WHAT THE OCEAN SAID...

The Dharma Beat's convo w/Gaia

“Life occurs on an ocean of death.

Without death, there is no life.”

~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

We’ve left wine country and the Sonoma Coast in our rearview mirror now, dropped Jack off at some seedy bar, and are heading up the Lost Coast — so named because it is the only portion of the Pacific coast not conquered by the asphalt engineers who gave us Highway 1. But GOOD NEWS: just before we veered off the northern end of Hwy 1, where it literally turns into Highway 101, Rama met some seals! There’s a nice, off-road Vista Point parking lot that accommodates overnighters. About 5 minutes from the lot we rejoiced over a magical shoreline thriving with life. 

Rama sees seals by the seashore!

At the start of our journey, finding little in the way of life on the shores of the South Coast, I quoted that salty sea-farer Ivan Macfadyen to the effect that the ocean seemed dead to him last time he crossed it. I was reminded of that quote by the paucity of sea birds, sea lions, or sea life of any kind.

I will now add the curious fact that I drove WyTARA, my 2001 EuroVan Camper, from Boise through Reno to the South Coast without a single solitary bug splatter on the windshield. Not one! And it isn’t because I’m such a good Buddhist pilot, either!

How quickly we normalize these unprecedented occurrences. Similarly, we made camp one night before hitting the Sonoma Coast along a lovely estuary that happens to be a bird sanctuary. Meditated with a white crane close by, a blue heron flew overhead, all peace and calm. And with the cave door open, we awaited the first bug while the sun was setting — Rama hates bugs! — to close things up for the night.

That bug never arrived. There were songbirds nearby in the lush forest, which I confirmed with my Audubon bird caller. What are they eating?

Of course, as humans we have a hard time getting worked up about a bug apocalypse. After all, more than half of humans who’ve ever drawn a breath, courtesy of our tree relatives, met their untimely end compliments of humanity’s top predator - the deadly mosquito!

Welcome to the Anthropocene - a world profoundly and unalterably affected by the Great Petrochemical Acceleration that baby-boomed in the traumatic, Holocaust and Hiroshima wake of WWII. So yes, the ocean has been chemically altered, it’s now changing color, and recent news is that the post-Ice Age trade currents, the very conveyor belt that controls our weather and carried Europeans, like so much Protestant flotsam, to Turtle Island, are now slowing down and may collapse altogether by 2050.

Which ironically would actually cool things down considerably in the Northern Hemisphere - a fact the scientists tried to play down, as they must know what people baking in the hottest month on record all over American and Europe will think: Help is on the way! Go Gaia!!

But at that groovy un-named shoreline there near the other end of America’s Dream Highway, I’m glad to report a near-constant procession of brown pelicans, cormorants and sea birds bobbing all over the seascape, sea gulls gulling everywhere and, to Rama’s utter amazement, dozens of sea lions sunning themselves on the outer reaches of tidal flats.

It was so cool watching the crazy rip-tide currents and big wave foam crashing twenty feet high like ocean geysers, the oceans frantic assault on the exposed rocks finally submerging sea-lion-island with just a few quick surges when the tide began coming in — at which point the lazy buggers positioned themselves on higher rock outcroppings facing directly into the smashing waves, sometimes comically losing their flippered footing and getting thrown backwards, feasting on whatever was being delivered to them by the tide. They were enthusiastically joined by the plethora of birds in exactly the kind of vast feeding frenzy I’ve always associated with the California coastline.

So there you have it from your intrepid reporters Tham & Rama:

SEA LIFE!

Predatory Sea Anemones, which Rama deemed unappetizing

Of course, this was after nearly 600 miles of slow-go picking our way up the coast since turning around at Big Sur two weeks ago.

Next morning, I met an elderly biologist who was counting seals. Relating my distress, she told me there had been a big die-off this year because of some neurotoxin carried by mussels. In fact, she told me, this summer has seen hundreds of dolphins washing up dead on California’s shores, at least 500 dead sea lions, and many more that are sickened and cognitively affected.

This confirmation of what I’d been seeing triggered the same kind of grief I remember when I was living on Ocean Beach back in 2013 — year whatever of Fukushima - and starfish were dissolving in the tidal pools in a massive die-off.

WTF?! Right? And recently I learned that billions of sea critters died in the Heat Dome that hit northern Washington and B.C. during the pandemic. And, of course, let’s remember that the pandemic itself displaced the horribly grievous news that billions of wallabies, roos and other cuddly critters were dying in the great Australian conflagration, which followed the firenadoes that burnt Paradise to cinders here in northern Kali-fornia.

This is the world we’ve created. This is the gut-punch assault on our sensibilities that is the Anthropocene. And this happens to be the time I am taking my retirement from decades of fighting for ecological and climate sanity.

And so, while it was Khadrola that drew me out here, it only makes sense at the beginning of this end-time gone journey of truth-telling, ongoing grief work, and eco-spiritual beatitudes, that I come to the ocean. Gaia has something to say to me here.

We haven’t really had the head space to adjust to any of this yet, from David Wallace-Wells landmark “Uninhabitable Earth” piece in the New Yorker Magazine in July of 2017, to the fire down under, to the pandemic, all with Trump thrown in for chaotic measure.

For me now, as a self-proclaimed pan-psychologist, it feels critical somehow to be spending these hours, days, full and new moons camping on cliffs and walking beaches, inviting Gaia to murmur in sleepy ear and roar me awake in the middle of the night, expressing Her sentiments to me at Her own tidal pace, and Her low sub-chthonic frequencies. 

Sunset on Black Sand Beach, Lost Coast

I’ve been in this kind of conversation-that-never-ends with Gaia ever since I wrote the paper Planetary Hospice in 2014, the paper that sent me on a trajectory of feeling called to act out a kind of psychotherapeutic relationship between humanity and our Mother, and to report out the results in essay and eventually treatise forms. That viral paper began with a quote that still resonates:

“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

The connection that permitted me access to Gaia’s Psyche was first opened, really, during 3+ months of meditating in the Edenic natural beauty of New Zealand’s Southern Alps 33 years ago, when I was 33. After thousands of hours of meditating in Nature on annual wilderness and Buddhist retreats since, I eventually came to find that just sitting on the Earth is enough, wherever I happen to be, whatever the surroundings, just being held in her gravitational field. What I’m tapping into is a perfectly natural, eco-somatic relationship by which Gaia’s ongoing traumas and our soma are intimately integrated, with profound feedback loops waiting to be opened there through entrainment of our psyche within Her Psychosphere. Entrainment (of our respective frequencies) happens naturally in meditation, in trance states (via drumming, dance, etc.), and with the aid of Gaia’s plant medicines.

Shortly after publishing "Climate Trauma: Towards a New Taxonomy of Trauma,” I was blessed with the opportunity to directly plug into Gaia’s intelligence via Her most powerful plant medicine: 5-MeO-DMT. That ultimate experience of ego-death and crossing over to the other side profoundly deepened my connection with Gaia’s Psyche, the very Soul of the meta-organism in which we are embedded like cells and organelles. 

Make no mistake - I am not speaking metaphorically here. What is alive has psyche, or conscious being, that animates all. Trees have it. Bees have it. So it only makes sense that the living planet which gives rise to trees and bees has it at a meta-level. The non-physical world is a no-boundary zone teeming with surging, inter-connected consciousness — psyche, or soul. When Sakyamuni, prince of the Sakya clan, finally sat down under that banyan tree and fully awakened to ultimate reality, the first sentiment he is known to have expressed was a recognition of this beautifully complex, larger Psychosphere that is literally our Mother.

He called on Earth to bear witness to his awakening.

And so I have come now to listen to and report on what the Ocean has to say, because surely that is Gaia’s primary, most insistent voice. Surely, the sea’s constant white noise embodies a spectrum of her available frequencies, if we would just listen the way Hesse’s Siddhartha is instructed to listen to the river by the ferryman. What I’ve been hearing has come as a surprise, somehow. But in retrospect, I’m not sure why I should be surprised. 

The ocean is death. Like a mantra, I’ve heard that repetitive transmission. The ocean is death. 

You are probably contracting around your inner wounded child about now, reader. Do not be afraid! There is light here!!

Water - as in rivers, lakes and streams - is life. Mní Wičóni. And yet, where do all rivers end up if not the sea?

As I let all this sink in somatically, I’ve been letting it take shape in thought streams today while walking no closer than 100 feet to the surf on Lost Coast’s Black Sand Beach — because it can literally reach out and pull you in there suddenly and without warning, pulling you into it’s womb to be reborn in a future lifetime — what actually surprises me is that the ocean/death metaphor is somehow not more common in literature, poetry, and mythology. 

How could the ocean not be associated with death?

How many millions, after all, have perished at sea? Think of all the wooden boats over the centuries that were crushed by killer waves in oceanic storms. Think of the Titanic! The very symbol of human hubris towards nature. Or all the poor souls who perished in wars on the seas. Even today, thousands of migrants fleeing the frontlines of climate chaos near the equator end up drowning every year, as Europe turns a deaf ear to their plight.

The ocean is vast. How many people have walked into the surf to end their lives in this seemingly infinite graveyard? Or simply been swallowed up? My own father, as the oldest sibling in charge of his clan one fine day at a beach near Boston, was traumatized when he lost his sister to the undertow. Then, just two years later, he was sent into the Pacific Theatre as an 18 year-old. 

But we instinctively repress this association of the ocean with death, don’t we? It is hardly a morbid projection on my part, as I’m coming off the most amazing spiritual retreat of my life, and for the first time I’m free and happy to realize my dream of becoming a wandering mendicant.

But the more I listen deeply to Gaia’s eternal voice, the more I peer into Her expansive water world, with fiery sunsets breaking through dense horizon cloud scapes, magnificently colored by the diffused smoke from Canadian wildfires, the more I feel the pull of this primordial, dark enigma. 

Sunset or Sunrise?

As a psychologist, I’ve always associated the ocean with our collective psyche - the “unconscious” realm of Jung, which from a Buddhist view is just extremely subtle consciousness, the ethereal realm of tantrayana. Large bodies of water also symbolize motherhood in psychology, as of course at some distant point in our past we emerged from the ocean’s shallows.

What I’m experiencing phenomenologically here, by contrast, is this persistent premonition that the ocean is death. Echoing, in a way, that sailor’s feeling that “the ocean itself was dead.” But what I’m trying to express is more symbolic than descriptive - not so much that we’ve removed 90% of the big fish from the world’s oceans, or that we’ve polluted it with so much plastic that it’s now in our salt shakers, our blood, and mother’s milk.

No, what I’m suggesting instead is that the ocean has always symbolized death, by its vast incomprehensibility alone. That this is quite natural, and that our failure to clearly see this is merely another reflection of our hyper-phobic relationship with our own mortality.

What if, psychologically, our death- and grief-phobias projected large are not just the underlying cause of the existential threat we’ve created, but also what is inhibiting our rational response-ability? What if, paradoxically, we have to embrace death in order to resolve climate trauma and stop slaying our Mother?

That’s what I feel Gaia is attempting to impart to me.

Thus, the opening quote from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:

“Without death, there is no life.”

He’s author of In Love with the World, a very popular book in Buddhist circles that recounts Rinpoche’s experiences when he stole away, in his 30’s, from the monastery he headed up in India, mirroring the Buddha’s own life-changing decision to abandon the Sakya palace in his father’s mountain kingdom.

The world as we have always known it is ending before our eyes. What if in order to live, we must die to this very world, by embracing a notion of death that we have always culturally and individually avoided even thinking about? What if our kind Mother, in her own way, is trying to bust us out of the feigned indestructibility of our species’ teenage years?

Let us now recall what our Big Sur friend and guide Henry Miller said, as quoted in the last Dharma Beat as proof of his Buddhist worldview:

He who awakens from his dream knows beyond all doubt that the imperishable soul which he calls his own is but a vehicle of [eternal change]… that living and dying are one, that all is one…

Now I want to get really real. I’d like to try, at least, to disseminate some ultimate truth. 

I’ve experienced death first hand.

Not “near death,” but death itself. Thanks to that so-called “God Molecule,” 5-MeO-DMT, which is a unique medicine derived from the venom of the “Toad of Dawn,” which spends 9 months of the year dreaming underground, only to be awoken by the first monsoonal thunder to carry on the task of survival in the Sonoran Desert.  This golden toad’s medicine is the closest thing to a miracle, or an elixir of immortality, that any one of us can experience.

And all those who have experienced full cathartic release from ingesting a shamanic dose of 5-MeO know this to be true. It may not be the only plant medicine Gaia makes available to us that permits us to visit the other side of life, but it is surely the most effective and direct by far (the whole experience lasts only about 20 minutes of this side’s time, while it feels quite eternal on the other side).

What I want to report to you now, in the context of Gaia’s conversation with me here, is this: with death we do not die.

Forget all that Garden of Eden propaganda!

Of course, everything we have always imagined ourselves to be — our personality that is a mere reflection of our conditioning, our roles in life — all that falls away in a blink. We die in that moment to all illusion, the clinging to which only brings us suffering.

We wake up from this life when we die to it, in other words.

That is the ultimate truth about death. At the very least, I can report that we have that opportunity presented to us in the moment after our heart stops beating and our breathing ceases. The Dalai Lama says bluntly, in his “Advice on Dying” book, that all dharma practices are meant to prepare us for that moment.

And the realm we wake into is an ultimate realm, where time and space and self and other have no place at all. It is a quantum field of Bodhi (awakened) Maitri (at-one-ment), or in Western science terms, the “zero-point” quantum field that unites all across time and space.

Far from being something to fear, it is an experience we should all look forward to! In Christian terminology, which I mention only because it has been labeled the “God molecule,” it is the opportunity to merge with the Godhead, or the “Pleroma” in Gnostic mythology. We have that choice when we die — to merge with all, and it’s possible to at least experience the taste of that total mergence before our body dies, with Gaia’s apothecary.

That ultimate natural phenomena of ego death and crossing over, out of our body, happens to be the most heightened experience of pure and universal love imaginable. In fact, we’re not really capable of imagining or even expressing that expansive form of love from this side, which is why we come out of the 5-MeO unitary experience in speechless awe. This is what is meant by a Buddha; a.k.a., “tathagatha” or “he thus gone,” for whom the experience becomes a realized state of being, referred to only as “suchness.” He thus “gone” as in “gone beyond,” the refrain of the Heart Sutra mantra that is said to be the ultimate truth.

And if we know that, or at least can find it in our hearts to believe it, then all the trauma we carry can be resolved, and all the drama can be released - before we die. I suspect that’s what Jesus of Nazareth was trying to express when he said the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, if only we can die to our selves before our body dies.

In the modern context, when we tap into that higher intelligence that is an expression of our own ultimate potential, of reality itself, then we are freed up to act in accord with Gaia’s wishes, rather than our own compulsive desires. And we’ll no longer be at risk of falling into the sticky tar-pit of despair which is so common and understandable in this dark new age. We will each and every one of us find our higher purpose in life, no longer fearing death at any level. That’s the ultimate payoff.

And rest assured - we will not kill ourselves. Instead, we’ll stop grasping at untrue truths, and illusory realities.

No more clinging. No more reactively tightening up or retracting when someone wants to talk to us about death or the end of life as we have always known it.

That is true freedom. And it’s not just possible in this unraveling word. It is Gaia’s natural compensation.

That’s what I hear the ocean saying.

Sunrise over Black Sand Beach, Lost Coast, America