Spiritual Medicine, circa 1998
I have been meditating of late. Five, ten minutes and then I suffer from “monkey’s mind,” meditating shorthand for the dross of everyday living which creeps into the mind on little cat paws and drops its poop. Here I am inhaling, exhaling, one in, two out, three in, four out, hands opened, feet flat to the floor — little Buddha. The tongue placed to the roof of the mouth is not for me. I do all this out of fear and stress, and because I am hypertensive.
I seek now a spiritual medicine for my ailments, age’s notification that I am closer to my end than my beginning. I gag on my mortality. I struggle to find time, that elusive vole, to sit down and spend fifteen to twenty minutes meditating, although so much time is like spit into the wind. One night I almost fell asleep which assuredly is not meditation, but then, I rationalized, many of us are already asleep in life. I am trying real hard to slow time down. Einsteinean time, that is.
The bottom line is the denial of death. I just flat out want to live longer (deeply would be more precise), squeeze the juicy tart lemon until its pips squeak. And it is this fear which doubtless intrudes on meditation. It is anxiety which carries the additional angst of dying. I often think we are methods, fifty-two lacquered Cartesian playing cards, shuffling, like jackstraws, sliding betwixt and between one another, interlacing into woven basketry. This antic hay is another way to delude ourselves. We seek methods to resolve the madness of being alive, the anguish of awareness; and we come to discover there is no method to the madness.
I also practice visualization. I imagine little cinematic, non-Bergmanesque scenarios (more Spielbergian than anything else) to deal with physical ailments — prostrate, for one, or the susurrant whisper of mounting anger. i see these visualizations and the hope is that they will ease, modify or remedy the difficulty. I have no proof they are at all working. But it requires a kind of faith on my part — or a gripping, latent fear just poking its Grimm mushroom cap above the level of consciousness. I can garner some faith when I feel I am under the gun, which I have been of late. Again death and again the denial of death.
So I have come to spiritual medicine as a learner, as a skeptic; perhaps I have been watching “Sightings” for too long. Recently I went to a healer-psychic who worked on my chakras, et al (you should pardon the expression) and it was a curious, albeit strange if not interesting experience, to watch him come “into” my body and withdraw invisible substances which he disposed of into the air as if they really existed, all in an attempt to ease inflammation of this or that.
He believed in this. I was not skeptical of that. I chose to be less skeptical and to be somewhat open as opposed to somewhat accepting. The fear of death drove me to this, no doubt about that. He worked on my internal phlogiston; he dowsed my being, if you will. Ah, here I am, late Twentieth Century man (child?), Kafkaesque, regressed to infantile needs, being alchemically and mystically probed and manipulated as a willing abductee. If only I could have crackled an earthy life-affirming laugh at all this lunacy, like Walter Huston in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, but I didn’t. What fear of death does to us all.
It is hard to face fear, especially fear that threatens the human body. For some, it is the loss of control that makes them emotionally frazzled. For me, I suppose, fear resides in a shortened existence — as if I had a grand existential blueprint for the rest of my anonymous life.
Imagine yourself out on a diving board, poised, readied, gravity-gripped to the surface. Imagine trying to dive out of your body but the body stays put and no dive is imaginable or possible. This inward failure to transcend before I croak is what rattles me — characterological and all that, I’ve been told. Nonsense! Like Rank, we must go beyond psychology. I imagine I might be more courageous if a Manhattan Project of my spirit were threatened; but I have no such effort in mind (but, oh, to have one!).
What I experience is that most difficult of feelings — Dread.
As I muse, I imagine that I have a Rooseveltian fear of a fear. I have a certain lability so that stress raises and lowers my blood pressure like cocainal fluids sloshing from one end of Coke bottle to the other, vigorously mixed to exert pressure. I find it morbidly fascinating to live a split. Blood pressure says I am under stress, my conscious mind says this past week was stress-free. It points to — again — how little real control we have over our many selves. Clearly control is not the way to go. It has taken over a century for the unconscious to become Oprahesqued. I wonder how long it will talke culturally to realize that we are but a tincture of human being in a vast body self.
In his collection of essays, With My Trousers Rolled, Joseph Epstein writes:”. . .While I was at it, it also occurred to me that it might be useful to place death somewhere other than at the end of a person’s life, so that he or she wouldn’t have to spend so damn much time thinking about it.” Here, here!
It would be altogether remarkable to raise our young with the inestimable power of a parental punch to their little souls that says life is to be lived exuberantly, vividly, intensely, without any concern as to the end of existence; as if each day was a complete swing of the bat or golf club that leaves us contorted and fixed in place but having completed the full effort of that swing, having built the Parthenon in one fell swoop. With me, reader?
