EPISODE 49: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR WRITES ABOUT YOGA AND DEATH

Welcome to my blog which began with an appreciation of the quietness of an Easter Sunday  morning in the rain but then deleted itself. On a morning such as this, sitting in a small room on a mostly tranquil street, one could almost believe the whole world is taking a breath.
But of course it never does.

*****
When I put on the TV to catch up on the cricket scores, I found myself watching an easter service from some christian church in the UK. Death and Rebirth are my trade these days, so I should have some sympathy with the resurection myth that I was subject to endlessly as a catholic child. What I noticed first on my screen was the people in the congregation. I suppose one could call them ordinary people, or normal people, or, in 1960s terminology, 'straits'. But what the fuck are they doing? Yes, it is nice and good for your brain and spirit to come together to have a singalong, but please, spare us the belief and the fairytale. Do you know you are worshipping a magic mushroom? Do you know jesus is a figment of your imagination and your priests are deliberately participating in a lie to fool you?

And this is televised by the BBC!

Anyhow, I'll stop there. I'm about to inflict an article on you about yoga and death. Headline news; Pot Calls kettle Black.

Not sure that makes sense either...oh well...no wonder i'm not getting anywhere...

Oh, the archbishop of christianity has just said, 'you can't blame religion for all the problems in the world'. For once, maybe, he is right.

YOGA AND DEATH

A few years ago, I went to University to study for a Master’s Degree in ‘Death and Society’. My reason for doing this was that I had discovered in myself a growing discomfort around the subject of death and a very definite discrepancy between what I claimed to believe and what I was actually experiencing. For more than thirty years, since meeting the guru Swami Muktananda, I had practised various forms of yoga, studied almost every new and old age philosophy and met numerous teachers, all of which assured me that I am not this body and that death should not concern me. So why, I wondered, was I waking up at night in the midst of panic and fear of dying? And why did I react to that by desperately reassuring myself that everything was alright rather than facing the fear? Clearly there was something to address. 

Although I only began the course to centre my attention on the subject, it proved to be endlessly fascinating. An advantage of tackling Death academically turned out to be the opportunity to take it all less personally. Maybe it is a tendency of those involved in ‘self-development’ to become over involved in themselves and their own process and thus lose sight of the bigger picture, of the others, or maybe it is just me, but I began to appreciate the entire human predicament when facing death, from our beginnings as hunter-gatherers with a bewildering short lifespan to our present medical sophistication that means our grandchildren will likely live to be one hundred.

 Everything in time changes, even dying. For us, dying is what you do just before, or more frequently, for some time before, your physical demise. For many of the ancients dying was what they did after physical death and it covered the time taken to make their posthumous way, frequently via terrifying Otherworld journeys, to a permanent position as an ancestor. Securing one’s place in the afterlife, and being properly prepared for the journey, were often the prime concerns of a person while alive -  hence the production of Books of the Dead which were guides on how to die, how to conduct oneself on the Ultimate Journey, and how to prepare during life.

For most of our history, death has been an individually meaningful and socially important event accompanied by significant and purposeful rituals with a set of purposes; to honour the dead, to make sure the dead actually go away, to add power to the departed’s onward journey, to acknowledge the damage done to the society by a loss of its member, to communally find the resilience to carry on and to adapt to new roles and identities, and to take advantage of the liminal state to explore altered states of consciousness.

The liminal state is that in which ‘any barriers between man and the supernatural are lowered’. Those of you who have been with the newly born or the newly died will know this state where the usual patterns of thoughts and grounding anchors are loosened and the emotional relationships between people, strangers even, are altered. 

Recently I attended a fairly typical modern British funeral, twenty minutes in the crematorium, a few hours in the pub afterwards. The liminal state plus alcohol tends to produce intense conversation between strangers, interludes of emotional expression, a possible fight and maybe an unexpected sexual encounter, all of which will end up in a general numbness. In the past, however, the liminal state would have people burning a fire, chanting or praying, imbibing inebriants or entheogens, and joining together both ordinarily and extraordinarily to acknowledge the rhythms of life and death.

 During the last century, Death moved from the family home to the hospital and from the care of the community to professional care. Our immediate contact with death has lessened and where once it was the children who died, now it is the elderly, and often their dying is poor one, medicalised and marginalised and seemingly meaningless. Back in the 1960s, death was almost a taboo subject and even now there is a reluctance to face it which has had serious consequences, not only for the dying, the grieving, and the elderly but for the evolution of our society as a whole.

In 1973, Ernest Becker wrote a book in which he argued that the denial and fear of death resulted in a society obsessed with self-aggrandizement and global rapaciousness. Interestingly, the majority of those who have near death experiences subsequently report both a loss of fear of death and a reordered sense of what is important in life. In the 1970s Stanislav Grof was permitted to give LSD to elderly patients dying of cancer.  Significantly those who reported ‘peak or mystical experiences on LSD, also lost their fear of death and even though they knew death to be imminent, their values rearranged themselves and their love of life increased.

So what has this to do with the practise of yoga? Well of course that depends on your understanding of what yoga is. Sai Bai of Shirdi used to say of his followers, ‘I give them what I want so they want what I have to give.’ Yoga is the same. It will heal your body, elevate your emotions and still your mind and then, if you let it, it will kill you.

Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras refers to the kleshas, the roots of our bondage, which include abhinesva – the fear of loss and the clinging to life. Sutra 2:9 reads, “Even for those who are learned, there is an ever flowing, firmly established love for continuation and a fear of cessation, of death.”  This basic fear, which even those with an intellectual understanding of impermanence suffer, can take many forms including fear of dying, fear of the afterlife, fear of the death of others (including one’s children), fear of losing some elements of life, fear of losing identity, fear of change in general, a reluctance to interact with the dying, ageism, enjoyment through acquisition and the seeking of gratification in wealth. Projected out in the world, as it in modern society, it means an unwillingness to give meaning to death, a fear of dead bodies, disgust with and scapegoating of the elderly, and an inability to be empathetic and communicative with those suffering loss.

When I began my course it was, as I have said, to address this fear in myself. What I discovered was the consequences to a society when the fear of death is pre-eminent as it is in ours. To truly embody yoga, it is not enough to meditate in the proverbial cave. In my local area there are hundreds of spiritual and yoga groups and a number of magazines devoted to their advertisements. The word death rarely, if ever, appears. Yoga, however, is learning to die. The mystic, Abraham of Santa Clara said, ‘He who dies before he dies, does not die’ and Muktananda wrote, ‘Only he can die joyfully and peacefully who, after having delved into himself, has experienced his own death while still alive.’

When once asked, ‘Do you believe in god?’ Carl Jung smiled, shook his head and said, ‘No, I don’t believe. I know.’ What do we know of death as opposed to what we believe or think we believe? It has been said that ‘a philosophy of life is most acutely defined by the way it successfully integrates death within its paradigm (or fails to do so)’. How successfully has the philosophy of yoga settled in you? For the medical materialists, death is extinction, and dying has become stigmatized, something to be conducted in private. In this system humane care for the elderly is frequently lacking and the grieving are abandoned to deal with losses no one wants to talk about because it makes them feel ‘uncomfortable’.

Unlike western philosophy, eastern thought is meant to be experiential. Transcendence of death is not a theoretical possibility but the reality. The clinging to live is the clinging to delusion and false persona. As long as we are ‘uncomfortable’ with death and its cohorts, such as grief and loss, then we are believing in them as threats to our peace of mind. The solution, as so often recommended by the Buddhists, is to immerse oneself in death and the business of death until such time as death throws a light rather than a shadow on our lives.

At the time of finishing my course, it was no longer possible for me not to think about death. But it was still disturbing me. Close friends died, as did family members. I saw that death caught most people by surprise and that they suffered for this. It seemed for a while that death was surrounding me and I felt depressed and somewhat hypocritical because it seemed that I still wasn’t walking my talk. I understand now that when we think about death we have the thoughts, the vrittis, of all mankind in our psyche, as well as the overpowering messages of our current culture about how life and death are. Once upon a time our journey through this miasma would be aided by the wise and by the stories a society lives by. Now it is our task to create new narratives and to demonstrate the truth of our understanding. This is why I and others are now running programs on talking about death and holding Festivals and Days of the Dead, not to tell people ‘how things really are’ but, in the ways of the old Books of the Dead, to remind ourselves and others of the value of occupying death before it occupies us.