be that the acuity of the ancestral vision, the art that stems from it, the halos around the heads of the figures on the rock walls and churches, the jagged rivers of lightning that adorn cave art on six continents, spring from sensitized vision that comes from the
place of always on the edge of death. The space of the visionary artist is a space of death. Myths are stories of death. Tell me a significant myth, a long myth at which there is no death. Ritual is what it is because of death. Ritual is an enactment almost always of some type of death, the seed pod cracks open, the coconut breaks, its fragile shell shatters. Death is the story, because we live in a world of transformation in which things are born and die, all around us,
all the time. So perhaps ancestral visions of a world that is both ephemeral and ultra-real, the ease with which the ancestors journeyed into visionary spaces was facilitated by close contact with death. And in that ancestral vision, the dead are close and the dead carry on and the dead interweave with the living. And death and life perhaps are not two oppositional forces but one great continuum. One goddess, one mother, nature. And the force that brings us into this world is the
exact same force that takes us out. O death, O death, I looked at the forest floor and it was so green, so alive with life. I looked at the forest floor and it was a great cemetery. It was death itself. I looked at the forest floor and it was both. It was both at once. O death, we can run from it, talk our way around it, but it is inevitable reality and all ritual and all
spiritual practice and one way or another is a preparation for death. No one here gets out alive, the death episode, this time on the Emerald. O death, I will just live for another. In the time you've been listening to this podcast episode, about 800 people have died, 800 people have crossed over. It happens to all of us Bill Bryson says, quote, every day around the
world, 160,000 people die. That's about 60 million fresh bodies a year, roughly equivalent to killing off the populations of Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Austria and Australia, year after year. And the journey goes something like this. When you go, hopefully many, many years from now, hopefully peacefully surrounded by friends and relatives. But when you pass on absolutely everything you've ever known, everything you've ever loved, everything you've ever earned or accumulated will
all be left behind. Simple. We all know that, right? Or do we? Let's dive in a little deeper. Let's make a list of everything that we don't get to take with us when we go. The house, the car, everything we've built or bought, all the matter, all the stuff, the sofa, the clothes, the entertainment system, the laptop, the phone. Oh, the phone. And there's a little twinge there, right? And addictive twinge. I wondered how many that have passed on since the
advent of the smartphone have been reaching for the phone in those last moments. If not overtly reaching for it, then at least the slight thought of, wait, there are messages I haven't responded to yet. Wait, I have to post about this. Wait, I have to check my likes. I guarantee it's happened. But there are no smartphones where we're going. And there'll be a whole lot of conversations that we're still in the middle of when that time comes. Won't get to finish those conversations.
Our inbox probably won't be totally empty when we go. There'll be stuff for us to respond to you that we will never, ever respond to. Never. Never. The battery on the phone might need charging when we go. Won't get to recharge it. Doesn't matter. So yeah, all the stuff goes. There's the stuff and then there's the people. Our relationships are loved ones. At the moment of death, that's it. You've spoken every word you'll ever speak to your son or your daughter or your wife.
If you're a parent like me, you won't get to know what the rest of your kid's story will be. Who they end up with, how this life turns out for them. They're regrets, they're passions, where they end up living. What friendships they carry with them to the end. That'll be for them to know and them to feel out and them to navigate. You, I don't get to know it. We'll be gone.
You won't get to know what happens with your favorite sports team. Every die hard New York Nick's fan who's died since 1973 left this world not knowing if the Nick's would ever win another championship. And they may not. Who knows. You won't. You won't know what plays out on the global stage. You won't know the end of the story. You won't know what happens with Ukraine and Russia. You won't know what happens with America or what the world map looks like in
100 years. All of us who live now in the time of climate change, all the anxiousness we have about it, all the action we want to take around it, all the desperate hope we have for a better future. We will never know in these bodies if humanity ever gets its act together to address climate change. We won't know if our descendants will live in a world of acidified oceans and clear-cut forests, or a green star trek like Utopia, or if there's another Holocaust, or if we eventually make war
a thing of the past, these things aren't for us to know. We won't know. And so everything that you or I currently think, all those many thoughts about all the issues facing the world, those are going to melt into either all those precious opinions. God. Your ability to participate in the conversation, God. All the hot takes, all the personal perspective,
God gone beyond. And you won't have won the argument when you go. There will be those of differing opinions who will outlive you, and you'll never get to finally say with definitive clarity that you were right and they were wrong. Imagine a whole lot of jerks will outlive you, and your opinion
won't matter to them at all. And who you were, what you called yourself, all the layers of identity, man, woman, straight, queer, trans, all the self-identifying labels, all the constructs of what makes us different, they're unique, or special, or valid, or worthy, gone, gone, gone beyond. Everything we've called ourselves, everything we've been called, gone, gone beyond. As the roar grows, the Tibetan texts say, all that will be stripped away. The roar grows as
impending death near. The bell tolls, and that's not just a metaphor, there is a ringing of bells, those who have navigated the Bartos' base as say, and a sounding of thunderclaps. And elements by element all is stripped away, all that we know as body, the physical experience of being in a body is stripped away. Element by element stripped away, earth into water, water into fire, fire into air, air into ether, ether into raw, naked, self-luminous consciousness.
Then the five elements will dissolve as follows, says the Tibetan book of the dead. The internal earth element comprises flesh and bone, as an indication of its dissolution into the external earth element, the body will grow heavy, and its skin will sag towards the ground. We're upon one will feel that the body is sinking into the earth. Because the energy of earth will have dissolved into water, one will be incapable of supporting one's physical form.
Bodily strength will slip away. The internal water element comprises blood and serum, as an indication of its dissolution into the external water element, saliva and nasal mucus will be secreted, while the throat and tongue will become dry. Because the energy of water will have dissolved into fire, the warmth of the body will slip away, and consciousness will oscillate between clarity and dullness. The internal fire element comprises warmth, as an indication of its dissolution
into the external fire element, the fire of vision will begin to go. The eyes will roll upwards, and one will no longer recognize people. Because the energy of fire will have dissolved into the wind, the warmth of the body will disperse. The internal wind element comprises breath. As an indication of its dissolution into the external wind element, the breath will become weasy, and the limbs will quiver. Consciousness will become turbulent, while mirage-like flashing,
fleeting visions will arise. A thousand years ago, tantric practitioners who had traversed the death space over and over and over again in meditative absorption, described an elemental dissolution that is strikingly similar to how modern physicians described the death process. Most dying people, Bryson says, quote, lose any desire to eat or drink in the last day or two of life. Some lose the power of speech. When the ability to cough or swallow goes, they often make a rasping sound,
commonly known as a death rattle. It can sound distressing, but seems not to be to those experiencing it. However, another kind of labored breathing at death, called Agonyl breathing, may very well be. Agonyl breathing, in which the sufferer can't get enough breath because of a failing heart, may last only for a few seconds, but it can go on for 40 minutes or more, and be extremely distressing to both victim and loved ones at the bedside. And when that distress arises,
how will we meet it? When physiological death looms and our body knows it, and our minds are roving here and there, trying to piece together all this life was and wasn't, trying to find some cohesive thread, some unity, trying to relive certain things and take back others, and all the while this year of what's happening of, oh shit, this is really it, into the unknown void at last, when all of these forces arise at once, wheeling, careening, how will we meet it?
Oh child of awakened nature, the book of the dead says, that which is called death has now arrived. You are leaving this world, but in this you are not alone. This happens to everyone. Do not cling to this life, even if you remain attached and clinging, you do not have the power to stay. You'll only continue to roam within the cycles of existence. Therefore, do not be attached and do not cling. So, will we lead with joyous abandon into the void? Will we cling to life for that last possible
minute? What will we let go of it last? What will we take with us? I have a strong hunch that we won't remember a single social media post that we did. We won't remember all the memes. We won't
remember all the heated discussions. I have a strong hunch that this whole life, this whole lengthy life, all the mornings and evenings, all the running around, all the sunrises and sunsets, all the breakfasts, all the toast and jam, all the conference calls, all the walks in the park, all the little decisions that seemed so big, all the matters of utmost importance, will seem in that moment like a dream that was over in the blink of an eye. That was it, this life. That was it.
But for a moment, we may remember the light on the meadow that won late afternoon. We may remember the way the infants hand curls around our finger. The toddler's hair dumbling in front of his eyes is pure, abhorious laugh. That day in the garden, we may remember that one day in the garden. I could have been more present. I could have been more present. I wish I had not worried so much about the future. If I had known, if I had only known creator, I would have spent more time singing.
What will we regret? What will we try to hold on to till the end? As death arrives, will we tighten against it? Will we soften into it? Will we shrink away from the engulfing waves of bliss and terror? Will we expand into that ocean? Will we crumble? Will we soar? Will we both crumble and soar? Oh death, I crumble, I soar. Broken, exhausted you go, saying the ancient Egyptians to the dying one. Into the night you go, into the night he was made for this earth but leaves it now as a falcon.
There at the holy moment, the holy moment of the embrace of the vastness, the embrace of eternity, what will shine for us present, clear, what awaits us at that finality. All this talk of death, it's a little morbid you might say, a little uncomfortable, right? And in our modern Western world, it's certainly not a topic that we'd like to talk about very much.
But for some traditions, it was much more present. At the opposite end of the spectrum from our Western, whatever you do, don't mention death at all costs are the Indian sadhus who live right in the cremation ground. Naked, possessionless covered in ashes, meditating in that precious cross over space for years. The death space, the space of crossing over is one of great potency. For how can we truly understand life? How can we truly strip away that which is non-essential,
unnecessary to this journey? How can we avoid life's tendency towards endless distraction if we have not practiced dying before we die? How can we know what the ocean is if we never want to go in? The Tibetan Tantrikas swam in that ocean over and over and over again. The Tibetan book of the dead arose out of centuries upon centuries of direct practice of
journeying into liminal spaces. How did they know what happens when you die? They practiced journeying there over and over again, projecting consciousness through the fontanel of the skull just as the ancient Egyptians did, outward into the spaces beyond over and over again. And while the Tantrikas explored
the death space with particular focus, they're not an isolated example. All of these ritual experiences of ecstasy of great conjoining that I talk about on this podcast over and over, these are death experiences. The individual perspective, the day-to-day concerns, are swallowed by the great roaring vibration of the world. The individual is subsumed into the greater, and for that to happen, the individual perspective has to die. The shaman in many cultures is the one who traverses the
land of the dead in ecstatic trance. The shaman flies as a bird through the dead lands, through rivers of blood and forests of bones, through hills of fat and lakes of fire, through mountains of skulls and eerie mists, the realm of the dead. Put a coin in his mouth to pay the boatman, the boatman fairies us across, put a coin in his mouth to pay the boatman. How will we ever navigate the land of the dead if we haven't journeyed there while alive? So the Ellucinian
initiation was a death experience. To meet Persephone in her full expression, the culmination of the Ellucinian right, to meet the goddess herself as simultaneously the virginal maiden and the queen of the dead one had to ritually die. The full vision of the mother goddess required one to die. Feel into what I'm saying, to see the mother in her full totality one has to die.
So through trans-inducing repetition, exhaustion, deprivation, darkness, exertion to the point of collapse, through terrifying sounds and imagery through the thunderous boom of the drum and clash of symbols, through wailing, through keening, through voices that arrived like luminous bird song at the darkest hour, the ritual replicated the death experience. Took the initiate towards death, towards telos, a word which means union, consummation, culmination, initiation, and death all at once.
For death is a consummation, death is its own type of marriage, in which that which has been its own separate thing is returned to the whole at last. At last we join with the infinite, at last we wed our true bride, our true bridegroom eternity. So every initiatory passage in this life is a death. The girl bleeds and then the girl is gone, just as one thing is ripening and other is dying. The flowers that the maiden Kodai
plucks from the field die. The flower's root system pries open the door to the underworld, where she, the maiden herself, dies and is reborn as Persephone, the goddess of death. Death is spoken of very directly in certain rights of passage. The boy must die so that the man might live. Kill the boy, John Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born. I die daily, said St. Paul, referring to his daily ritual of turning it over to the divine.
For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality. We must practice dying, connecting to journeying into exploring the vastness that we will be drawn into. Oh, young folk, one Japanese death poem commands, if you fear death, die now. Having died once you won't die again, die now. The point of ritual is for something to die. The holy brew commonly known as Iowaska is named in the Ketuan traditions, the Deathvine.
And it is a common experience and an ethygenic ritual for the individual to experience a type of death. Sometimes the force of it is so strong a person feels that they are physically going to die. Sometimes it is an imaginal death. The flesh slides off the bones, the bones crumble. The body is subsumed into the vegetative cycle, returning to earth, until the body is regrown again as vegetation, as flowering vines. Death, for many traditions, was not something to run from.
Not something just to acknowledge, but something to actively prepare for. And why would we not? Why would we not turn our eyes towards the defining moment of life? The capstone of life. Why would we not lift our eyes and look at where we are all every single one of us going? So the Tibetan Book of the Dead is not some made up fantasy about what intellectually or conceptually might happen when we die. The Book of the Dead are the great liberation through hearing in the intermediary state.
Hearing is an encouragement from those who have been there over and over and over again, to cultivate our navigational capacity while we are alive, navigating the raw vibrational currents of existence, knowing what it is to plunge into the river when we no longer have a boat, getting everything clear while alive so that we can die well. Because what happens at that exact moment of death is thought to be very important. Mythologist Joseph Sensenese says this.
Ultimately what the core knowledge is trying to do is to recreate for you while you're alive the experience of dying, the actual literal, not the symbolic, the actual literal experience of dying, so that when that occurs you won't freak out. When you begin to die, when you start to realize you're not coming back, this is it, you're going. You can start to freak out, your mind can run wild.
And at that point as you're starting to leave your body, the word of God, this high pitched wine, of energy that's out there, will take the state of your soul and fashion a new reality for you. And you will be reborn according to that new reality. And if that reality, if your state of mind was a fear, trepidation, terror, well then your next knife is not going to be a happy one. Yeah, in many traditions it's important not to freak out at the moment of death.
As the interior state of consciousness becomes the vast churning sea in which the dying person swims, do not fear, do not fear. From the book of the dead quote, oh child of awakened nature, when your mind and body separate the pure luminous apparitions of reality itself will arise, subtle and clear. Radiant and dazzling, naturally bright and awesome, shimmering like a mirage on a plane in summer. Do not fear them, do not be terrified, do not be odd.
They are the natural luminosities of your own actual reality. Therefore recognize them as they are. From within these lights the natural sound of reality will resound, clear and thunderous reverberating like a thousand simultaneous peels of thunder. This is the natural sound of your own actual reality, so do not be afraid, do not be terrified, do not be odd. Whatever sounds lights raise my derives, they cannot harm you. For you are beyond death now.
It is enough that you simply recognize the sounds and luminosities to be manifestations of your own actual reality. No then that this is the intermediary state. So how one met death was a matter of great concern for the Tibetan yogi, just as it was for the Viking warrior. And not just out of some type of warrior pride, the nectors of Valhalla awaited those who met death with equanimity.
To have some type of conscious poison death, some lucidity, some calm, a willingness to dive into the great transition was thought to set the tone for what came next. Think all of your ancestors experienced this, the defining moment of death, all of them millions of ancestors. You are descended from ten thousand generations of human beings, all of whom stared into the vast, holy, unknown, and then went there. How did they meet it, each one? How did your ancestors meet death?
How will you? How will I? For the Japanese poet or monk for a certain period of Japanese history, it was expected that the dying person would compose a death poem close to the hour of their passing, a verse that encapsulated somehow the state of their being at that moment. It takes, I imagine, some focus and tenacity to do this. It takes some practice, some acceptance and calm.
Empty-handed, I entered the world, the 14th centuries and monk goes on each of you, I said, barefoot, I leave it, my coming, my going, two simple happenings that got mixed up somehow. Would we have the poise and lucidity to compose such a poem? What would it say? What will your death poem be? What will mine be? And of course, the death poems run the full range of human emotion and experience and texture. Some of them can sound a little lofty. I cleanse the mirror of my heart.
Now it reflects the mood. Rinseki tells us, which is beautiful, but it also sounds a little like something that the perfect Zen practitioner is supposed to say. You know, I did the work, I cleaned the mirror of my heart. It's now perfectly reflective, but is death ever that neat and tidy? I long for people. Then again, I despise them. End of autumn. Chogo wrote, leaving behind a more nuanced picture of unreconsiled feelings and paradoxes that stayed with him till the very end.
Some death poems ache with longing. Oh, sacred spirit, Hokusou says, let us set out for the western skies. Let us set out for the western skies. And some evoke the deep somatics of dying. Island of eternity, bise says, a turtle dries its shell out in the first sun rays of the year. Can you feel it? The turtle's shell drying. The water of life evaporating into sun rays. What is the feeling of evaporating at last into the sun? Have you felt all you knew of yourself melting into the sun at last?
Does the dark, thickative trees about us know our journey to the sun? Does the magpie know our journey to the sun? The magpie on the door. Oh, the magpie on the door. Farewell said bonza on his deathbed. I pass as all things do. Do on the grass. That was me, do on the grass. Do on the grass, steam in the air. Space, light, moisture. There I was. So how will we go out as do on the grass as a turtle drying its shell? Simultaneously resenting and yearning for other people.
Bemoaning the political direction of society as some of the death poem authors did. Stoically, humorously. Let's just say some went very earthy with their death poems. Before long, one monk in tone is the hour approached. I'll be dried salmon. Or in the immortal words of kill on one last fart. Death. It's difficult for us to understand in an individualistic culture in which the extinction of the individual is the worst thing possible.
But for many cultures, there wasn't such a stigma about plunging right into death. In numerous places throughout history, from Norway to Hawaii to Mesoamerica, to die ritually was a welcome honor. These days, when we think of human sacrifice, we tend to see it as the height of what we call primitivism. And we imagine evil priests with daggers plunging them into the hearts of innocent victims who resisted till the very end. Allah, Indiana Jones, and the temple of doom, right?
But what of the numerous accounts of human sacrifice where the participants walked, willingly, joyously, in trance, in awe, in reverence, tears streaming down their cheeks into the embrace of death? Can we imagine that? Many of the accounts of human sacrifice from early colonial explorers, by the way, are much more like this. Not the struggling victim, but the interapsured participant. On the north shore of the island of Kauai, there is a massive sea cliff riddled with holes.
This was where the bodies of the Hawaiian kings were put to rest, and no one was supposed to know where this was. So those who brought the bodies of the kings and interred them there, after doing so, ritually plunged to their death, willingly, perhaps eagerly, it was an honor to do so. How could it be? Because one individual life might not be the most important thing in the universe. What might be much more important is the continuity of the whole system. Imagine that.
But in an individualistic world, what could be more terrifying than an individual dying? Death is, for most of us, the most terrifying event imaginable. Bryson explains, quote, Jenny, Disky, facing impending death from cancer, wrote, movingly in a series of essays from the London Review of Books, about the excruciating terror of knowing one is soon to die. The razor sharp claws digging into that interior organ where all dreaded things come to scrape and naw and live in me. She said,
For many of us, the ultimate discomfort is the knowledge that death is inevitably coming. It's an anxiousness that naws at us. It's an anxiousness that naws at the heart of the Western world. I spoke of this in the cremation ground episode. If you start to look, you can see it everywhere, the fear of death. You can see it literally driving our modern world.
In the agitated urgency that humans feel around the rush to succeed, in the feverish accumulation of stuff, you can see a deep agitation at the horrifying specter that it's all going to go away. If you look, you can see the fear of death propelling the waves of traffic on the 10 freeway in Los Angeles. You can see it beneath the plaster makeup masks of the Fox Newscasters, fear of death.
For me, the defining feature of modern consumerism is a failure to reconcile the fact that we're all going to die. For how else do we arrive at a worldview in which the purpose of existence is to consume, consume, consume more, more, more, right up to the very end? If we had fully come to terms with the reality that we're going to die, there's no way we would relentlessly vainly pursue the acquisition of material stuff with the fervor that we do.
Because the only logical way to live one's life when one recognizes the inevitability of death is steeped in the love of the present moment. But instead, we live like the beings of drawm in the Tibetan mythological vision, with all that we could ever ask for right in front of us, but plagued by an unpleasant sound. The sound that whispers to us, the death is coming that says, all this is going away. All this is going away. And everyone, beggar and billionaire, is going to die. Everyone.
So consumeristic capitalism flees death at all costs. We spend billions and billions of dollars keeping death at bay for just a moment longer, just one minute longer. Billions on treatments that are no longer effective when the person is that close to dying, just to keep us away from death for one more minute.
And then even after death, we shoot up the corpse with formaldehyde and dress it in a tuxedo and make it look as alive as possible. One more minute, one final minute before I let death win. And yet, in seeking to stave off death at all costs, we also enact death on a massive scale. Through war, through environmental destruction.
The climbing suicide rate in the developed world, I believe, is a direct consequence of how we've tried to shun death, how we've made it taboo, pushed it to the side, failed to acknowledge it, only for it to return back to rebound back in the darkest of ways. Modernity has convinced itself that it stands somehow for life, that it stands for, you know, this great quality of life for all individuals.
And the primary measure that is used to justify all of our planetary accesses is the increase in human life expectancy. All success is measured by human life expectancy. How horrible modernity tells us our ancestors died young. Can you imagine? So capitalism positions itself as a buffer against a great soulless darkness. Against the unthinkable fact that we sometimes died young, in circumstances beyond our control.
Out in the desert sometimes, alone in the vast sandstone canyons. Can you imagine? Sometimes we died alone at night beneath the blazing stars. Sometimes we died alone. The clear, aquias layer of our eyes clouded over and earthly sight faded. And the breath of life slipped away into the womb of the night.
And that eye of ours merged with a great eye above. How terrible, how terrible to die out there in that indifference sand. Free of beeping monitoring machines and doctors and temperature controlled hospital rooms. So terrible isn't it to die there upon the stony ground, upon the forest floor. Such searing agony to die in the direct presence of the mother herself.
This is what we're afraid of. To die, to let go, to behold the full presence of the mother goddess with no layers or buffers between us. With no layers or buffers between us and the naked raw reality of existence. And so modern consumerism positions itself as reinforcing the good things in life, celebrating life and food and fashion, keeping death at bay. And yet everything that we consume dies. Have you thought of that? Consumption is not a celebration of life. It is an enactment of death.
Consumption is our modern death ritual. And the more we consume, the more dies. 50% species lost the real possibility of lifeless oceans in my children's lifetimes. This is not the path of life. This is the way of annihilation. This is fleeing death at all costs only to enact more death. This is the fear of death governing our lives. This is what happens when a society loses its loving relationship with the great beyond.
Loses its understanding that the role of the individual self is precisely to be subsumed into the great self. This is what happens when society loses its songs of death. It's death rituals, it's initiation. It's embedded in cultureated practices of dying to live, dying to live, dying to live again and again and again. It's no accident perhaps that one of the foundational myths of Western civilization is a story of a deep agitation about death.
It's a story of the search for immortality but is really a story of the consequences that arise when one is driven by anxiousness around death. The epic of Gilgamesh is often lumped in together with what are called hero myths. If you think of Gilgamesh you might think of a classic story of monstrous laying and questing and travel to distant lands.
When in fact Gilgamesh is the story of a deep agitation. Gilgamesh is half man, half god. So therefore he has an immortal part of him and a mortal part of him. And the mortal Gilgamesh witnesses death firsthand. His dear friend Enkidu is slain and Gilgamesh has propelled forward on a journey to find the cure for death, the secret of eternal life. There's an inherent anxiousness to Gilgamesh's mission. I must find the secret of immortality. I must at all cost prevent this horror.
And driven by agitation he misses all the cues and signs along the way that would point him to true immortality. He slays the scorpionic boatman who could have ferried him to the exact place where the secret would be revealed because he's in a hurry. He does everything wrong because he's driven by distraction and agitation. And how can the distracted and agitated find immortality? When of course immortality is right here in the nectars of the present moment.
Finally Gilgamesh arrives at the cave of the hermit Udnapishtim who knows the secret of eternal life. Sure says Udnapishtim, I'll teach you the secret of immortality. All you have to do is stay awake for six days and seven nights. And then I'll teach it to you. All you have to do is stay awake for six days and seven nights. Which of course is another way of saying that it's impossible. Try it. You can't do it. Probably you can't even do it for three days.
Quote, Gilgamesh, the great hero, the valiant hero, the monster slayer seeking to overcome death, cannot even conquer sleep. And it's deeper to this part of the story. It's about how questions of immortality are deeply tied to states of consciousness, seekfulness, attention, trance, rapturous focus. All are linked to our ability to connect to the true immortal state.
For as a parting gift, Udnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the secret. He tells him that there is a box thorn-like plant at the bottom of the sea that will bestow eternal life. And so the great hero journeys to the bottom of the swirling sea with great stones on his feet and he traipses across the ocean floor. And wonder of wonders, there it is. He finds it the precious plant, the secret of immortality in his grasp, but last. He goes back up to his boat.
I will rush this home to Uruk, he tells himself and test it on someone to see if it works. So he sails home, but he's been sailing so long he finds that his attention is waning. So he stops off for a bath at a spring. He puts the plant of immortality off to the side as he baths, and he lets it out of his sight for just one moment. A serpent snatches it and makes off of it, swallows it, sheds his skin right before his eyes, and disappears. And it's gone, the secret of eternal life gone.
So let's feel into this a bit. Many traditions tell us the elixir of immortality is found in the center of the ocean, the deathless nectar at the center of the swirling ocean of consciousness, if only we can keep our attention steady. In meditation and transrapcher, the three times past, present, and future merge into eternity, the self and the world merge.
When does a moment feel like a thousand years in the trans state? It is death and deathlessness at once, it is life, it is extinction, all of it, all delivered in the state of rapturous focus. The elixir of immortality is our ability to steep in the state of rapturous focus.
And do you think these days, amid the agitated static of tiktok and fox in a dozen 24 hour sports channels, and incessant phon alerts and threads and likes, do you think that if the deathless one, the deathless one, do you think that if the deathless one, that if she raised her voice and sang to us at last, at long last? Do you think that we'd be able to truly focus on her song for ten seconds?
How many invitations to the immortality of nectarine presence do we pass over each day, with each breath? Do you think that if we held the deathless nectar in our grasp, we wouldn't already be thinking about posting about it, or turning it into a workshop offering? Gilgamesh has it in his hands, remember, and he's like, I'm going to go test this on someone else. How many rapturous moments have we squandered when we're already planning what to do with them after?
Because the nectar of immortality is not material. It is instead the stripping away of the distractions of the self in favor of union with the greater world. The immortality is when we get out of our heads and become the towering gum tree, the flock of white cockatus at dawn, the tumbling waters the laughing cuckaburra. The elixir of immortality is not material.
But the fact that the elixir of immortality isn't ultimately a material thing isn't stopping some in the modern world from doing everything they can to try to find the secret of immortality right here. You know, live forever. See how it all turns out, keep this body going for a few millennia, at least. Sounds reasonable, right? Why wouldn't we want to prolong this life as long as possible?
The science project you've heard me say before has become increasingly not about awe and wonder at the mystery of nature and a pure, kneeled agraste-tyson like want to know, and is instead much more about control over nature, control over its processes, transcendence of the life cycle, transcendence of the planet. And this is blatantly evident in the billions of dollars of scientific research that are spent trying to reverse the process of aging and dying.
Quote, all things must die according to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson says one article, but that could be about to change. Silicon Valley's quest to live forever could benefit humanity as a whole, boasts another on CNBC? Here's why.
Right, you know, trickle down immortality so that when Jeff Bezos pours a billion dollars into genetic research and learns how to live to be 300 years old, that's actually altruism, because it means that a few of us might get to live to be 300, too, which of course is what everyone wants, right? Increasingly, the scientific language that's being used to talk about things like death and weather and other forces of nature that exist beyond our control is the language of fixing, curing, or solving.
The Chinese are fixing the weather pattern. Geneticists are treating aging as if it was a pathology, curing aging, curing death, fixing nature. So at bio-viva, we believe that defining your destiny is designing it through genetics. And that's a pretty bold statement, but that's really where technology is going. Genetics give us the ability to manipulate genes and to create maybe the future human that stays in perfect homeostasis.
And that's kind of the goal of the company is to create a body that defies aging, but if you're going to do it, you're going to have to go big. Okay, so we don't want to just target one part of aging. We want to target the whole thing. So, you know, through smart genetic modification, we can reverse biological aging and create a better future. We're definitely going to have to set down our risk of version.
We're going to have to re-analyze ethics. And I'll have to tell you that even though we have not cured aging yet, I believe that we're on the way. And we are already as a company starting to dream even bigger dreams. I'm feeling like sunshine, like springtime, like something's in the water and I'm taking a deep dive. I'm feeling so weightless, like I'm going to make it. And nothing in the universe can take this.
When you hear me talk about how these are mythic times, this is exactly what I'm talking about. For many are the mythic heroes who tried to cheat death. Now reports the Guardian, Google Founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have, quote, pumped millions into Calico a secretive health venture which aims to solve death. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the billionaire Peter Thiel are backers of unity biotechnology, which hopes to combat the effects of aging.
The comedy sci-fi show The Orville recently introduced a vision of a future race of beings that had solved death and who lived forever. What asked if he would really want to live forever, Seth McFarland's character replies, yes, with a kind of innocent enthusiasm.
Because he says, I want to see what happens. And that's the line that science takes a lot, that, you know, the quest to reverse the aging process, to throw a grenade right into the heartworkings of the natural world is coming from some kind of altruistic, scientific celebration of life and curiosity about what happens next.
Rather than the alternative, which is that we are horrified, anxious, that we've constructed a world of such soulless self-centeredness in which we have lost all perspective on nature, that we cannot stand that nature might possibly move on without us. We can't possibly seed control to something as fundamental and basic as time. So what we're talking about is a total lack of recognition of any type of harmonic balance of nature, any type of pattern or order to the natural world.
A lack of recognition that death might actually play a role in keeping the universe in balance, that in fact it might be essential to the larger cycles that play all around us. I mean, really, like, how rude would it be to your ancestors to live for a thousand years? And what an affront to the web of life. What within the web of life would you be borrowing from in order to keep you alive? For everything that lives borrows from something else?
Not to mention, what would living a thousand years actually be like? Reductionist science, of course, assumes that you simply turn off a genetic switch, aging stops, and everything else just proceeds normally. So science has identified shortening telomeres as the cause of aging. You know, just keep the telomeres from eroding and the cells won't die, and you'll live forever just like you are now. But forever. Really? Imagine for a moment what a thousand-year lifespan would do to your mind.
Think about something as simple as the strain on brains that have to continue to remember new names. Think about the confusion of living alongside generations upon generations of your offspring and descendants. Imagine the cost on a strained medical system of having to support millions of 200-year-olds. And what about how do I put this nicely? Some of the characteristics that tend to exacerbate with age, you know, sometimes people can get a little irritable, little stuck in their ways.
And what your grandparents were like at 75, and then what would they be like at 475? Seriously? Which is a gentle way of saying that physical immortality would indisputably drive us insane. None of the recognizable joys and sorrows in building blocks of existence would be there anymore. None of what it means to be human would exist.
What would such a person strive for? What would the long project be? What would there be to write poetry about? Art is a fleeting, luminous glimpse of that which will one day be taken away. No death, no art. From Hermann Hesse quote,
he thought death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall. And in our hearts we know that we too are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it's in order to salvage something from the great dance of death.
The great dance of death is the dance of art, of longing, of joy, of bliss, of pain. All of it comes from death, which is why Tolkien called death a gift. Illuvitars gift, the gift of the powers to mortal beings. Quote, the sons of man die indeed, and leave the world, wherefore they are called the guests or the strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Illuvitar, which as time wears on, even the powers shall envy.
But Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope. So something that was once seen as part of the great cycle. This great gift becomes conflated with evil. Life is good, death is bad. Death is to be shunned.
One of the presentations on genetic reversal of the aging process that I watched even quoted Lord of the Rings, calling their work with telomeres the one gene therapy to rule them all. A reference to the great ring of power. And of course, the ring of power conveyed what Tolkien called unnatural long life. A lengthened lifespan and Tolkien's vision was in no way desirable, it was unnatural.
So that Bilbo began to feel like what? Like butter scraped over too much bread. So that Gollum lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, but as a withered addict. Perhaps my grandchildren will live to see the day when Jeff Bezos and his quest for long life will have become what we've always known him to be. It's an interesting topic to explore, but ultimately, hot take here. The quest for physical immortality won't work. It won't work. You won't cheat death. It won't happen.
Nature dictates the laws always has always will. And so I can say personally with confidence that Jeff Bezos, just like the rest of us, is going to get old and die. And Elon Musk is going to die. And Sergey Brand is going to die. And Mark Zuckerberg is going to die and Putin and Trump and every king and every tyrant and every billionaire that has ever walked the planet will crumble to dust.
As we all do. And the great goddess, the great mother goddess, who wears time and space as an ornament won't even blink. Life which you look for, Udna Pistum tells Gilgamesh. You will never find. For when the gods created human beings, they let death be their share and life they withheld in their own hands.
So immortality is the great cycle of nature itself, not the domain of one individual being. To want to invert or subvert or pervert the death process is to reject the universe itself, to reject transformation, to reject change, to reject the fact that the individual is not the primary unit of the web of life, but only astrand in it. To reject death is to reject the goddess, for the goddess is death, to know her one must die, to know life one must die.
Hermann Hessa describes the artist Goldman as he nears his death. He wants to sculpt an image of the eternal mother, but he's too late, he's dying. Quote, he would have wished not to die until he would have made an image of her, but instead of me shaping her, it is she shaping me. She does not want that I visualize her secret. Instead of me shaping her, it is she shaping me.
Remember that, kings and tyrants and transcendentalists, you are not shaping her. She is shaping you. She shapes all of us. Births us of the red and blue placental clave creation adorns us with fingernails and hair and shimmering eyes, sets us loose within this world of life, with hands disculped and voices to sing, and then claims us back. Inevitably endlessly claims us back again, again, again, until we evaporate like water off a turtle's back in the sun.
On his deathbed, Goldman feels sorry for his friend Narcissus, who has sought a life of transcendence rather than a direct acceptance of the cycle of nature. But how will you ever die one day, Narcissus, if you have no mother? You can't live without a mother. Without a mother, you can't die. To know the goddess, we must know death. The goddess is not simply the earth mother who showers us like Lakshmi with fruit and coins and milk and abundance.
She is simultaneously Kali, with a garland of severed heads around her neck. Kali, the great fierce mother, the ultimately benevolent kind loving mother, who lives on the edge of the city, in the land of the dead, with corpses dangling from her ears by a river of blood and flame in a hut of flayed skins. This is her too, the goddess. She is life and death, and its eternal continuum.
The vision of the triple goddess, Parah, Abhada, and Parapada, maiden mother, Cron, is incomplete unless it includes her, the Cron. Death. Our culture, it seems, has no place for Cron. Hollywood flees from the Cron every chance it gets, and yet she always finds a way to make her presence known. For if you reject the Cron, she devours you. She eats your face, I've heard.
You know, that look, those Hollywood actors and actresses who've taken one too many trips to the plastic surgeon, trying at all costs, to ward off the Cron. You've seen the ghastly face that results. That is the repressed Cron devouring the face of the one who rejected death, live in front of our eyes.
For modern culture to reconcile its terror of death requires a deep reorientation around the place of the individual within the universe. For if I am an isolated unit, a solitary subject in a world of objects, objects that I seek desperately to possess, to call mine, to take with me,
and then I'm confronted with the frustrating reality that I can't take any of them with me, and that this individual being which I have considered the apex of creation, the most important thing in the universe is going to die, then death can be the most horrible prospect in the world.
But what if that's not what I actually am? If I am instead a continuum of ancestry, then what actually dies? If I am water molecules momentarily repurposed as a human on my way to become streams and summer thunderstorms, then what actually dies? If this body is woven of stardust and vines and mineral salts and goes back to being them again, ashes to ashes as they say, then what actually dies?
If I am a single verse of a great song that has extended for thousands of generations, a humming vibrating strand in a great sonorous tapestry of song that lives in rivers and accacia trees, and in the ritual heartbeat of the people that continues on and on and on, then what actually dies? If a particular dance has been going on for a hundred thousand years, and there are dances that have, then how can my role be anything other than to add my footsteps to it for a few brief cycles of the moon?
It is the dance itself that is eternal, that is alive, not me. I am a love, same enough, on the same thread of star, on the land, full of wind and breeze, still cradle in the deep.
Do not stand at my grave and weep the old poem goes, I am not there, I do not sleep, I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sunlight on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn raid, when you awaken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight, I am the soft stars that shine at night, do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not die. It is worth asking, what actually dies?
From a biological perspective, Sophie Strand reminds us, the moment of death is actually teeming with life. Quote, death is paradoxically a mess of aliveness, it is the moment when a homophonic song shifts into a microbial polyphony of multi species collaboration. A corpse is still very much alive, Bill Bryson agrees, it is just not your life any longer, it is the bacteria you leave behind plus any others that flock in.
So your atoms don't die, they were never according to science alive to begin with, your molecules don't die, they reform repurposed, does anything in nature actually die? Have you ever seen anything just end or is nature instead the eternal shapeshifter, the eternal world breath?
And what we call us, what we call this identity, this self, is just a brief shimmering facet of a universe that longed to gaze back on itself with our particular eyes, in our particular way, singing back with our particular voice, here in this particular time, before subsuming this tiny fragment of the song, this tongue, these eyes, back into its eternal body of vibration, repurposing and re-expressing it, again and again.
Jumping mouse, the brave protagonist of the plane's Indian story, sets out on his great quest to know, to see, and eventually has his great moment of transformative initiation, what is that moment he is picked up and devoured by an eagle? As the land and waters below him recede into the distance, we could easily think that this is the end of jumping mouse's story, but his friend Frog shouts from below, now you have a new name, now you have a new name, little mouse, now they will call you eagle.
Which one was he again? Was he mouse? Was he eagle? Who are you separate from the waters to comprise your body? Who are you? Are you not the late summer sunflowers that surround you? Are you not the moonlight that shines upon you? Are you not the gentle all night rain? Are you not the cold of thunder? Is that not also you? Has that thunder ever stopped sounding? Where did the endless skies of the worlds of roll and echo with vibration and brim with moisture forever?
The young Nachiketas journey is to the realm of the dead and has the audacity to ask the lord of death Yama himself the great question. Is there indeed a life beyond death? Some say there is, others say life ends with this life. What is the truth? Yama seated on his great black buffalo laughs and says, that's the one question I won't answer.
Because there is even disagreement among the gods about this, but Nachiketas presses him and finally the lord of death relents. Young Nachiketas Yama says, the self is immortal. It was not born, nor does it die. It did not come out of anything, neither did anything come out of it. Even if this body is destroyed, the self is not destroyed. The one who thinks that he is the slayer and the one who thinks that he is slain, both are wrong. For the self neither slay is nor is slain.
Smaller than the smallest and larger than the largest, the self is alive in all beings. Alive everywhere. The force of animacy itself alive in all things. It's just not us as we think of us. So what actually dies? O unis say the pyramid texts and unis is the name of the Pharaoh, but is also synonymous with the individual being, the individual spirit, the dying one.
You will not go on to die. You will go on to live. Your hand is as the universe. Your shoulders are the universe. Your stomach is the universe. Your sides are the universe. Your legs are the universe. Your face is the summer star. You don't cease to exist. Author Susan Brinmore explains, but you do cease to exist as a particular person. The air as breath is unchanging. Eternal. Hence, your breath does not die or cease to exist.
The moisture in the composition of your body does not cease to exist. You are the child of the air. This is what Osiris gives you. You are the child of moisture. This is what Osiris gives you. You are the Child of the earth, this is what Osiris gives you. You are the Brother of the Sky and this is what Osiris gives you. You are the Brother of Wild Nature. This is what Os Aires gives you. So you become, again, moisture. You become wind. You become the grasses the night.
This vision of death is a great ecological recycling is beautiful. For who would not want to become the leaves, the wind, the stars, the breeze? Back to the earth I go. And many people these days are taking this very literally. Numerous companies now sell bio-earns and organic burial pods. Want to become a tree when you die? One online vendor asks, here's how. But here's a question. Is what happens at death purely a biological shedding?
Our body's water joins the great waters, our bones see back into the earth. We become warm food. What was borrowed as returned? Is that the full picture? It's a convenient vision because it allows us to simultaneously hold what science tells us about biological death. While still holding a kind of reincarnation-like view through the cycling of the waters and the material and so forth. But there's more to talk about here.
Because the fact is that most animus traditions do not see death as simply a recycling of material. Tradition after animate tradition speaks not only of biological continuity. They speak of essence or spirit or soul that journeys on after we die. Animus tradition is full of ghosts and spirits and unseen forces. Lands of the dead cross over spaces between life and death. An individual being on a journey of multiple lives, life after life after life.
So yes, water returns to water, breath to atmosphere. But what if that little thing called spirit? What of consciousness? When I feel into the moment of death, when I feel into that moment, I feel a shedding of the elemental layers. I feel a crumbling, melting, dissolving into earth. But I also feel something else, something sore upwards, like a bird. Will we crumble or will we soar? Oh, for certain, we will crumble, but we will also soar.
And here's where I'm seeking to provoke some thought, some conversation. Very specifically perhaps to provoke the deep ecology world and the new animus world into a discussion on spirit. And I'm not trying to force a worldview on anyone, just to say that it's very easy for those of us in the modern world to simply be comfortable with the idea of death as a great mystery.
We're exposed to so many traditions and poetic visions and scientific understandings that it's very easy to simply say, yeah, death is a mystery and never really have to define it. And I love that death is a mystery, but that can also leave it totally amorphous and undefined in that lack of definition, can shape in a fairly big way the actual experience of dying and therefore can shape in a very big way how we are when we're alive.
And so I think it's worth going into on a deeper level because it raises really important questions about what animacy actually is and it asks us to define what we really think is going on in this universe. What happens when you die? Does it all shut down like turning off a television? No one who has come back from the edge has really described it like that. Is there a rush of imagery before finally it all flickers out?
In the 300,000 year history of human beings there have been very, very, very, very, very, very few pockets of culture that have seen death is some kind of final end, a total darkening. And that would be easy to chalk up to wishful thinking, right? We want it to go on so we construct mythologies in which it does. If it weren't for the fact that descriptions of the lands of the dead and the spirit journey and the qualities of the experience have striking similarities wherever you go.
Tunnels and vortexes, phantasmic luminosity. Trees of souls whirling psychic forces, lands populated with animate beings. A freedom of movement not known before. Visions arising in full actualization out of nothing and then reabsorbed back into foundation luminosity just as quickly. Realms upon realms arising, falling. Roars of vibration, devouring entities, terrifying apparitions that become suddenly angelic.
And historically, cultures have not been so concerned with intellectually ruminating on what these all might mean in an abstract sense. They've been much more concerned with practicing the actual navigation of these spaces. For much like the experience while on at the Agents, the actual experience of death itself might be vastly different depending on the contextual framework we've built around it in our lives through practice.
Remember the Tibetans at the moment of death, the internalized becomes externalized. That which lived in a single body now suddenly lives everywhere. The psychic patterning that we carry with us rises up to meet us as gods, as angelic and demonic forces, as landscapes, as geographies that we traverse. Can we navigate ourselves as universe?
If you were to suddenly expand outwards, your psychosomatic patterning expressing as a vast universe of swirling seas and storms and ranges, could you navigate the storms of that universe? If all the collective ripples of the little unresolved things of your life were suddenly given bodies, what would those bodies be? Can you feel the prickly bark of the vast forests of the patterns that arise from the state of your being right now?
If you, as a pattern, as a mandala of being, were to be given its own externalized universe, who would inhabit it? Wild goat-footed gods, liquid nymphs, animal beings, archangels. Who? If we are afraid of dying, says Danny Ielos, guardian angel, chiropractor in the 1990 film Jacob's Ladder, then what is ultimately angelic could be seen initially as demonic? It all depends on us. If you frighten of dying and then you hold it on, you'll see devils tearing your life away.
But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all. So don't worry, okay? So have we practiced crossing over? Have we traversed these liminal spaces? Have we practiced surrender? What one friend calls the discipline of surrender? Have we practiced journeying? Have we soared like a bird into the vast geographies of the land of the dead? Because as we crumble, so we will also soar.
Current embodiment discourse puts a lot of emphasis on being in the body here and now, feeling into the gut, rooting, anchoring. And this is an important part of what embodiment means. But embodiment also means expanding the boundaries of what the body is. For at death, we ourselves will be involuntarily expanded. We will suddenly be the river and the late summer wheatfield and the distant sky of stars. It sounds beautiful, but also terrifying. Will the vastness terrify us?
Maybe not if we've practiced an embodied vastness. What would that feel like, an embodied vastness? Have we practiced being torn apart in preparation for the great tearing apart? Have we practiced shedding in preparation for the great shedding? Have we practiced dissolving in preparation for the great dissolving? Have we practiced crumbling? Have we practiced bowing? How often do we practice bowing? Not Instagram bowing. Bowing when no one else is around. At death, we bow alone.
Have we practiced this? It's good practice. Because before the vastness of time, before the will of life and death, we will all bow. One way or another. Embodied cultures from the Kalahari to Siberia regularly practice leaving the limited body and flying into the great body. Embodiment is also this, leaving what we call the body. When we hold these two things at once, that embodiment is both being in the body and flying out of the limited body into the great body. Can we hold this?
That embodiment, as I'll be exploring in an upcoming episode, means being torn apart and flying away, to fly is also to be embodied. True embodiment also recognizes the death body, the corpse of Osiris, the place where our body is infinite, the place where our body is ancestry and light and time. The place where spirit flies. Let us not forget, in our quest for embodiment, let us not forget how to fly. Say the words, may he rise this being as the shining light rises.
This being rises again in the sky, his flesh goes out to the luminous horizon. He has broken the knots of the spine. As he rises from the Akashitri, the pyramid texted Boke, as he rises from the Akashitri, the serpent guides him. The ancient Egyptians describe the body as an Akashitri. The dying person breaks the knots of the spine, soaring out of the Akashitri. The Akashitri is the body, Susan Brindmoro explains. The serpent is the spinal cord in the branching nervous system.
The corpse contains the serpent, the white serpentine spinal cord, the source of the body's movement, electricity and sense perception. The snake sheds its skin as the electrical energy of the spinal cord moves upward from the spine. At death, the serpent guides the dying to leave the tree, to rise up as a white bird, purified energy, leaving the tree of the body behind. The serpent leaves the body the words of 4,000 years ago still echo. The Falcon flies. What remains of him?
What remains of him now? What remains of him? The Falcon flies. Brindmoro, quote, the primary concept of ancient Egyptian religion is introduced in these verses, embodied in the sense impression made by the motion of a bird of the prehistoric desert world. The bird, the Falcon she explains, evokes layers and layers of meaning. Quote, it is at once the vivid, newly freed motion of the infant child of the dead body.
The wild energy that rises from the shell of the corpse back into the sky, and it is the continuous motion of rising itself, the dabbled wings of rising and setting stars that are the variegated wheel of time as eternity. This loose range of metaphors describes something real. The eye, the awareness in the body, is the snake of the central nervous system in the channel of the rising spine. As it leaves the body at death, this serpentine current of energy is thrown out.
Rising like a bird, it becomes pure, rising light. The death, this essence, the light that is in fact the ultimate reality of a human life is reabsorbed into the universe with its fluctuations of infinite light. The stars, the moon, their paths, their harmonious, eternal movement in the sky. So the infant child of the dead body is a luminous Falcon, birthed from the serpent of the spine in the great branching tree of the body. The Falcon soars into the night sky into the tomb of the sky.
The tomb is the sky. Say the words, the eye in you is your child, the eye that means the consciousness, the awareness, the eye in you is your child, the Falcon. The great ones tremble when they see you rise with the book in your hand into the realm of stars. Here's the one who was washed in the field of rushes, pure as the light in the field of rushes, pure as the one washed in the field of rushes. What is the field of rushes?
The field of rushes, the reeds along the banks of the Nile River, but the field of rushes is the stars, the field of rushes is the starry sky. The Falcon rises into the starry sky where ISIS, the great mother, the womb of the sky, offers him her breasts so that he may drink the milky white light of the star and never thirst or hunger again. The initiate merges with the mother in order to be reborn. The mother is the sky, the child, the spirit, the Falcon is the rising star.
The mother is the sky, the child, the spirit, the world, the world, the world, the world, the world. Beautiful, this section concludes with an Anamata poetic sound. It is the sound of the wind. Moro tells us. The words mean let him be free. Let him be free. Or he is empty. These sounds of the wind were whispered in the ears of the dying. The navigation of the intermediary space and the Egyptian and Tibetan traditions happens through uttered sound.
Words bring the evocative, imaginal poetry, the sounds that guide the dying person through the roaring sea of vibration that is death. The words become a thread, a ladder for the person to climb. The process of cracking the individual open for the journey of death is initiated through spoken and uttered and sung words. Feel into this now. Death, which is responsible for poetry itself, is navigated through uttered poetry. Words come to us from the land of the dead.
Our dead ancestors spoke words that we still speak, words bridge worlds. The truth of nature of death, as Moro says, can only be apprehended through the associative imagery of poetry, which triggers a deep recognition on the physical level. In the Egyptian text, the serpent is awakened in the body and rises to the top of the head where it is prompted by ritual words to leave the body at death. The somatic recognition that words trigger.
The way that bodies respond to invocations of roaring oceans and naked awareness and starry skies provides a transmission that has the capacity to transport the shaman, the singer, and the dying person through imaginal realms, through threshold spaces across into the land of the dead. Which means we could sit here and have an intellectual discussion about what happens at death. We could say that the consciousness extinguishes and that's it. We could say there's some essence that lives on.
And all of this would be intellectual banter. But instead, I could whisper the sounds of the rushes and the wind. I could whisper the sounds of the rushes and the wind. And could whisper of falcons whose flesh is light. And could whisper of a flowering tree breaking open. A white serpent escaping, a sky of stars, a great womb, a body made of wind.
To the end of the sky, the pyramid texay, to the end of the sky, to the end of the earth, to the end of the limits of space, this being travels as the wind. Words of death are meant to be spoken, sung poetry, for how else to invoke the crossing over of one being into the vastness. Say the words the pyramid tex command over and over again. And the hieroglyph for say, for speak, is a serpent. A river, a tongue, transmit the energy it is saying.
Words are the living green sprout rising from the dead body of Osiris. Words are how we will cross over. Words are they alive or dead the texas? Osiris is he alive or dead? What is Osiris? Osiris is anyone as a rotting corpse. Osiris is the life in all things, plant and animal. Osiris as a word is the seat of the eye. That means the seat of consciousness. The dead thing is life. What is the eye? Speak words of poetry into the ears of the dying, chant and story tell and sing.
Cast a thread for them to journey on, as death nears and that holy liminality grows, and the threshold trance deepens. Speak in vogue, sing. To the east the mountains are singing, sang the ancient Egyptians. O Lord of Akashatris whose blossoms are the first sensations, who binds the rags of mummies. This sad mortality, the boat is set up on its sledge and filled with yellow flowers. O great jackal Hanubis, show me the road through the darkness. I have passed through this door into nothing.
Nothing grows and nothing dies. All that was and would be is. This life is a singular breath and your passive eye is time. O justice done, truth is law. Upon the brows of the people the world is written, and in their hearts the word is deed. Smoke from temple fires, curled like hair, the onk in your one hand, the knife in the other. Life in one hand, death in the other. This life is a singular breath. Last the threshold, navigate the precious in between spaces while we are here.
So that when it lasts we go, when it lasts we make the great crossing. We can answer that simple question that Raymond Carver wants us. And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? We can answer as he did. I did. And what did you want to call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth? First and foremost, many, many thanks to rising Appalachia, that's Leah Song and Chloe Smith for taking the time to repurpose an old traditional folk song called O Death.
Also special thanks to Janay Rogers, who gave me a rough recorded version of the song, Your Body, My Name. And you can find Janay's music at Vine Music on Instagram, that's V-Y-N music. Ben Murphy also contributed some beautiful overtone chanting. Ben is a vocalist, composer, storyteller, and mythosomatic practitioner. Based in Portland, Oregon, and he's also a steward of the school of mythopoetics.
Charlotte Maelon, who's contributed Viola for a bunch of these episodes, also contributed, and her music can be found at resonanthearthealing.com. This episode contains reference to a whole mess of articles, movies, books, et cetera, et cetera. These include The Song Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. Is Silicon Valley's quest for immortality a fate worse than death? That's Adam Gabbett writing in the Guardian in February 2019.
CNBC's article Silicon Valley's quest to live forever could benefit humanity as a whole. Here's why. Sam Sheed, September 2021. The old blue song, Death Don't Have No Mercy, this time performed by Blind Gary Davis. The book Awakening O'Sireus by Normandy Ellis. The song severed garden by the doors, and also the song Five to One by the Doors. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyel Rinpoche. The Body by Bill Bryson. The poem Furn Hill by Dylan Thomas.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The First Complete Translation by Gourmet Dorje. The Donning Moon of the Mind by Susan Brind Moro. This episode makes extensive use of this book and quotes it many, many times. And I find Susan Brind Moro's poetic visioning of the Pyramid text to be one of the most profound things that I've read in years. So I really highly recommend checking it out. A kayak full of ghosts compiled by Lawrence Millman. The story of Nachikata, which is in the Kato Panashad.
The HBO series Game of Thrones, which of course is based on the song of Ice and Fire series by George R. Martin. The Bible. Japanese death poems compiled by Yoel Hoffman. The work of mythologist Joseph Sanson Azy. The Epic of Gilgamesh, translations by Maureen Kovacs, by Penguin Classics, and kind of a loose poetic translation by Stephen Mitchell. Gene Therapy for Human Aging Presentation by Elizabeth Parrish. Presenting to the young Lou Lynn School of Medicine.
Last time I checked Elizabeth Parrish was still aging. The Orville, a science fiction series by Seth McFarland on Hulu. Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, the 1984 film from Stephen Spielberg. The book Narcissus in Goldman by Herman Hess. The Silmarillion by J.R. Tolkien. Hagetude by Sharon Blackie. Jacob Slatter the 1990 film starring Tim Robbins and Danny I.L.O. Not for Kids. Do not stand at my grave and weep poem by an unknown author, which has been attributed to many different writers.
The work of Sophie Strand and you can find out more of Sophie's work at sophistrand.com. That's SOPHIESTRAND.COM. The poem Late Fragment by Raymond Carver. The book Seven Arrows by Hemiost Storm. And of course, the meaning of life, the 1983 film from Monty Python. If you liked what you heard today, please consider becoming a patron of the Emerald Podcast. The patronage really helps me devote all the time and energy necessary to this. And it helps pay for the musicians and the studio time.
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Next time may we live lives that are driven forth by imagination, vision and wonder. Can I ask you a question? What? How can we all have died at the same time? A salmon. A salmon. A salmon. A salmon. Darling, you didn't use canned salmon, did you? I'm most strictly embarrassed.