Top Five Regrets of the Dying

When my mother passed away in December, we were blessed to work with a knowledgeable and compassionate palliative care nurse named Kerry who helped to make my mother's transition easier. I was and continue to be in awe of the way that Kerry balanced the practical tasks of working with my mother's medical needs with the simple, loving way she could just be there with her and hold her hand and share stories and joke and laugh with her and honor her humanity.

Having now twice been through the experience of being present with another human being at the time of death, I consider the work that people like Kerry to do to be among the most important work that anyone could do. It is a vocation that, when practiced well, brings dignity and grace to one of life's most difficult and potentially frightening transitional moments.

When people like Kerry speak, I listen, because of the wisdom they have gained from their years of working with people in their final and most critical moments, when so many of the stark realities of life are stripped of pretenses and laid bare.

That is why I have so much respect for the observations of Bronnie Ware, who published a book in 2012 based on her years of experience as a palliative care nurse in Australia, called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. (The book is only $2.99 if you download on Kindle.)

Ware discovered through her many intimate conversations with people in the final stages of their lives that there were several common and recurring themes of regret. Below are the top five themes that she identified. If you were to find yourself, through some unforeseen circumstance, on your death bed in the near future, would any of these themes would ring a bell with you?

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

The great medieval Tibetan yogi and saint Milarepa said, "My religion is to live and die without regret." Death will come for all of us sooner or later; the problem is that we always think it will come later. If it were to come sooner than you think, would you feel any of these common regrets?

What are you doing today to make sure you don't feel that way when the time does come?

Alive in New York: Recent Photographs

I'm pleased to present a slideshow of some of my recent photographs taken in New York City. Enjoy, and feel free to repost and share with your friends. (Note to email subscribers: If you cannot view the slideshow in your email, please click through to the blog.)

Gabor Maté on "Toxic Culture: How Materialistic Society Makes Us Ill"

This incredible "Quote of the Day" post comes from an interview in the Toronto Standard with Dr. Gabor Maté, Nazi genocide survivor and bestselling author of Toxic Culture: How Materialistic Society Makes Us Ill.

Maté:  People have a need for meaning and for belonging. But this society defines the value of a human being by how much they can either produce or consume. For all our talk about human values, we don’t really value humans for who they are. We value them for what they either give or purchase.

In other cultures, elders are considered to be people with wisdom, with experience, with a contribution to make. In our society, we don’t talk about elders, we talk about ‘the elderly’ – in other words, we define them by their age. And once they’re no longer either producers or consumers, they lose their value. We know that the more isolated people are, the more likely they are to get sick and the more likely they are to die of their illness. This is a society that isolates people.

TS: Is there a way to be “in this world, but not of it," so to speak?

Maté:  The only way to live healthy in this culture is to be in it but not of it. And that means being able to see through a value structure that has materialism as its highest goal. By materialism, I mean that the control and possession of material goods are seen as the greatest obsessions. And the people that are seen as the highest achievers are the ones who acquire and wield more material control than other people do. To buy into that is to limit our human capacity, and therefore, to limit human health.

TS:  How can a person break through that?

Maté:  Does the person see the connection between their lack of joy or their depression or their mental illness or their alienation from work or life or nature – do they see it as a problem? If they don’t see it as a problem, then there’s no point of giving any type of advice.

More people are questioning; are we heading in the right direction? Do we hold the right set of values? Is it serving our physical and mental health? Is it serving our spiritual health? And by the way, that’s one of the failures of the medical system - is that it considers people only in physical terms. The fact that people have emotional needs is kind of recognized but the relationship of that to illness is not recognized. And the fact that we have spiritual needs? We don’t even talk about that.

TS:  Why do you think that is?

Maté:  Because the essence of capitalism is to reduce things to commodities. Or to reduce people to things that consume commodities. Everything else is secondary. So we have a lot of religion but very little spirituality.

The Great Liberation

Death was a recurrent theme during the two years I lived as a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey. From my circle of friends and acquaintances outside, I received emails telling me of one loss after another. My acquaintance John was horrifically stabbed to death in his apartment by his own lover. My friend Gregg, who suffered from depression and had attempted suicide a few times before, finally succeeded. In the space of a few months, two other acquaintances died by drug overdose. My grandmother died of old age. And finally there was Ani Palmo, a senior nun at the Abbey, who passed away in my presence. As I shared one loss after another with my fellow residents, we contemplated the frequency with which death was visiting my circle of loved ones.

In the Four Reminders, a traditional Tibetan Buddhist teaching, the second reminder urges us to remember how fleeting and fragile life is, like a bubble, and how quickly and unexpectedly the bubble may be ruptured. “Death comes without warning,” it says. “This body will be a corpse. At that time, the Dharma will be my only help. I must practice it with exertion.” In other words, carpe diem: practice like your hair is on fire, for you never know when your time will be up.

“We do not know where death awaits us so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.” – Montaigne

It’s true that death sometimes comes without warning, but at other times it mounts an all-out media blitz to warn people of its coming. It can arrive suddenly in a burst of unthinkable horror, as it did for my friend John; or it can send word discreetly that it is planning to come in the near future. Death can creep in bit by bit over the course of many years, gradually tightening its grip with agonizing slowness, giving you plenty of time to think about it. That’s how it came for Ani Palmo, who had battled first throat cancer and then emphysema for about a decade. She had rehearsed and anticipated and talked about her death for so long that it became a sort of running joke at the Abbey. Ani Palmo was dying, and she had been dying ever since most people could remember; but we wondered if she might end up out-living most of us.

I only got to know Ani Palmo during her last year-and-a-half — but even then, in her diminished capacity, she was a formidable person. As a young child she lived in Poland under Nazi occupation; after the war, she spent five years in an orphanage operated by nuns. A psychologist by profession, she left her first husband and two young children, remarried and emigrated to Canada in the 1970s; but she soon felt lost and confused amidst the drinking and drugging and sexual freedom of the time. After becoming a student of Chogyam Trungpa, she found her way: she divorced her second husband, took life-long vows as a Buddhist nun, and entered a strict three-year retreat with Kalu Rinpoche.
  
In the effusive manner of an old-world Polish grandmother, she was famous for her hospitality, and for the cookies and chocolates and gossip she would offer to visitors at her cabin. But once you were relaxed and comfortable, she would turn her flashing, slightly intimidating blue eyes on you and ask you — in her thick Polish accent — about your meditation practice. Her frivolity was matched by her gravitas as a practitioner. Her students loved her passionately, and had a respect for her that bordered on fear – and for good reason. For all her sweetness, Ani Palmo had sharp edges. She could be severe and demanding, and disarmingly perceptive.

By the time I knew her, Ani Palmo was confined to her cabin, tucked in the woods a short ways from the Abbey, and she breathed with the help of an oxygen machine. I often went into town and did the shopping for Abbey residents, so I was the one who brought Ani Palmo her supplies of cookies and chocolates. Her eyes always lit up when I walked into the room, and she would greet me with a cheerful “Hieeee!” or with my monastic name, “Zopa!” Occasionally, she would ask me to bring her something contraband, such as an “everything” bagel with garlic and onions (both taboo substances in the Buddhist monastic code), and we would share a conspiratorial smile. Then she would invite me to sit down, offer me some of the goodies I had brought for her, and ask for the latest gossip from the Abbey. Often, she would break down in a spell of acute wheezing, unable to catch her breath, the fluids deep in her lungs rattling in a guttural way that alarmed me every time I heard it.

With Ani Palmo there was none of the usual tip-toeing around the subject of death. It was constantly on her mind, and on her tongue. She anticipated death every day, and in fact she wished it would hurry up and come. It was long overdue, as far as she was concerned. Any casual conversation with her was likely to come around to the topic of her death, and she often sent visitors away with some little cherished possession as a parting gift, in case they never met again: a photo, a tchotchke, a Dharma text or practice implement. She seemed to have an endless supply of these objects, so her practice of giving them away was never finished. Again and again, people came to visit her and say their final, emotional farewells, only to return in a year or two or three to find her still alive. At her 76th birthday celebration, she told us that if her birthday wish came true, she would not live to see another one.

Ani Palmo did not fear death; what she feared was the suffering involved in dying. She had seen her mother dying, also from emphysema. She had witnessed the horror and pain of someone slowly drowning in her own internal fluids, so she knew more or less what kind of physical suffering was in store for her. She was already deep in the grips of that suffering, and could only tolerate it with the help of morphine and Dilaudid. Among the team of people at the Abbey who shared the task of giving Ani Palmo her medications, it was joked — but we weren’t sure it was really a joke — that she took enough painkillers every day to kill William S. Burroughs in the prime of his opiate addiction.

Yet, for all that, she was remarkably clear-minded, and surrendered to her situation. She had long ago accepted her illness as her own karma coming to fruition, and she did not seem to have any resentment about it. Since there was no looking away from death, in her case, she chose to fully embrace it. Following the Tibetan tradition, she saw death as the greatest opportunity for liberation and enlightenment — as long as one is properly prepared for it.

When I went to visit Ani Palmo I would sometimes find her listening to a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This reading had been recorded specifically for her, years before, by Pema Chödrön. The book is a shamanic guide both to dying and to liberation for the consciousness of the dead person in what is called the bardo — the disembodied, confusing state after death but before rebirth. According to tradition, this in-between state is fertile with the potential for full awakening if one is trained to recognize the nature of mind and to rest in it with equanimity. Over the years she spent preparing for death, Ani Palmo must have listened to that recording at least 100 times.

During Ani Palmo’s last stay at the hospital, about an hour's drive away from the Abbey, we set up a team of people to take turns staying with her around the clock. On the day she passed, I went to the hospital for a late-morning shift. Serri, one of the other temporary monks, was there along with Barbara, the director of the Abbey. Ani Palmo was very agitated, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was talking very fast in what seemed to be Polish, and struggling to catch her breath in-between phrases.

“Look, Ani Palmo,” said Barbara. “Zopa’s here.” Ani Palmo grew quiet for a moment and opened her eyes wide, making an effort to focus on me; I couldn’t be sure if she still recognized me. Then her eyes went unfocused again and she lapsed back into her Polish monologue. I sat by her bed for a while and stroked her hand and arm. She seemed to want desperately to communicate something, but we had no idea what she was saying.

Then, from somewhere within the stream of incoherent words, a few syllables jumped out at me, and I suddenly recognized them: “...Vajra Guru...” I realized that Ani Palmo wasn’t babbling incoherently — she was reciting the Guru Rinpoche mantra. I began to sing the mantra repeatedly to its familiar melody: Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum. Barbara and Serri joined in. Ani Palmo stopped speaking, her eyes still closed, and listened intently for a while as we repeated the mantra, and then she piped up again: “Om Ah Hum!” Those three syllables from the mantra that was sacred to her were her last clearly spoken words.

After a little while Ani Palmo raised her hand and gestured toward the MP3 player that held the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Serri turned on the recording, and we listened to Ani Pema’s voice as she began to guide Ani Palmo, according to tradition, through the stages of the dying process and its immediate aftermath. Since she had listened to the recording so many times before, it was natural to assume that this time might be like all the others.

After Barbara and Serri left to return to the Abbey, I was alone with Ani Palmo and the vivid descriptions, wafting out from the little MP3 player, of what one sees and experiences in the bardo of dying and the bardo of dharmata — the moment when the consciousness of the now-dead person reawakens without a physical body. According to tradition, in the bardo of dharmata the mind’s inherent luminosity and openness shines brilliantly and without obstruction, if only for a moment, before habitual patterns begin to cloud it over again. That moment of clarity is said to be ripe with potential for complete awakening, if one is able to recognize mind’s luminous, empty nature and remain within that experience.

The MP3 player was set on repeat, and Ani Palmo and I must have listened to that forty-minute section of the recording two or three times before it began to dawn on me that this might not simply be another in Ani Palmo's long series of rehearsals for death — that this might be the real thing. At a certain point Ani Palmo’s breathing abruptly shifted and became strangely calm. I called in the nurse to look at her. The nurse checked her IV line and felt her forehead, shrugged her shoulders, and left unfazed. She had seen similar things before.

I ran a washcloth under the tap and wiped Ani Palmo’s forehead with it. She was no longer very responsive to touch, but I could tell she was still listening to Ani Pema’s voice, and following the instructions. Every once in a while when Ani Pema would say her name, she would respond with a non-verbal sound of recognition, just the smallest of grunts — but enough to tell me she was still there, still listening. According to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the hearing is the last of the senses to go; in fact, hearing is believed to continue functioning even in the bardo after death, which is why the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read aloud to people who have recently died.

Gradually, the spaces between Ani Palmo’s breaths became longer and longer. I began to silently count the time before her next in-breath: three, five, ten, fifteen seconds. At some point I waited for the next breath and counted the seconds, and then just kept counting: one minute, two minutes went by. I kept waiting, but she never took another breath. At the very end, after all those years of battling illness, she slipped across the threshold of death so peacefully that I wasn’t even sure it had happened. I reached out a hand to stroke her forehead and smooth her hair back, and whispered: “Your struggle is over, Ani Palmo. You’re free.”

Death is the greatest uncertainty, and yet nothing could be more certain than the fact that we will die. We don’t know when it will come, or how; and despite what we may believe and what tradition may tell us, we don’t really know what will or won’t happen once we cross that threshold. As with a black hole, we can’t know what lies beyond the event horizon because no light or information escapes the gravitational pull of this greatest of unknowns. But we can choose, to some degree, how we cross into the vast, open space of that question. We can go kicking and screaming with fear and regret, clutching in vain at the shards of the mirror that is shattering before our very eyes; or we can dissolve into that open space and trust that our fractured reflection in the broken mirror of self wasn’t really who we were in the first place.

Ani Palmo became one of my greatest teachers that morning: she showed me what the death of a great Dharma practitioner looks like. To the last moment, her commitment to waking up did not falter. Despite the complete deterioration of her body, the unbelievable amount of medication she was on, and whatever traces of fear and anxiety and attachment she might have felt — with so much stacked against her, she maintained the clarity and strength of mind and singularity of purpose to continue practicing, right up to the threshold of death, like her hair was on fire.

A Monk No More

It has been quite some time since readers of this blog last heard from me. Many people have written or approached me to say how much they would like for me to continue writing here. I can only say that it has always been my intention to return to this blog, and add (feebly, in my defense) that life since I last wrote anything here has been, well, a bit of a rollercoaster.

About a month-and-a-half ago marked my one-year anniversary of being back in New York City, following a two-year odyssey of living as a temporary monk at a Buddhist monastery in the remote wilds of Eastern Canada. It was while living that frequently charmed life — nestled between ocean and mountains and supported by the insular rhythms of monastic rituals and hours of daily contemplative practice — that I wrote most of the essays that appeared on this blog to date. And it was through that particular filter of experience that most of you saw me and got to know me here.

That life now seems like such a distant memory to me that it’s sometimes hard to believe I was actually living in the monastery, wearing maroon robes, a year-and-a-half ago. So much water has passed under the bridge of life since then, and so much has changed. As Heraclitus said, "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you."

People in New York City often have a wide-eyed expression when I tell them about my time in the monastery, and (assuming they aren't looking at me with suspicion or pity) they seem to regard it as proof of some special ability on my part. “Wow, that’s amazing” is usually followed quickly by “I could never do that” or “I can’t sit still” or “I would go crazy” or “I can’t imagine being without my iPhone.” Little do they know that I can’t sit still either, and sometimes I went crazy in the monastery, and even though I lived an hour’s drive from the nearest cellular signal, I still had my iPhone at my side and used it as a WiFi device to check my email and Facebook accounts. You can take the monk out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of the monk.

With most New Yorkers, the next series of questions usually goes something like this: “So, when you were living in the monastery, were you celibate? Really? Wait, so you mean you didn’t have sex with anyone? No one? For two whole years? Not even once? You’re kidding! Oh my God! I would die. So, wait, I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable that I’m asking you all these questions? Are you sure? Okay, so, I mean, did you at least...you know? Oh my God, I would die!” Well, here I am. I did not die, and neither would you. Personally, I think a two-year sabbatical from sex and romance did me a lot of good.

Actually, I like to think it did me a lot of good but I don’t really have any proof of that. My post-monk intimate life in New York has certainly not been anything that I would hold up as a role model for anyone. About a month after I landed back in the city I met someone and fell deeply, madly in love — in the intense, all-or-nothing way that perhaps only someone who has been starved for intimate connection for several years can fall in love. But love, as it often does, stayed for a little while and then abruptly went away, and I was left holding a bag with the broken pieces of my heart in it. Only I now had another person’s name written on each of those pieces and I couldn’t seem to wipe it off. When I came back from the monastery, my heart was wide open and strong, wider and stronger than it has ever been. But by the time love was done with me, my heart was shriveled and bruised and enfolded upon itself, and I felt weaker than I have ever felt in my life.

It has taken me some time to be able to look back on that experience and say that it was probably exactly what I needed, and that it arrived and departed exactly when it was supposed to. But I can say that now, and there are even occasional moments when I can say it and actually mean it.

Once people have gotten past the sex questions, they usually want to know what was it that led me to go to the monastery, and what did I learn while I was there? What did I get out of it? Did I find enlightenment? Have amazing spiritual realizations? Achieve inner peace? “You seem, like, so Zen, so chill. That must be from your time in the monastery.” No, actually, I was always pretty much like this. It’s just my outward persona. And you can ask my close friends about how Zen and chill I really am. They know you can scratch off the polished Zen facade and you'll find someone underneath with all the neuroses of Woody Allen and all the maudlin narratives of Adele, just waiting to come out.

I used to say, when asked, that what I brought home from the monastery was a sense of being more comfortable in my own skin, and a stronger feeling of compassion for others. But I don’t even make those small claims anymore. Since my return I’ve been tested enough times — by love, by family, by friends, by the noise and greed and rush of New York City itself — to know that my compassion often flies out the window when it’s needed most, and I can still find myself at times wanting to be in a thousand other skins than my own. La piel que habito no es siempre lo que quiero habitar.

As for why I went to the monastery in the first place, well, it had something to do with wanting to explore my spiritual development — which is to say, my growth as a human, as a being, as a human being — in an intense, all-or-nothing way that no other environment or path seemed to offer. (You see, I suppose I fell into monkhood as blindly and whole-heartedly as I fell in love.)

The other day I came across a quote by one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Ken McLeod, who seemed to sum it all up:

“As long as you limit your experience to what fits into the world of society, you will explore your spiritual potential only to the extent that it doesn’t impinge on your life in society.”

Going to the monastery was a way of trying to explore my spiritual potential to the fullest extent I could at the time, no holds barred. Frankly, nothing — except, perhaps, joining the circus — could “impinge on your life in society” more than moving to an isolated spiritual community and donning the robes and following the vows of a monk — the epitome of someone who walks away from society and all its materialistic expectations. Going to the monastery was going against the stream of everything society said I should be doing instead. And it was an immersion into the formalities of spiritual practice that I realize I may never be able to duplicate in my life outside the monastery. I also recognize that it was an experiment that not everyone has the luxury of making, and that I was fortunate to have had the experience, however challenging it may have been at times. And in the end, I’m keenly aware of the fact that I came out of it with nothing in particular to show for it. Only a deeper sense of connection to the world and to myself, and a deeper willingness to work on myself and nourish my strengths and know my weaknesses — to accept myself, warts and all.

And for now that is enough.

Somewhere Between Rage and Serenity

In the movie X-Men: First Class, a prequel in which we meet the younger, more innocent versions of the characters from the later movies, the ever-wise and telepathic Charles Xavier (later known as Professor X) coaches Erik -- the vengeful, angry young man who will eventually become his arch-rival, Magneto -- on how to use his metal-bending superpower. Erik cannot seem to unleash the full extent of his power except when he is swept away by emotion -- specifically, anger and sorrow. Xavier instructs him on how to control his mind in order to control his power: "True focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity."

Like most dialogue in superhero movies, this line is too cute by half, but within it there is a kernel of truth. From the Buddhist point of view, the key to working skillfully with our emotions -- both the pleasant ones and the painful ones -- is to find a balance between, on the one hand, feeling the emotion and opening to its energy, and on the other hand, having enough space around the experience of the emotion that we do not get swept away by it. It's rather like the way the Buddha instructed one of his students who was struggling with meditation practice: "Not too tight, not too loose."

In the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, and particularly in the view of "formless" meditation practices like Mahamudra and Dzogchen, whatever arises in the mind -- even powerful, afflictive emotions such as anger, jealousy, or rage -- is regarded as the path of awakening. We don't need to apply any antidotes, or try to get rid of our thoughts or pacify our emotions. Every experience is the play of mind's natural luminosity and emptiness. The only question is how we relate to what arises in our minds -- whether we see its true nature or mistake it for something it is not.

Usually we cling to the thoughts and emotions that make us feel good or reinforce our egos, and we reject and push away the ones that feel unpleasant. Or, like Magneto, we go the opposite way and cling to what is actually painful; we nurse resentments and keep scratching at wounds that eat us up from the inside and become the whole storyline of our lives. In either case, we project a degree of reality and solidity onto our thoughts and emotions that they don't really have. As Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche said, "When you know that thoughts are illusions, you can take thoughts of desire and anger as friends." The stronger the emotional charge, the more it reveals or points to mind's awakened nature. It all depends on whether we can experience the raw energy of our emotions without buying into our own concepts and storylines about them, and without blowing our emotions up into something they are not.

The story of how Erik became Magneto is, of course, a cautionary tale. In the end, Erik was just too consumed by his rage and his thirst for vengeance, and his obsession turned him to the dark side. From Charles Xavier he learned how to unleash his full mutant powers, but not how to let go of his own concepts. He didn't quite grasp the real meaning of Xavier's advice about working with the power of emotions: "True focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity." In other words, it's about finding the middle way.

I think Professor X was on to something. He might even have been studying Buddhism.

More Apocalypse Now

Just 24 hours after posting my article on our modern obsession with apocalyptic narratives and religious visions of doomsday, the doorbell rang and I was greeted by a smiling Jehovah's Witness in a suit and tie. He wanted to let me know about an upcoming convention in the area, and gave me a flyer with the details. The flyer's content -- about the coming apocalypse and the promise of redemption for the lucky few -- could not have been more perfectly attuned to what I wrote even if I had written the copy for it myself.

"Violence, immorality, and global warming," the flyer asks, "along with oil spills and other environmental disasters -- all these problems have led concerned people to ask, WILL HUMANS RUIN THIS EARTH?" It invites me to attend a three-day convention, where a talk will be given that "will show how this planet will soon be transformed into a paradise and how you and your family can qualify to live there."

This particular vision of apocalypse and redemption is based on a dream recorded in the Book of Daniel (2:31-45), interpreted as a prophesy that details the successive rise and fall of multiple empires: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the British, and the Americans. The dream itself has to do with a statue whose toes are made of iron mixed with clay, and a huge rock that smashes the statue to pieces and establishes God's Kingdom on earth, which will last forever and ever.

The apocalyptic narrative put forth by Jehovah's Witnesses may differ slightly in its content and sources from the narrative put forward by Harold Camping and the Rapturists. But the message is essentially the same, and it perfectly demonstrates what I wrote in my previous article. It plays directly upon people's awareness that there are real and serious problems in the world: violence, global warming, environmental pollution, "immorality," and so on (I won't open the Pandora's Box of what constitutes "immorality," but there it is). It plucks at the strings of people's fears that all of this is building towards some kind of imminent turning point, a day of reckoning and dramatic change. For those who are inclined towards interpreting contemporary events in the light of ancient Biblical prophecy, those fears are easily diverted into a consoling vision of how to turn the threat of apocalypse into an opportunity for you and your family!

Apocalypse Now

Last week the American public was treated to an amazing amount of hype about the so-called "Rapture" predicted by a self-styled evangelical prophet named Harold Camping.

I come from an evangelical background (I bear the scars of a Southern Baptist childhood), so Rapture fever is nothing new to me. But I was astounded at the level of hype and media coverage garnered by Camping and his followers. As a prophet, Camping may have been quite mistaken; but as a marketer, he demonstrated a certain genius. There were at least 27,000 articles published on the topic; Camping and his followers spent an estimated $100 million on billboard advertisements promoting the coming apocalypse. On Facebook and Twitter and on late-night shows last week, Saturday's scheduled Rapture was the subject of seemingly endless commentary and derisive satire. While some of this satire was quite funny and richly deserved, in the end it was depressing to see that our public discourse could be so completely hijacked by a story that really merited discussion only in psychiatric journals, as a case study of religious mania.

It was also sad to see how shamelessly religious believers' fears were exploited for profit. On eBay, one man last week was selling, for $99, a fail-safe message delivery service ensuring that those lucky enough to be taken up could have their goodbye letters post-Rapturously delivered to loved ones who were left behind. Another service was offered to insure ongoing care for beloved pets forsaken by those pet owners who were expecting to be levitated into the sky and escorted directly to Heaven.

As some have noted, the amount of hype and discussion generated by last week's Rapture bubble is probably miniscule compared to that which has already been building for several years in anticipation of the apocalypse predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar for December 21, 2012. If, like me, you quickly tired of the Rapture bubble, just wait: there is still a year and a half to build up a proper media frenzy about the Mayan doomsday. It has already been the subject of a major Hollywood film with a $200 million budget -- twice what Camping spent to promote his brand of apocalypse.

The ascendancy of apocalyptic narratives in popular culture belies deeper forces at work within the American mind. Apocalyptic narratives are the clothing in which we dress up our fears of the future, our dread of change and loss, our basic fear of death. If our need for such narratives is growing, it indicates a corresponding amplification of fearful mind. Behind our fear, and fueling the narrative, is the collective awareness that we are playing a game that is nearing its inevitable end. The way we live today is not sustainable, and people sense that the repercussions are building towards a day of reckoning. That awareness -- which isn't necessarily mistaken -- is easily hijacked by apocalyptic narratives of any kind.

It would be much better if we could begin to face our fears -- and their causes -- directly, rather than projecting them into mythological narratives of apocalypse. We are right to sense that our modern human life is out of balance, and that we are nearing a tipping point. We may also be right to sense that a moment of truth is approaching, and that facing the truth may not be easy or comfortable. But when we divert this awareness into apocalyptic narratives derived from ancient prophecies, we only distract ourselves from our real problems.

Love's in Need of Love Today

This morning I attended a funeral service for an acquaintance who died last week. Most of the small, Acadian town here turned out for the service -- a very traditional Catholic funeral in the town's single, large cathedral.

Having grown up Baptist, I always feel like I've stepped into another world when I visit a Catholic church, with its alien liturgies and rituals and rich iconography. The feeling of being a visitor from another planet was heightened, this morning, by my being dressed conspicuously in the robes of a Buddhist monk, which literally marked me as an alien presence and made it impossible to pretend otherwise. But the local people here are accustomed to having Buddhist monks in their midst.

Since this morning, I've been reflecting on something the priest said during his homily. "In order to experience life in its fullness, we must share the fullness of God's love with others." To put that into more secular language: no man is an island. We are relational creatures, and we find and experience the fullness of meaning in our lives through the love, kindness and compassion that we give and receive in relationship to one another.

The Buddha expressed this as the truth of interdependence. We do not actually exist as solid entities, separate from one another; we "inter-are," as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it. In the fullness of realizing our interdependence, we feel others' pain as our own, and there are no barriers to the natural flow of love and kindness. Sounds like heaven, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, back on earth, there seems to be no shortage of barriers blocking the flow of kindness and compassion between human beings. Open the newspaper or turn on the TV. The world is hurting, burning with violence and conflict. "Hate's goin' round, breaking many hearts," mourns Stevie Wonder. "The force of evil plans to make you its possession. And it will, if we let it, destroy everybody. We all must take precautionary measures."

In his book Awakening Through Love, the Dzogchen teacher Lama John Makransky writes:

"Everything that is most important to human beings is dependent upon love. Powerful and enduring love, grounded in wisdom, is the panacea to cure the ills of this world, starting with our own. We all have this curative power of goodness within us; all we need are the means to unveil it."

Replace "God" with the "power of goodness within us," and that's pretty much exactly what the Catholic priest said this morning.

Oh, and here's that Stevie Wonder song, from 1976. Its message couldn't be more true, or more timely.

Descend into Your Body and Wake Up

Cross-posted today at the ID Project.


Lately I've been seeing more and more meditators and teachers talking about Mindfulness of Body -- which makes me very happy. Last month, Kate Johnson published a thoughtful piece at the ID Project blog called "Mindfulness of Bodies." Will Johnson had a fantastic article, "Full Body, Empty Mind," at Tricycle. A little further back, in November, I published (also at the ID Project blog) "You Are Not a Brain on a Stick (Or Are You?)".

In that piece, I wrote:

"...We modern people have become tragically disembodied, alienated from the most basic level of our own experience as human beings.... Most of us have lost the felt sense of what it is to be embodied, to experience the world in and through the medium of this material and energetic body into which we have been born.

"We think about the body a great deal, sometimes obsessively, but this is not the same as being in and with the body on its own terms. Our allegiance to thinking about everything -- mediating and managing our experience and our lives through the conceptual thought function -- is the very root of our disembodiment in the first place. For the most part, we think of our bodies as mere tools (and sometimes obstacles) to serve our ambitions and our ego's goals of attaining happiness and comfort; we rarely descend into the darkness of the body itself and witness, without an agenda, the naked experience that arises there."

As Reggie Ray says in his book Touching Enlightenment, it's not simply that we can find realization and awakening in the body -- there is actually no other place to find it.

But it would be just like us (wouldn't it?) to sit here in cyberspace and chit-chat and theorize about Mindfulness of Body, without actually doing it. So -- enough talk. Embedded below is a simple, 20-minute guided meditation on Mindfulness of Body that I led about a year ago at Nalandabodhi New York. You can download the MP3, or listen in streaming audio online. Close your Facebook and Twitter windows, silence your mobile phone, sit down in a comfortable meditation posture, click "Play," and explore the mystery of being alive in a human body. There is a world of somatic experience unfolding in your being at this very moment -- just waiting for you to notice it.






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