Great Throughts Treasury

"Death is the rock upon which all systems shipwreck, the question for which there is no answer, and yet, strangely, the most seasoned philosophers and realistic mystics have always advised us to practice daily awareness of our own death. Philosophy, according to Plato, is the practice of dying. I think it may be more like learning to penetrate the many disguises in which death wraps itself to remain unrecognized and undetected."

"For the most part, in America, disease and death are experienced as something that happens to us?an invasion or bio-technical failure. Death strikes us, lays us low. Outside entities, enemies of the body?germs or viruses?breach our defenses and overwhelm us. Or, suddenly, through no fault of our own, the adrenal or pituitary glands malfunction. ?Death? and ?disease? are nouns that we must name before they can be conquered. When we first fall ill we wonder anxiously: is it diabetes or appendicitis or C_ _ _ _R? As the illness looms large ( is it fatal?) we become small, confused and in need of an authority who will take over the responsibility for diagnosing and prescribing the cure for our condition. Further, we usually expect that the process of repairing the damage will involve a technological solution?a pill to restore chemical balance, an antibiotic to combat an infection, an operation to correct a structural malfunction."

"First noble truth?Life is awful. To be fully alive is to be willing to imagine and be engaged with the pain of others. The second noble truth. Life is wonder-ful. Enjoy it Immerse yourself in beauty and delight. These two are strangely connected?like Siamese twins. Camus said it well: It is only when we have discovered the absurd that we can write a manual of happiness. What does it take to be genuinely creative?the willingness to wrestle with chaos, and engage the dark, destructive forces that threaten the psyche and the polis. Therapy does not leave us whole and unscared, but aware of our wounds. At best, as Freud said helps people exchange neurotic suffering for real suffering, neurotic anxiety for realistic fears."

"Healing begins with the courage to name and imagine the disease. The disease affluent people in the developed world suffer from comes less from a Thorn in the flesh than a vacuum?.. Something crucial is missing from our awareness ? Ignored! Repressed! And the therapeutic profession is not helping us to re-member what lurks in the shadow. We are all too concerned with enlightenment and peace and harmony. What does the Shadow know?? Years ago in the orient, Lamont Cranston leaned a strange hypnotic power to cloud men?s minds so they could not see him.? How have we been hypnotized? What lurks beyond the therapeutic imagination?"

"Gradually, sexual liberation trivialized sex and stripped it of sacredness because it overlooked the fact that genitals are connected to human beings who have histories, dreams, hopes, continuity, and children. Lately, we have found it necessary to re-own the old notion that vital and whole-hearted sexuality is the touching of incarnate spirits. Sexuality that does not honor the totality of another person ?body, spirit, history, story?- creates its own special kind of repression. It is important for us to ask whether the death liberation movement is in danger of encouraging a more trivial and alienated style of dying. Why? First of all, human death, is not a natural phenomenon, not a biological occurrence. Human beings are the only bio-mythic animal, our biology and mythology are inextricably connected. We are the self-conscious animal who cannot separate biology from the stories that we tell about ourselves."

"How might we think about a wholehearted way of death? The most extreme example I know is in the yoga tradition that holds out the possibility that a person who has practiced meditation and learned wisdom and compassion will come to the end of life and die voluntarily. If you are constantly learning to let go and surrender to what is deepest, you are always learning to die. Such a person does not die from a disease; they surrender to death at the time (kairos) of readiness and ripeness. In our culture, the best example of this I know was Scott Nearing. Scott Nearing was a philosopher, an organic farmer who believed deeply in the connection with the earth. When he got to be 100 years old he said, ?I?ve lived long enough.? He stopped eating and died. Almost an inconceivable thing in the United States for somebody to do that! Inconceivable .Was it suicide?"

"I am a self, a thinking, feeling, acting being enclosed in a mystery I can neither fully comprehend nor control. My mind registers every current in the cosmic sea. That old devil moon moves the tides in my blood. Distant vibratory events ripple through the plasma of my mind. Just as the DNA in any cell of my body encodes all the information necessary to reproduce my entire body, so my mind contains in germ the wisdom of the cosmos. I am a microcosm of the macrocosm. I am a gateway to the world, a nexus through which all lines pass. Deep within and far beyond meet in the depth of my spirit."

"I am a dreamer, half my life spent in unconscious darkness. In my most creative moments and in sleep, I abandon the polite fa‡ade of my personality and slip into wild costumes. In dreams I change forms, like Proteus, become a bird, a snake, a hero a seducer, a murderer. I play childish and terrifying games. I travel beyond time, create and destroy heavens and hells, savor forbidden pleasures and construct alabaster utopias. Nothing is impossible. I am large as anything I can hope, and small as any fear I will not recognize and banish."

"I am alone. You can never know exactly what I think or feel. You can?t make my decisions, battle my fears, suffer my pain, enjoy my pleasure or do my dying. I alone bear the joyful responsibility for the life given me. At times I am lonely. I lock myself in solitary confinement and can?t remember where I hid the key. I may invite you into my inner sanctuary but never allow you to be a permanent resident. Even when I am alone I am always in relationship. Without touch I shrivel. In the beginning I was enwombed, inseparable from the Mother-Ground of my being and born into a caring circle of family and community. In time I became a friend, a lover, a spouse, a parent, an elder. The masks I wear and the roles I play are shaped by the applause or disapproval of my audience. I exist in your eyes. Without a thou there would be no I. Without you I could never know the comfort of enfolding arms, the ecstasy of love. Your self and my self are linked, for better or worse. The greater our interaction our interbeing, the stronger and more capacious we grow. I am tough minded, practical and shrewd. I do what I must to survive and thrive. I crave power and gain potency by acting."

"I suggest our best metaphor for peace is an ancient one?the wrestling match. The Greeks visualized peace as a form of loving combat, a contest, or ?agon? between well matched and respectful opponents. They applied the word ?agon? equally to a wrestling match, a verbal dialogue, and the contests in the Olympic games. Their highest vision was of a world in which the impulse to war might be gentled in an arena where men and women competed for glory. They thought of conflict as creative and strengthening so long as it was rule governed. When I visualize peace I think of nations wrestling together. Politics as a playing field. I see enemies facing each other not as evil empires but as worthy opponents who struggle honestly to further their legitimate interests and value systems. I see the US and the USSR trying to learn from eachothers? strengths and weaknesses, Capitalism and Socialism locked, not in a Holy War, but in a dialogue about the priority of the individual or the community. And let there be rules, world law, and world courts, honored by all,and referees powerful enough to enforce the will of the commonwealth of nations. I haven?t quite gotten my faith down to a formula yet. But when I do my bumper sticker will say something like: Learn from your Enemy. Or, Grapple For Peace."

"I am always transcending myself. I am a child of my time, blessed and bound by the values and prejudices of my family, clan and culture. And yet I can dispel my most cherished illusions. I can be a truthful witness of my own lies. I can sacrifice my immediate pleasure for a greater good. I can wonder, wait and work for a future I will not live to see. I can rise above my greed and cruelty and aspire to love."

"I am unique. No one like me has ever existed before. I have fingerprints, a name and a story unlike any others. No one can play my part in the drama of history. I am an important piece of the puzzle without which the picture of life would be incomplete. My vocation is to become a gnarled, original, exceptional individual. I am common. Like all humans I have a hungry stomach and a divided heart. I need food and love. I was born small and helpless, grew into the fullness of my being, and must make the return voyage into decrepitude and death. I struggle to create intimacy and muster daily courage to deal with the anxiety of the unknown. I believe, I doubt, I celebrate and I grow weary. I am both greedy and generous. It is not easy to be me. Often I allow myself to be what you want me to be rather than expressing what I feel and value. Yet, again and again, a small voice?call it conscience, spirit or consciousness?calls me back to myself."

"I notice that as I think about various death-myths I hold my death at arms length. I can keep my anxiety under control when I deal with theories of death but when it comes to my mortality I resist, postpone, deny."

"I live within abstract structures?government, nation, law, economy. I am a single cell within a social body that both nourishes and threatens to inundate me. My country gives me work, security and ideology but extracts a heavy toll on my time and conscience and I struggle to balance public demands and private needs. In modern times I have grown accustomed to urban ways and the convenience of machines. Computers have multiplied my calculations and media have extended my senses. But my feet are still in the soil. I am rooted in the humus. From dust to dust. My eco-self is a member of a commonwealth whose citizens include whales and starlings. I flourish only so long as I respect the communion that links me to all living beings."

"I offer my reflections on death from the point of view of an amateur. There is an enormous difference between dealing with death and grief as an objective occurrence and as the primal, existential fact of my death and my grief. I am dedicated to trying to understand human existence through the mirror of the life of Sam Keen, and I am convinced that I can best understand what?s going on in my culture by reading my own psyche and my own soul. As a philosopher, it is my hope to be a physician of the spirit and the soul. And, that means that I must first be a physician to my own spirit and my own soul. Philosophy is about the healing ? or if you want ? the salvation of the soul, not particularly or necessarily in a religious sense of the word."

"If that entity I call my ?self ? is not an autonomous center of action, but is (pardon the language) radically dependent on, ontologically bonded to, intersubjectively connected with, erotically inseparable from God (the Ground of all Being and Becoming, the Self-transcending-Transcender-of all, the Alpha and Omega) how should I think about my personal power? Paradoxically! I am no-thing and Everything, an impotent part of an omnipotent whole, a sinner (sundered) and a saint (whole), ?At its best, religion reveals both truths about man: his worm likeness as well as his godlikeness. Religious heroism involves living in primary awe at the miracle of the created object?including oneself in one?s own godlikeness.? (Becker) How do I experience my godlikeness? My sacred power? Not by proclaiming myself ?the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,? a weary but unyielding Atlas,? Not by courses in self-esteem that assure me that I create my own reality. It begins with a quiet moment when my normal identity disappears and I am wonderstruck, terrified and fascinated to realize that my existence, like that of the cosmos, is mysterious beyond anything I can comprehend or control. When I consider my life existentially I realize that I am not a standardized human unit that can be replaced by another standardized unit. To myself I am not a specimen, or a member of a species that evolved from a chance collision of particles in the cosmic soup. The state may consider me a citizen to be numbered, taxed, conscripted, fitted into the demands of a five year plan. My employer may consider me a resource to be used or discarded as needed. But to myself I fits into no pigeon hole. I am a bud beginning to unfold, a story waiting to be told."

"If death is the result of a purely biological event, it makes sense to medicalize the problem of dealing with illness and disease. We turn it over to a physician. We take our bodies to doctors and say ?Here,? ?I?m dropping this off. Fix it.? There are alternative movements where we?re beginning to understand our responsibility, but, by and large, we think and deal with disease and death as victims."

"I want to call your attention to a small difference in the way we think about death that makes all the difference. If I ask, ?What did Socrates die from?? a medical pathologist might say, ?Hemlock? and give me a clinical description of death by poison. If I ask, ?What did Jesus die from? The answer might be: Blood loss. In both cases it is the wrong question. The right question is, ?What did Socrates die for??,?What did Jesus die for??"

"If we want to explore the significance of religion we need to reject both religious literalism and dogmatic atheism and return to the root meaning of religion??to bind, connect, or reconnect.? In its original sense, religion bears nearly the opposite meaning it has been assigned in modern times. It is not about cult, creed, ceremony, miracle, mystery or authority. Nor is it about occult knowledge of a transcendent God revealed by scriptures or religious institutions. Religious belief springs from an awareness that all creatures belong to a single commonwealth of sentient beings. This leads to a passionate commitment to venerate the miracle of ordinary life and dwell in the presence of the sacred. The religious psyche is animated by elemental emotions that stand in stark contrast to the emotions such as shame, guilt, envy, pride, greed, ambition and acquisitiveness that make up the palette of responses we learn from secular culture. The elemental emotions do not come from our social indoctrination but from the raw human encounter with the incomprehensible universe into which we have been thrown."

"If you doubt that asking a new question is a royal road to revolution, transformation, and renewal, consider what happened when Descartes asked, ?Of what may I be certain?? or when Newton asked, ?How is a falling apple like a rising moon?? or when Marx asked, ?Why were men born free but are everywhere in chains?? or when Freud asked, ?What is the meaning of dreams?? Your question is the quest you?re on. No questions ? no journey. Timid questions ? timid trips. Radical questions ? an expedition to the root of your being. Bon voyage."

"In our imagination death is an enemy. Physicians are taught that they must defeat it at all costs even though it eventually destroys us all. Death confronts us with our helplessness. ?very unAmerican. We?re not used to being out of control or surrendering. All of the emotions that are an embarrassment to our self -image as autonomous and independent beings are put in the waste basket of death."

"In Search of an Environmental Policy: Some Radical Propositions: I. Prelude: Diagnosis of the Dis-ease - 1. Nothing fails like yesterday?s solutions. 2. Most social, psychological, and spiritual dilemmas are solved, or dissolved, by expanding the context within which they are viewed. 3. Change your questions and you will alter your vision. 4. What is ?practical? depends on your ideology, myth or vision. 5. Policy is always the application of someone?s vision. 6. Mistaking a symptom for the dis-ease worsens the illness. 7. It is only by considering a chaotic diversity of symptoms that we can make a good diagnosis. 8. Hope for significant change emerges precisely within the condition of disintegration that seems to invite us to despair. 9. The present dark night of social anarchy offers a greater opportunity for systemic change than the superficial optimism of the l950?s, the psychedelic utopianism of the l960?s, the neo-realism of the l970?s or the unbounded greed of the l980?s. 10. A good environmental policy can only emerge from considering the context of the entire post-modern political agenda?the population explosion, the cancerous growth of megalopolis, urban blight, structural unemployment, the growth of a perpetual underclass, the disintegration of family and community bonds, crime, the climate of violence, the eclipse of a sense of meaning, value and the sacredness of life, and (most importantly for the policy suggestions I want to make), the abandonment of rural and village life. II. In Search of a Vision of Environmental Health 11. Changing our vision of our place in nature, our relationship to the environment, our way of organizing our economic life to insure the hope of a sustainable future for our children is the central spiritual and political challenge of our age. 12. As presently conceptualized, a healthy (perpetually expanding) economy is dependent on perpetuating an environmentally sickening style of consumption. 13. Current efforts to save the environment are formulated under the supposedly realistic mandate that they must not have a negative effect on the economy, lead to the loss of jobs, imperil our competitive advantage. 14. No policy formulated from within the perspectives of the economic myth, the myth of progress, the myth of the free market, or the ideology of urban life, will be adequate to the central spiritual and political challenge of our age. 15. The syllogism that points toward a new vision and policy is: We can only heal what we love. We can only love what we touch. We can only touch what is proximate. 16. Formulating a policy that will implement a healing relationship to the environment requires us to visualize ways in which a majority of citizens can love, touch and remain proximate to the natural world. That 3% of our population produces the food for the remaining 97% is a symptom of our alienation from the environment, an index of our exile from the elemental truth of air, earth, fire, water, plant, and animal life which is the abiding context of human life. III. Medicines and Means of Healing: Policy Implications. 17. A major aim of environmental policy should be to slow, halt and reverse the worldwide pattern of population migration from rural areas, villages and towns to megalopolis. (This will require us to challenge the ideology that unconsciously assumes that the trend toward urbanization is inevitable and desirable) 18. We need to re-conceptualize and create innovative approaches to the economies of village, small town and rural life. To date, government agencies have been of little help in revitalizing the culture and economics of ?depressed? rural areas that are losing their traditional mainstays of farming and logging. With the revolution in telecommunications, rural areas are no longer remote and removed. 19. We need to promote homesteading programs that will make it possible for a generation of young pioneers to create a new type of modern family farm based on the practice of sustainable agriculture. 20. We need programs that will aid retired people on fixed incomes living in cities to relocate in, and revitalize, small towns and villages. 21. We need a department of Urban Agriculture to promote the greening of the cities. (During World War ll a majority of Americans, and Germans grew victory gardens) 22. Federal, state and local departments of education need to be encouraged to experiment with ways of giving children some direct, hands-on, experience of growing, tending and harvesting. In the same measure that it would be irresponsible to neglect to teach the young to deal with the emerging information technology, it is irresponsible to ignore their environmental education."

"Ivan Illich has argued in Medical Nemesis that modern medicine has disempowered us to deal with our own suffering and dying. As experts take over the management of our bodies in every crisis from borning to dying, and redefine moral conducts such as addiction or greed as diseases, we are reduced to being passive consumers of professional body tenders. Increasingly our medical system infantilizes patients. How obediently we tolerate the authoritarian atmosphere of doctors? offices and hospitals! We wait patiently and submit to procedures we do not understand because the experts assure us they are necessary. And we die in hospitals because that is where we can get professional care. Only the lucky among us get help from hospice providers and are allowed to die in he comfort of our homes."

"It is only with the events of 9/11 that the specter of death by terror has imprinted itself on the American mind. Even though American forces are involved in the business of killing and being killed in two or three wars (depending on who is counting) we seldom see pictures of the causalities we have inflicted or suffered. Mid-East media shows the mangled bodies that result from ?collateral damage? but American are not allowed to see the blood of the victims of violence. (Except on entertainment programs on prime time television.)"

"Map for an Endless Journey: These reflections on sacred and profane power leave many of my questions unanswered. Like anyone who has experienced an epiphany of the sacred in any form, I am caught up in the perennial struggle between sacred and profane views of the world. Like it or not, I am a citizen of both realms and must find some way to live in a creative tension between the two. I am under no illusion that I will ever live in a commonwealth governed equally by love, power and justice. But a map showing the topography of these competing kingdoms of human consciousness helps me to understand the direction in which I must travel to fulfill the sacred promise of my life, to become a wholesome person."

"It has been said that philosophers are perverts! And it?s true! That was the charge made against Socrates. Everybody in Athens pretty well understood the cultural norms until Socrates came on the scene. Euthyphro, for instance, was on his way to turn his father in for impiety when he met Socrates who started asking him questions. By the end of the dialogue Euthyphro has no idea what piety is. For this disturbing habit of questioning, Socrates was charged with perverting the youth of Athens and given a hemlock milk shake. And that is the job of philosophy, to turn things over, switch appearance and reality."

"My body is a living museum of a natural history. As a fetus I passed through every stage of evolution. I had gills before lungs. I slithered on my belly like a reptile and walked on all fours before my reptilian and mamalarian brains were crowned by the glory of the cortex. In my holographic mind and evolutionary body eternity and time meet. My nervous system incarnates the story of Bethlehem."

"Mythology is not just something in the head, it?s in the way we experience nature. In the degree that the natural order is felt to be maternal, the soul will be regenerated, reborn, reincarnated or transmigrated,. But it cannot die. Death is just a part of the cyclical existence of the human soul. This is an assurance we no longer have because we don?t look at nature that way. Consider other focal deaths. In the pre-modern world the two iconic deaths that gave people the meaning of life were the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus. Remember Socrates? last words? Socrates is dying, the poison has reached his waist and he leans over and says, ?Crito I owe a cock to Asklepios?. That?s very interesting, because Asklepios is the god of healing. Socrates, in the middle of dying says, ?I am being healed. I owe a cock to Asklepios?. Almost all of ethics after the time of Socrates, in Aristotle, in the Stoic ethics ? is a reflection on the life and death of Socrates. And, why didn?t Socrates escape from Athens and save his own life? He didn?t escape because, in his view, the highest good was found only in community. Human beings are human only when they are social, only when they?re in a community. And a community can only exist when there is law. Therefore the law of Athens must be obeyed even if it is wrong, otherwise one ceases to be fully communal human being. Ergo? Socrates swallowed the hemlock voluntarily rather than violate his vision of the communal nature of the good life."

"Once we acknowledge the inseparability of the self from the community, the quest for justice takes on a radical nature that goes beyond the civic virtues we owe to our immediate neighbors, it is no longer satisfied by mere fairness or by the obligation to share a minimum of wealth and power. It demands that we seek the fulfillment of the potentiality and promise of our neighbors, near and far. Love radicalizes the demand for justice by extending it beyond tribe or nation to all members of the commonwealth of all beings. As the Buddhist vow puts the matter: ? Sentient Beings are numberless I vow to save them.?"

"Nowhere do we see this paradigm of illness so clearly as in the mythology that surrounds our most highly cathected disease?cancer. Cancer ?the enemy, the dark, insidious, irrational thing ? strikes its victims without warning or rationale. It is a metaphor for the evil that attacks the innocent. The deaths that we most focus on are those in which we feel ourselves to be victims of something. Increasingly, we are a society where there is a rush to victimization, where illness, and especially catastrophic terminal illness, is thought of as something that happens to a person?a cancer victim, a victim of a stroke, etc."

"One of the few deaths, in the modern world, that has become iconic is the death of Che Chevera. For the communist world, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only hero who inspired youth was Che Chevera. After the Cuban revolution he voluntarily went to South America and was killed and became a martyr. Some say that one of the reasons the Soviet Union supported Cuba for so long was because they had the only martyr of the revolution ."

"One of the primary stories we tell about ourselves is, about the meaning of death?? Every culture has a mythology, a repertoire of stories about why people die. In some cultures people are thought to die because they?ve offended the gods. Many primitive mythologies assume that death comes as a result of breaking a taboo. It is not natural, doesn?t just happen. You?ve offended a god, or you have done something you ought not to have done. To understand the meaning of life you have to ask about the meanings that are assigned to death. What are the stories that govern death?? What kind of death is focal in a given culture?"

"Socrates also said that his reason told him that the soul was not born and would not die. Therefore, he should go to his death voluntarily without fear. He says, ?All of my life I have been practicing dying. And now, when it comes to the act of actual dying should I be afraid? Should I run away? That would show that my entire life was a fraud.? Socrates taught that philosophy is the practice of dying, moving away from mere sense of knowledge and getting in touch with the soul. To die was merely to finish the process of getting to the essence of the soul, to be liberated from the bondage of the body and time. In bearing witness to this, Socrates became a savior, a comforter, an incarnate exemplar."

"Sacred community requires far more than mere civility or fairness. Although the great religions have very different theologies, they share a common vision of the kind of action that characterizes the life of the sincere believer. The summary of this consensus: ?Do unto others what you would have others do unto you.? The golden rule places a maximum demand on all who would be guided by it. When we unpack the implications of this simple, universal commandment we find it involves the recognition of the preciousness of all persons and the intention to respond to all members of the global village with empathy and compassion ."

"Religion is not speculating about the existence or non-existence of otherworldly entities, but is living with a sense of wonder and struggling to keep our one and only earth a sacred dwelling place."

"Plato?s parable shows us it has always been difficult to separate shadow from substance, propaganda from reasoned conviction, data from meaning, opinion from wisdom. Every culture has had its image smiths, propagandists, myth makers, and newsmen. The first storytellers sitting around ancient fires fascinated their audiences and convinced them without evidence that floods were a sign of the wrath of god and rainbows a symbol of divine favor. In Medieval times the perils of sin and the pleasures of the good life were advertised for all to see in the stained glass windows of cathedrals. Crusades and holy wars were promoted by song and sermon long before the printing press invented yellow journalism or television helped politicians convert a struggle between haves and have-nots into a battle between heroes and evil empires. The manipulation of public opinion is as old as civilization and as inevitable as the lust for power."

"Playboy and Cosmopolitan promoted casual sex and Erica Jong insisted that women had the right to the ?zipless fuck?. The sexual revolution promoted the impossible idea that sex was something any two consenting adults did without too much emotional involvement, that was, nevertheless, supposed to free us. We had the Reichian full body orgasm.( Probably, many of you didn?t have one. It?s colder up here in Canada. ) Salvation by orgasm. When even that proved inadequate we discovered that women could have more orgasms than men? four of hers for one of yours. . In due time we discovered the ?G? spot and the ?O? spot and the long repressed news that there were only clitoral orgasms. Thus, the vibrator replaced that part of the male anatomy of which we men are so fond and raised a question as to whether women should bother with men."

"Some characteristics of courageous thinkers: Creative dissatisfaction with accepted answers. Willingness to break taboos. Ability to live with disapproval and criticism. Capacity to suspend certainties. A ludic disposition?delight in playing with possibilities. Enjoyment of solitude. The ability to remain silent, to listen and move slowly. (Siddhartha?I can think. I can wait. I can fast.) Love of paradox and contradiction. Intolerance for departmental boundaries. A good bullshit detector to sniff out stale solutions, moribund paradigms, sacred cows and self-serving ideologies. An appreciation of the difference between a problem and a mystery. (Marcel). An abiding love of questions."

"Strangely, the horror of death in the third world is a perverse comfort to us, because it is not our death. It is not the one we think about We read the stories of incredible savagery and say, ?Isn?t it awful?? But under our breath there is a self-righteous refrain: ?Thank God we are not as they. Thank God we are not primitive. Thank God we are really civilized. Thank God we don?t have deaths like that. Thank God.?"

"Supposedly, there?s a tribe in New Guinea where the right?of-passage for men involves drinking a strange kind of poison that can be absorbed in the esophagus, but it?s neutralized in the stomach. If you take the poison neat, in one gulp, you are safe. But, if you hesitate and gag, you?re dead. Whether the story is true or not, the principle is sound. A spoonful of death a day keeps illusions away. When I am able to swallow the terror raw and not run from it, I can look back over my life and see the ways in which I armor myself against the awareness of my mortality and construct what Ernest Becker called, my immortality projects for denying death. Clinging to orthodox Christianity, working obsessively to be worthy of fame, striving to make a name for myself, conforming to social niceties to be deserving of love, adopting rigorous health routines to protect me from age and decrepitude ?all these are ways armoring myself against the terror of death."

"Some of you old timers are veterans of the sexual revolution. Now, with AIDS and herpes many of you will have only heard about that blessed period, not as long ago, when we thought that to liberate ourselves sexually we only had to connect any two or more pairs of genitals of consenting adults. Getting together in any constellation for any reason held the promise of liberation."

"Switch cultures and focal deaths. In the case of Jesus, as with Socrates, we are dealing with a death that is chosen, voluntary, and could have been avoided. Jesus is condemned to death for reasons that are not clear but he does not try to escape. He prays that ?this cup? could be taken from him but he goes to his death in obedience to what he conceives of as the will of God. In so doing he demonstrates that the meaning of life is found, not in reason, but in direct obedience to God. The authentic life is one of obedience to a covenant with a personal God. In accepting suffering and death Jesus re-affirms of the meaning of life."

"The experience of wonder, the first of the elemental emotions, is the wellspring of both religion and philosophy. D.H. Lawrence got it exactly right; ?There is a sixth sense, the religious sense, the sense of wonder?. The emotion of wonder is triggered over and over again by the awe-ful realization that there is no reason for the world or anything in it to exist, myself included. Gratitude and celebration flow from wonder as we accept our existence as an inexplicable gift bestowed on us without rhyme or reason by the Infinite Creative Void, The Unknowable G-D (beyond God), or the Ground of Being from whom all blessings flow. (Take your pick.) Reverence may be elicited by a stand of giant redwoods or a two-year-old playing on a jungle gym. Listening to the myriad voices of our fellow creatures, we are reminded to walk softly on the earth and show respect for strangers. Reverence is the virtue that puts the ?civil? in civilization."

"The final word? There is no final word. I define myself, and yet I escape all definitions. I am unfinished, pregnant with longing and hope. There is always some fulfillment just beyond my reach, some adventure calling me. I am a citizen of three kingdoms: the long ago and far away, the here and now, and the not yet. My self a gypsy, always on the road."

"The mark of a free mind and a free society is the ability to question authorities, be critical of institutions and resist the seductions of propaganda and advertisement. Every citizen has a moral and civic obligation to reason, deliberate, weigh evidence, evaluate and make informed judgments. Ergo: it is the task of education to teach the skills of visual literacy that help us understand how we are manipulated by images and seduced by media generated virtual worlds that increasingly inform our perceptions and values. Newspapers and television could do a better job of presenting us with information and a variety of opinions, but they can never do our thinking for us, make our decisions, or choose the values by which we will live."

"The operative myth or narrative of any culture is mostly invisible to the people who live in that culture. The fish does not see the water in which it swims. In Eskimo culture, in the old days they took the old people out and they left them on an ice flow and thought goddess Sedna would comfort them as they were dying. I can look at that practice and say ?It is very mythological, isn?t it?? But when I look at my own culture, where we take people to the hospital and have weird people dressed in white (never in rainbow colors, or like a clown) attend them, I don?t see that as mythological. That?s science. That?s modern medicine. In order to decipher death, and understand what we are doing and NOT doing we have to examine the, largely unconscious, mythology of our culture. One of the best ways to get a handle on this is to look at the death of the hero upon which a given culture focuses? the myth incarnate. Every culture has somebody who, in their dying, becomes a model for the meaning of life and death."

"The abiding sense of power, purpose and meaning that the sacred perspective offers the individual flows from the conviction that one?s most idiosyncratic gift -one?s vocation- is an integral part of the divine creative process-the 8th day of creation. Again Earnest Becker: ?What makes dying easier is ?to know that beyond the absurdity of one?s own life, beyond the human viewpoint, beyond what is happening to us, there is the fact of tremendous creative energies of the cosmos that are using us for some purpose we don?t know. To be used for divine purposes, however we may be misused, that is the thing that consoles.? When I experience my self as sacred, a divine being with fingerprints, I discover that the words ?power,? ?potential?, ?promise?, ?purpose?, ?vocation? are identical. ?Power? comes from the Latin ?potentia? ? potential. My potential is discovered in the unfolding of my talents and gifts. My power increases as I fulfill the promise of my being. My vocation is the voice of my future calling me to become. My gifts, my vocation, are woven into my DNA. My end (telos) is in my beginning. My DNA is a strand in the ongoing process of creation. The power-potential-promise of my being is integral to Being-Becoming-itself."

"There will come a time when I will be done with the little deaths of the ego and will face the definitive end of my life. I wonder how I will face this conclusion. Years ago I talked with my great friend Howard Thurman during the last weeks of his life. He told me ?I am not going to die until I am in the room where the ultimate decision is made about my life and death.? I am certain that when he died a week later he was in that room and gave his consent. I hope his example and spirit will be with me when my time comes."

"There is a great sense of metaphysical relaxation that accompanies the realization that the world is ultimately mysterious and beyond explanation. It relieves me of the burden of having to know what I cannot know and the temptation to place my faith in so called ?revealed truth? of some institution that promises me mystery, miracle and authority. In place of an ersatz revelation of the meaning of life, the wonder and simple beauty of Mockingbirds and Pine trees is given me day by day. My life in an overflowing world that is always borning and dying is given me moment by moment."

"Three iconic deaths, three stories, three incarnate mythologies, each of which tells us how to live and what to die for. Death Modern- Style. Forget what you know, forget your expertise for a minute and let?s just read the newspaper, watch television and ask ourselves ?What deaths are focal, or exemplary in modern culture? How, when and where do we see death portrayed? What is the face of modern death? The image of death we see most frequently on the media is the death that comes out of anarchy, disintegration, and poverty in the places where tribal consciousness and tribal hatred are re-emerging?Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, Congo, Syria, Somalia. We see bodies blown apart by suicide bombers or hacked into peaces and floating down the river."