Crossing the River Styx
Part III: Journey to Wholeness
Quite apart from the loss of my father at 19, which I didn’t grieve at the time, I’ve had an intimate relationship with death from my experimental youth on. I once washed down 7 Seconals (reds) with a glassful of Jose Cuervo at a party. That might sound suicidal to you, or it might even sound like bragging. But the truth is that I was simply fascinated in my indestructible youth by near-death states of mind.
Why, you might reasonably wonder?
Because I found that no matter how debilitated I might become physically, there was invariably this mysterious presence that would end up observing these experiences, almost angel-like, with a rather detached, floating, and incongruously clear-minded state of awareness - unimpaired by whatever substances I’d over-indulged.
It was always a bit perturbing when my friends would start discussing calling 911, because I’d have to return from that blissful limbo state to prove to them, often with a hearty laugh, that I wasn’t in need of an ambulance.
My older brother, who shares a similar constitution in this regard, actually did go a little too far one time, on a week-long bender with a woman who seemed to know every crooked doctor in the greater Chicagoland. His heart stopped beating three times in the ambulance, and he described a similar observer effect. According to his account, he chose to come back each time in response to her pleading, though he would’ve preferred moving on. The doctors were amazed from his toxicology report that he hadn’t died days before. You’ll be happy to learn that he’s a happy, hard-working and long-sober septuagenarian today. Somehow, we beat the system, and both ended up Buddhist.
Fifteen years after my father passed, I myself died - first only in my mind, but then in a much more complete way. I know from a scientific-materialist world view, that sounds crazy. But as someone who subsequently trained at Zen Hospice, as someone who is just as conversant in quantum physics as in Advaita Vedanta and Vajrayana Buddhism, I can state unequivocally that we are not our body. I’ve shared my takeaway from hospice with many people struggling after loss or fearful of their own mortality:
Only the body dies
This is not just my assertion, either. Pim van Lommel, a renowned heart surgeon, was astounded early in his career by patients who’d died while he was operating on them, and after being revived were able to offer vivid accounts of the procedures performed on them while they were ‘dead.’ After years of closely studying this phenomenon, he posed this provocative question in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (2013): “how can an extremely lucid consciousness be experienced outside the body at a time when the brain has a transient loss of all functions during a period of clinical death, even with a flat EEG?” His own conclusion is worth considering at this point:
The conclusion seems compelling that endless or non-local consciousness has and always will exist independently from the body. For this reason we indeed should seriously consider the possibility that death, like birth, can only be a transition to another state of conscious- ness, and that during life the body functions as an interface or place of resonance. This view of a non-local consciousness also allows us to understand a wide variety of special states of consciousness, such as mystical and religious experiences, deathbed visions (end-of-life experiences), shared death experiences, peri-mortem and post-mortem experiences (after death communication, or non-local interconnectedness with the consciousness of deceased relatives), heightened intuitive feelings and prognostic dreams (non-local information exchange), remote viewing (non-local perception), and perhaps even the effect of consciousness on matter like in neuroplasticity (non-local perturbation) (van Lommel, 2010).
Similarly, I want to posit for you that death is primarily a psycho-spiritual phenomena that we can experience while we are still in our bodies. Not that you would necessarily want to, though. I know this only because it happened to me, and it reduced me to a shell of humanity, thoroughly shattered, incapable of even forming a coherent thought or speaking a complete sentence for three interminable days. But as I alluded to, it was pre-figured by a less literal passing.
When I returned from an 11-month long circling of the globe, the last half of which was in Asia, I fell into what can only be described as a state of cultural shock. I could no longer relate to the culture of my birth, and withdrew for an extended period into the fecund embrace of my homeland’s vast natural abundance, living out of a van in national and state parks and forests, writing about my travels at length, with only a wise little Keeshond (Dutch barge dog) as my faithful companion.
Gaia and I ended up at the Oregon Country Fair that year, pitching our tent in the Security Camp on the Long Tom River. I lost my ability to sleep, spending my nights at “The Ritz” - an outdoor spa with a big fire pit and rustic steam rooms - fending off repeated attempts by naked witches to entice me with hallucinogens offered on their tongues!
It made me realize that LSD had become a big pink elephant in my psyche. I resolved, on the last day of the fair, to eradicate it.
Thus it was that I finally came to drop a blotter hit at the nearby Cougar Hot Springs, an ancient tribal healing ground, with the Rainbow Family of Light, immediately after the Country Fair had concluded - not having slept at that point for over 72 hours. I found a small pool far below the main hot spring pool, grew a pair of gills, and commenced, anadromously, swimming up a long river until I arrived at the land of the dead.
I know that might sound like a bad trip, but it was actually all quite lovely. There on the banks of the River Styx stood a group of the dearly departed, fronted by my own father, all mute and sombre save for one - Paula Potter. Paula was a dear childhood friend who’d tragically died in a grease fire not long after graduating college. All you need to know about Paula was that she had an indefatigably positive outlook on life, and never missed an opportunity to brighten up someone’s day with a kind smile or an infectious laugh.
Recognizing me even in my salmonesque body, Paula swooped me up out of the river and proceeded to fly me back downstream, pointing out telepathically how that dynamic river in motion was, in fact, a dynamic movie-reel that contained every scene of my life! She wanted me to see how silly it was to fight the current. My life existed all at once, just like a movie reel, with millions of frames giving the appearance of linear time. And then she exclaimed “You gotta enjoy the ride!”
Joy. That was her simple message to me from the other side. This lovely girl who never seemed to catch a break from the men in her life, and died making breakfast for one in the middle of the night.
A couple days later, I departed Cougar Hot Springs with a spiritually motivated band of Deadheads, including the most Jesus-like person I’ve ever come across. Michael looked and flowed like Jesus, with that same hypnotic gaze and Prince of Peace presence> He could quote the bible at length without carrying one, and emanated healing energy. I even witnessed him feed the masses once out of a dumpster - a literal feast for dozens of Deadheads!
It had been nearly a week now since I’d fallen asleep, and I felt completely dead inside.
Suddenly, riding in the back of the van with Brother Love at the wheel, Michael shared a poem with me, and I was instantly transported to the charnel grounds. I could feel all the death that had transpired over the years on that highway, I saw jackals and rattlesnakes in the fields we were passing through, and I directly perceived the animated skeletons of these kind, young Deadheads I was riding with. When I told Michael that I had died inside, and was thinking about how to end my life to comport with that empty feeling, something finally snapped.
All the suppressed grief from losing my father fifteen years earlier came gushing up like Mt. Vesuvius, and spewed out as vile bitterness and wrath towards my father, for the sins of raising us in the darkness of the Catholic faith and subjecting us to a middle-class, bourgeoisie life. What I was really furious with him for was dying, but of course it’s difficult to blame someone we love for something they are the victim of - in this case, an inoperable glioblastoma brain tumor rooted in his exposure to radiation in the rubble of Nagasaki 30 years earlier.
So I raged at that injustice and evil, too.
After 20 minutes or so of sobbing tears alternating with explosive fury and splintering recriminations, I felt completely dismembered. Other than the deepest sadness imaginable, and a slow but persistent trickle of tears, as if from some inexhaustible ancestral wellspring, I was comatose. Those dear, sweet Deadheads embraced me with unconditional love, and placed no demands on me to be responsive in any way. I’d entered a psycho-spiritual, psycho-somatic bardo state with nary a single thought or utterance that would last another three days.
I was just along for the ride. No thoughts, no words, and still no sleep.
Finally, after 9 or 10 sleepless nights (and yes, I realize that is supposedly impossible, but I swear to you on my life and death it’s true), I curled up with one of the sisters, Beth, on top of a bed in a Red Lion Inn with at least a dozen other Deadheads scattered around after a little party there, and fell asleep.
At long last, sleep. The sleep of the dead, as they say.
You may well conclude that what I’ve described was just a simple psychotic breakdown. While it is true that it manifested as a total emotional, spiritual, and mental breakdown, that was mere appearance. Because you see, what I’ve left out is that I was under an alchemical spell from The Secret of the Golden Flower, which I’ve written about here before. When properly invoked, that spell creates an embryo of light which, if bathed in the light of meditation in nature, with celibacy, for a full revolution of the Earth around the sun - which was the practical consequence of my culture shock - results in the death of the host spirit in order to make way for another, presumably immortal spirit to enter.
This, according to the ancient religion of the Golden Elixir of Light. I know, right? Carl Jung gave it credence. I gave it my body and soul. Somehow, karma really, I cracked the golden code.
As it turns out, there is an amnestic effect that sets in towards the conclusion of this “Magic Spell for the Far Journey,” such that you no longer remember being under its influence. This happened to me even before I lost the ability to sleep, and it wasn’t until I awoke in that Red Lion room the next morning that, my cognitive faculties having returned during the night, I remembered the spell, looked at the date, and realized it’d been exactly a year since I’d unintentionally invoked it.
While I do not pretend to be an entirely different person than I was before my psychospiritual death, I am also not really the same person who invoked that spell. The one thing that I can state with complete confidence is what I have already suggested to you: just as the body dies at the end of our life, it is possible for our mind to suffer a psycho-spiritual death while we are still in this mortal coil.
And I am living proof.
The Draught of Immortality
So in the wake of my spell-induced death and metaphorical dismemberment, in no way did I come out of it feeling immortal! But as anyone who has ever experienced a complete psychological, emotional, and spiritual breakdown can attest, I definitely felt like I was starting my life from scratch at 35. This was much more than a ‘mid-life crisis,’ I can tell you that.
Even though I’d been meditating regularly for twelve years by then, even though I’d been on this grand world adventure, backpacking around the world and meditating at length in nature, discovering that the “I that I am in Nature IS nature!” ~ I have long since maintained that my spiritual path began with that psycho-spiritual death.
For one, I was forced to locate a place of true spiritual refuge deep within the darkness I felt enveloped by. And refuge really is the starting point for spiritual development. Up to that point, I was just spinning my wheels on some grand ego trip that I had merely labeled a spiritual adventure. There was a fixed sense of self that was destroyed by my meltdown.
The way I thought of, and recited, refuge over the course of the next seven years was this: “I take refuge in the mind of awakening, which lies deeply within; I take refuge in the perfect implicate order that underlies all contrary appearances and worldly circumstances; and, I take refuge in the spiritual friends I encounter along the path.”
When I had the chance to share the story of my dying with the first Tibetan monk I met, he listened patiently to my story of woe as we ate, and then told me that what I’d experienced was actually what monastics themselves strive for on extended retreat - except that they have the advantage of a guide to tell them what to expect, and what is happening to them.
“The only difference between a breakdown and a breakthrough,” he told me, “is whether or not one has the necessary support system in place.”
That monk was the first spiritual friend to inform me that I had a unique “backwards karma,” by which I’d experienced emptiness at the outset, not even knowing the term at the time, and now I would need to spend the rest of my life intellectually integrating that self-annihilating experience.
It was great advice. After what for me had been an unusually prolonged respite from reading of any kind, I began studying the Dharma in earnest. At one point, a couple years later, I was sitting on a park bench reading a book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He said that what makes someone a Buddhist is taking refuge in the triple gem: Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. It was at that moment that I ‘remembered’ I was Buddhist (I never say ‘became’ - as if it were really a choice). I’ve always been a little slow on the uptake.
Seven years after my psycho-spiritual death and bardo experience, I was introduced to the infallible “Lamrim” ~ the gradual path of awakening ~ by a well-qualified Dharma teacher on retreat at Cloud Mountain, which is itself a very magical place. After twenty years of wandering lost in the wilderness of cyclic existence, I finally was shown a true path that would reliably lead me away from the suffering of pervasive unsatisfactoriness that defines our lives in this soha world.
And now we arrive at the point of this deep dive into death and dying. In 2001 I received profound teachings from the Dalai Lama on the Heart Sutra (“form is emptiness, emptiness is form”). At the end of that retreat, he bestowed some empowerments.
The Dalai Lama’s blessings of my mindstream were deeply felt. I learned directly what people meant by “the blessings of the guru.” Only days later, I returned to Cloud Mountain with my root teacher, Ven. Chodron, still in retreat mode, and absorbed in the highest level of mental quiescence I’ve ever experienced.
It was while in that deep, still pool of open, spacious awareness, sitting next to a creek one day on Cloud Mountain, just listening to the melodious sound of water, that suddenly these vivid memories surfaced from the end of my previous life - a disturbing scene in a cave in the mountains where two young members of the Chinese Red Guard forced me to the ground and shot me through the back of my head.
Holy shit! WTAF?
On a previous retreat, we’d been taught a method of memory retrieval by which you travel backwards in your mind to your earliest years, and then you’re supposed to continue back until you are in the womb. At that time, when I got to my earliest memory, the rest seemed quite contrived. But this time, repeating the exercise at length, disturbed but still quiescent, I was able to retrieve vivid memories of being in my crib, then of being back into the womb, through the felt sense of being in the bardo, and finally arriving at that deeply traumatic scene.
At least it seemed traumatic to me. Once I was in the headspace of this cave dweller, he seemed remarkably unperturbed by the whole unfolding tragedy. In fact, his concern was more trained on the two young soldiers, who were clearly acting under duress.
From that inner calm, I was able to access the most recent memories of this victim of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and piece together a little bit of this person’s story. Subsequently, I was able to place it in time (i.e., 9 months + 49 days prior to my birth) to reports of a specific disturbance in Amdo, an eastern province. And years later, after receiving initiation from His Holiness into the Wheel of Time mandala (of course!), I was actually able to reconnect my meditative experience with the thread (literal meaning of ‘tantra’) of that prior incarnation’s spiritual practice in our shared mindstream, which benefitted my own practice immeasurably.
So, while others may struggle with the idea of reincarnation - in spite of clear evidence of the phenomena in children who, like myself, suffered a traumatic ending to their prior lives - for me there is no room for any doubt. And my subsequent experience in Zen Hospice from sitting with the dying and being with death only served to support this conviction because. The mind goes on. At the moment of separation, it is still right there in the room, usually a little unclear about what exactly is transpiring. We’d encourage the survivors to directly address their loved one at that point, and give them permission to move along.
This realization through meditative experience, I slowly came to realize, really is tantamount to a kind of immortality.
His Holiness, who reincarnates consciously again and again, with highly developed intention and willpower, maintains that all of our Buddhist practices are designed to prepare us for death. Because in dying, there is a precious opportunity, at the moment of separation from the body actually, to merge with the clear light nature of mind. But it passes in a flash if you are not ready to take advantage of it, and then you are plunged into the bardo like a child lost in the wilderness.
The whole purpose of life, in other words, is to die well.
Conclusion: “This is the end... my only friend, the end”
So the Magic Spell really worked. In the end, it was well worth all the trouble and excruciating pain - much like childbirth for a woman, I imagine. All I had to do was die to this life, long before my body expired. At the time, it felt like the worst thing that ever happened to me, as did losing my father when I was only 19 years of age. But I guess that’s the great mystery of this fleeting life. There is an old saying that our first great suffering in life is our greatest spiritual blessing.
And while our culture values “keeping your shit together” at all costs, even when going through a mid-life crisis (another form of spiritual blessing), in truth anyone who has ever suffered a breakdown will tell you, once they’ve recovered enough to share their vulnerability, that it was the best thing that ever happened to them. It is like the secret handshake of our relatively exclusive club.
Jesus was not wrong. In order to truly live, like getting fruit from a seed, all we have to really do is die. I often wonder how many of today’s Christians who consider themselves to be “born again” skipped the dying part? And interestingly enough, the same is true of shamans. In the concluding part of this journey to wholeness, I will attempt to present you with that choice.
Are you ready for that?
“Truly the blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful secret:
death comes not as a curse but as a blessing to men.”
- Ancient Greek Epitaph from Eleusis