An old man was walking on the same unchanged rout he had walked every night of his life. It was dark and cool, and as he walked he passed many houses. Any time he passed a house with a vegetable garden in front he would stop. It was the end of summer so all the fruit that had fallen was now hard and dry from the mid day sun. The old man would bend down and search with his hands in the dark to find the preserved seeds. These seeds would be sewn in his garden for the next year.
At one house as he was stuffing the seeds in his pocket, a small thing hit him in the back of the head. He turned around and looked down on the walkway. A small bird was lying still. The old man reached down and picked up the figure, as black as the unlit night, and cupped his hands around it. He held it motionless in his palm patiently, until finally he felt it begin to move.
He opened his hands and the bird hopped around awkwardly till it found a finger to perch it's self on.
"hello" said the little bird "I feel you are different from other people, you don't try to harm me or eat me, but also you do not try to name me, count my feathers, test my talons, or measure my beak, so i will ask you for a favor. Yesterday it was warm and the sun was out. I could feel the sun warm me as I flew through the air and it made my happy. But I was struck with the urge to look upon the thing that brought me such joy. So I turned upwards and flew at the sun. I forced my eyes open. It was beautiful, but now I am blind. I have not eaten in days and realize that I will probably die this very night, but I have one wish. I would like once more to feel the sun warm my back as I fly through the air. So the favor i ask of you is that you offer me food to eat, that I might live one more day."
The man reached into his pocket and pulled out the seeds he had gathered that night. He poured them into the hand that held the bird. Hearing them fall, the bird immediately started pecking at the man's palm. His sharp beak missed the seeds as often as he found them, and soon the small punctures in the old mans hand began coating the seeds in red. The bird ate till he could find no more seeds in the pool of blood and flew off into the darkness with out a word.
The man looked up into the sky where the bird had flown and saw the stars.
He looked down at the ground where his feet were covered in dust.
He looked forward where he was going, he look backwards at where he had been.
He looked to the left and to the right,
then
he walked in a new direction.
Joseph Campbell said that God is something that transcends all categories of human thought, including the categories of being and non being. This means that God neither exists or does not exist, he is beyond both. If God is this way, I think it’s easy to see that all things in the world are this way, the idea that something exists or not is truly a state of the human mind, but if we were not to perceive it would it still exist? Or more classically if a tree falls in the forest an no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise? It is our own perspective that dictates how something exists to the utmost degree.
If you hold 3 rocks in your hand how do you know there are 3? You might count them and say “there are three rocks here” but if your mind was not present to count would there still be 3? With no mind to distinguish the rocks as 3 separate entities, or even to separate them from the hand would it still be 3 stones in palm? Or would it simply exist by it’s very nature as something simultaneously more and less than we have ever perceived it to be? With out the human mind things are never together, and never apart. Our perspective of every single detail of every single object, idea, experience, is created by our own mind, the very idea of 3 is an invention, 3 does not exist in the universe, only in our mind’s need to categorize and label the universe so that we can understand it. It is clear now why God would be beyond all categories of though, just as the true nature of everything is beyond all categories of thought, and finally why death must also transcend our ability to understand. Though not be beyond our ability to experience.
When I was young I went to a Lutheran church that was a wonderful place in which to grow up, where I loved church, but hated Sunday school. For a person who would later come to love spirituality so deeply while I was actually in Sunday school I was never so bored. We learned the lords prayer, we learned the G rated Bible stories, and we learned that when we died we would go to heaven because we were baptized and had accepted Jesus, this meant that even if we committed sin, as long as we still gave our sins to Jesus we would always be forgiven. The idea of heaven was nice, though nothing I really thought about much. The average preteen has little use in thinking about death and is as far from comprehending it as you can get. He has spent 100 percent of his life getting bigger, stronger and healthier, he might understand the idea of ageing in concept but there is none of the reality that one gets from experience. The only problem I had with the heaven model at the time, which I think would be the fear of any ADHD kid, is that just being happy and having anything you wanted all the time seemed like it would get pretty boring after a year or two, and to do it for eternity seemed horrible.
When I started getting interested in Buddhism (for my Lutheran confirmation I wrote an essay about the similarities between Zen and Christianity) I stopped thinking about death. Shifting from a religion in which salvation happened only after death, to a religion where salvation came only right now was a major shift and I had to wrap my head around so many new things the concept of death was one of the last things I really tried to reconcile. In fact to this very day I have never lost anyone tremendously important in my life and have not had to go through the real deep thought that I think will probably shape my ideas about the subject after that event occurs.
When I started to get really interested in Joseph Campbell and started really forming my model of the universe after his, I started to really understand how dramatically complex things were, or perhaps complicatedly simple. I realized at that point that developing a complex comprehensive logically devised concept for what happens after death, or even in life for that matter, was ridiculous. We have a million truths, a million correct, true things to say about the universe and the way things are. Truths conflict with other truths regularly, but reality exists regardless of what we say about it. We die regardless, and when we do die the experience will be enough, by that point there’s a chance that we won’t have minds to analyze and describe what is happening, we’ll just experience, purely perhaps.
To describe the experience of dieing would not do it justice, the experience is reality, the description is a step away, even if true. When we hold things in our hands we count them, we label them as rocks or seeds, and name that which they rest in as hand, we immediately determine how big they are and their shape, we know their function and where they came from and what they are supposed to do. But if we were blind we could not see what they looked like, if we could not feel them either we would not know how many there were. With out language to describe them they would exist all the same, not as a number, not as a tool, not as anything, they would simply exist. And if it were not for our mind we would not think these things, we would simple experience the utter reality around us.
When we die we lose out eyes, our nose, our tongue, our hands and our ears. We lose every way of experiencing the world. We not longer have a mind or body, but I do not believe, and cannot believe that we simple disappear. At the very least I can hold on to the concept that energy cannot be created of destroyed. At the least I am simply one unite of energy that exists on this planet, perhaps I am just one blood cell of the real living being that is the planet it’s self.
In the end I believe that the only true way to express this indescribable reality is in poetry, art, dance, or any of those. Science tries and fails to view the universe objectively, but it does not communicate reality adequately. Metaphor is the only way I believe we can communicate true reality to any who are searching, we can point at the sun but there are few who have the courage to look at it.
