Reclusland

This was more a conglomeration of different articles on death that popped up in my life a few weeks back.  Besides being another opportunity to work one of these tarot cards into a post, it was also going to be a chance for me to work out my thoughts on death.

Although originally a nameless card, the skeleton with a sickle is a pretty obvious stand-in for death.  Yet any good tarot card reader will be quick to point out that this rarely has anything to do with physical death.  It’s more an ending and a rebirth, doors opening and closing.  That often, the death we fear in life is not actually death, it’s the dissolution of some part of our ego that we can’t let go of.  And that, as the gnostics, sufis, and zen buddhists say, you must die in this life in order to fully understand life and death.

I was going to tie this in with a card I’d gotten on my favorite tarot reading site:

It’s the “Ancestors” card from the Voodoo Tarot of New Orleans, a stand-in for Judgement.  It reminds me that we’re each of us the product of two people, the union of two opposites.  If we inherit our genetic history, or if you prefer, our morphic resonance fields, from two people, and our parents inherit theirs from two people, then each of us is the result of centuries of combined opposites.  That’s biology.

And psychologists will tell you the same thing (I noticed it during my own therapy) that our psychological tendencies are a reliving of our parents’ relationship.  The dynamics between Mom and Dad will play themselves out in your own life, and if you don’t pay attention, you might be forced to repeat their history.

The ending scene in “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” (one of my favorite movies, regardless of whether or not it represents what really happened…) where Bruce fights off his demon to save his son is a good example of this.   If we don’t deal with our problems, the flaws in our morphic resonance fields will be passed onto our children…

And this goes for the good stuff too of course, not just the demons!

But to bring it back to actual death, I also was sent a NY Times article from a friend, about the passing of Richard John Neuhaus, “Episcopal minister in Tarrytown, N.Y., and an admirer of the writer and theologian”.  The heart of the article, to me, was the message Neuhaus had sent out shortly before he died from cancer: “Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much I hope to do in the interim.”

This attitude that death is something that gives our life purpose, something toward which we are drawn, resonates pretty powerfully with me.  The acorn dies to become the tree, and when we die, our bodies become food for that tree.  And our energy?  Well, Einstein tells us energy is neither created nor destroyed, so what happens to it?

Our good friend Rob Bryanton had some things to say about this, within a few days of my receiving the NY Times article from my friend.

Oscar Janiger:…My bias is that when the current is shut off, we somehow lose our sense of individuality…that I’m simply shut down in my present state, and that somehow I–which is now a kind of fruitless phrase–am somehow restored to the earth, or to the matrix, or to what the Germans called the urschleim, or the fundamental substrate of all things, the fundamental primitive primordial stuff of which we are constituted. We go back to before the Big Bang. I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history.

Physicists talk about the Big Bang as being the most highly ordered state our universe was ever in. Quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd tells us to think of the Big Bang not as a physical event, but as the first binary yes/no that separates out our universe from all of the other possible universes that could have existed.

this leaves us with one of the most basic ideas from this project: no matter what you are thinking about in the universe, there is a binary viewpoint, and there is a holistic viewpoint. In quantum terms, this relates to the three states for a particle which can then be used in quantum computing: we can call these a “yes” state, a “no” state, and a “simultaneously yes and no” state.

And were does that lead us to, how does this all tie up?

I have no idea. Triage, remember?

Feel free to take this thought stream and run with it, if you want.  But if you do, I’d recommend including something from this essay: George Wald: The Origin of Death.  It’s a really great essay, although a bit long.  My notes on the essay can be found here, if you’re interested in my take on what the good parts version is…