Not Dead Yet!

One of my pointedly few vows for blogging was never to apologize for periods of time without writing.  Nothing to Attain continues to attain nothing, and all is well.  


Pari-Nirvana Sesshin happened in February.  Not surprisingly, my mind really does not want to meditate on death.  It writhes around in a weird mix of humor and anxiety, making for a bit of a turbulent week.  Interestingly, one meditation that did settle my mind was the closest I could get to meditating in the charnel ground:  Imagining my own body decomposing, in as much detail as possible.  Except that I have very little training in biology of any sort, and I avoid zombie movies, so there are lots of blanks to fill regarding this process.  


But I got curious about it.  So I got home, googled around and found a couple books to help me.  You've probably already read it, but Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach!  How did I miss this?  Why didn't you tell me?  


The third chapter is about the University of Tennessee's Anthropological Research Facility, aka the "body farm".  It is as close to a charnel ground as we might get in our culture, and provided exactly the kind of detail about what actually happens to bodies when they are left to decompose on their own schedule.  Mary Roach:

Do you recall the Margaret Hamilton death scene in The Wizard of Oz?  ("I'm melting!")  Putrefecation is more or less a slowed down version of this.  

Beetles, maggots, and bacteria, oh my!  Such a powerful antidote to body obsession and stuff obsession.  It occurred to me that all the calcium supplements I take will just end up in the ground someday, one way or another.  Impermanence.    


I learned that the creator of the body farm also wrote a book called Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales.  It's on my list.  I think these windows into forensics are way better than those CSI shows, which I also avoid.    


Our Sangha has a yearly poetry gathering online every March.  One of the week's themes was on death.  Here is a poem I wrote for that the other day: 


Meditation on Death and Life
Everything falls apart.
Starting with our jaws, as we meet death
with open-mouthed amazement.
The bacteria in our bellies loosed like a tsunami
liquefying and changing the landscape.
Not to mention to the janitorial crew; millions strong and teeming.
Indeed affirming the lives of flies,
thanks to whom, the traveling swallows,
snapping their beaks audibly in the fields,
feed baby birds with hungry open mouths.

Pari-Nirvana Sesshin

The Reclining Buddha, Ancient City, Bangkok, originally uploaded by Miek37

I'm not sure what I expected, but my expectations did not, of course, resemble reality. The Teisho were all about the Buddha's last weeks of life, and his teachings during this time. This much I expected. But what I wasn't expecting (why not?) was that we meditated upon death -- our own death -- for the week:

Breathing each breath as if it were our last. Eating each meal as if it were our last. Visualizing our own death on the cushion in as much detail as possible. Then visualizing the responses of others in those first moments, a day after... a week after, maybe a memorial service. Then one month, 6 months, a year, 5 years, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 years later. What endures?

I was surprised by how quickly life moves on. What a self-centered and wrong view -- that the whole world will stop upon my death. Sure, there would be a few people who would really be hurting with the loss for a while. But for the most part, and in the long run, it's like taking a spoonful of dry sand out of the beach. It all just fills right back in.

We held the awareness of the inevitability of death for ourselves and also for others. We were encouraged to look upon others as we passed, worked, ate together with the knowledge that they could die tonight. To look at the monastery as if it were a hospice.

My resistance to all of this was subtle. As I watched people come and go the moment I picked up the hospice visualization, my first thought / sense was something akin to sympathy: "Aw, you guys are in a hospice." Then immediately realizing, "Fool, you're in the hospice too!" I found this kind of resistance a bit comical.

Another kind of resistance was noticing some holding onto ideas of the Heaven of my Christian upbringing. This idea that the self not only continues indefinitely, but that you get a body upgrade, complete with wings and no suffering. And Heaven has all your favorite foods and all your deceased relatives, friends, and pets. I don't even believe in this anymore, but that's where the mind wanted to go; a simple, sure, solid answer, rather than really holding the question, holding the not-knowing, and just sitting with the fact of total dissolution.

But it's not even the death of the body that the mind had as much resistance to. I can see the interconnectedness and this body's place on the food chain. No, it's the end of this small self, this personality that freaks me out and causes my mind to comfort its anxiety with humor.

I initially found this response years ago when a friend who was in medical school took me on a tour of the cadaver lab. I noticed my nervous laughter for what it was. But I also could not seem to stop it.

During the retreat, I couldn't really feel anything when telling myself this was the last meal. The last chance to taste anything in this body. The last time to hear frogs singing. The last time to feel the breath in the belly. The last breath I would ever take. There's a store of denial there. Apparently I just don't believe it. So I ended up trying different ways to settle this awareness more deeply. I tried to find words to convince myself of the permanence of death -- that I would cease to exist. Then, of course, I just ended up thinking of the Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch:

"It's not pinin,' it's passed on! This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late parrot! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolical processes are of interest only to historians! It's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This.... is an EX-PARROT!"

And in one of my visualizations -- dying on the patch of ground I was (again) digging out blackberries for work practice, I ended up having a rather hilarious vision of the monastery immediately just rolling right on with the schedule, without even moving my decomposing body from the side of the driveway. At least not until their Japanese Gardening Consultant advised them about a week later that this was not the most auspicious placement for dead bodies. So then someone had to move my dead body out to the back forty for their work practice.

One person shared that they kept having visions of flowers throughout the retreat, and didn't know why. Isn't it obvious? Aren't we all just these various fleeting little expressions of life? Here to be seen and appreciated, and treated with kindness?

I ask you: What endures?