In Favor of His Savagery

"Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again--not half, by a long way." 
___ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part 1

I watched another documentary last night, this one about aging. Seems I am obsessed with the real facts of life these days. If I am not dealing with pornography, it is love and cheating, or Jewish baseball players, or even prairie radio hosts. I am familiar with the spiritual leader Ram Dass, and was very interested in how he not only dealt with having a paralyzing stroke but how he was recovering from it. Ends up being he is doing quite fine and has kept his devout following more or less intact, previously expanding exponentially with the death of his guru Maharaj-ji back in 1973. I am such a skeptic that I was acutely aware of all the warm hugs he was getting at his readings and talks from pretty young girls eager to follow his teachings. It was obvious Ram Dass loved the attention which he was careful to term love.

The film is titled, Ram Dass: Fierce Grace . It was made in 2001 and is ninety-three minutes long. Netflix describes it as: "Spiritual guru Ram Dass attempts to recover from a stroke, which he dubs "fierce grace," in this documentary produced and directed by Mickey Lemle, a close friend of Dass for decades. Dass, author of the lauded Be Here Now, was felled so severely by the illness that he became paralyzed -- but in true Ram Dass fashion, he saw it as a reason to look death in the face."

Ram Dass is most famous for his previous incarnation in this lifetime of being the brilliant Harvard professor, Richard Alpert who more than dabbled in LSD. Alpert teamed up with his faculty neighbor Timothy Leary and others to do extensive controlled psychological experiments with psilocybin and LSD, eventually resulting in popular culture's wide-spread use of the drugs, the drugs drawing too much attention to themselves and ultimately becoming banned, adjudicated, and deemed completely unacceptable in our American society no matter their proven and still-studied health benefits. After being the first professor (along with Leary) ever fired from Harvard, Richard Alpert journeyed to India and became a follower of the Hindu guru Shri Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaji-ji), further writing popular books about his spiritual journey and developing his own devoted crowd of followers. His most popular title, Be Here Now, written back in the early seventies, was a bestseller. I actually stole the book from my older brother as I began my own personal quest for knowledge which, if you want to know the truth, I have failed at rather miserably. And it is not because I did not practice and study every religion. I did. I still read extensively, but mostly philosophy on the order of Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, and Alphonso Lingis. But none of the religions ever seemed to fit for me. My philosophy will have to do. And because of it I have finally accepted that this life is all there really is. I am of the opinion that Ram Dass is no different than any other believer following some practice that leads to, or promises, eternal life. The many religions have all attached themselves to eternal life. I find that remarkable given the amount of blind faith and ignorance required to accept these teachings as truth.

Seems that all that is required is to develop a religion and promise the devotees they will never die, and your flock will grow. The personal plan that I feel I am stuck with has it that when I am dead, I am dead. Nothing is nothing. There is no deal that can be made in my lifetime that will assure me of another life after this one. I am totally responsible for my life as it is. I have no followers. My beliefs are not popular in any of the environments I inhabit. I am required to bite my tongue almost every day in order to not upset anyone. If you believed as I believe you would recognize that some form of religion promising eternal life is prevalent in every neighborhood in America. When people die the survivors say the deceased went to a better place. And they might have. A hole in the ground just might be better than their personal life on earth was, and for some, they are glad it is over because it was so miserable. But to think you get to do it again in another incarnation is to me incredulous. To think you were put here on Earth to work on a specific segment of your eternal cosmic journey is fantastical. It is easy to fall into these traps of self-importance. Of course we have to work on all our issues confronting us on a daily basis, and our happiness and fulfillment depends on it. Some of us keep making the same mistakes over and over with the same results and we are told this is the definition of insanity. And I think that is true. But the attached concept that once we get an individual part of us figured out and corrected in this lifetime we can go on to the next incarnation is frighteningly ludicrous to me.

I was thinking after the program last night about how silly it is to think we are reincarnated. I was imagining another ice age, and there will be another ice age even if we destroy the planet with our nuclear bombs. The last ice age depleted the human population to a few thousand if I remember correctly. We have billions now. No guru can tell me these multitude of humans will be reincarnated after weakly succumbing to the frozen tundra. It is just not feasible. It does not make sense. It is simply unbelievable.

Another problem I had with the film was when Ram Dass said he had accepted the stroke which left him paralyzed on his right side. He said he had never been in so much peace his entire life. I can tell you from personal experience that having something happen to you (for me it was falling off my roof) and then being unable to motor on your own power is a humbling act of humiliating measure. To have to rely on a stranger, or even your spouse, to care for you constantly, to tend to your needs of sustenance and the wiping of your ass, is without a doubt an act of letting go. But it isn't only some enlightened spiritual person who can do this. It is simply someone who has rationalized he has no where else to go, his fate for the time being has been settled for him, and he best relax and get the most he can out of the kind people willing to wait on him.

I was in the recovery room after my first surgery that attached a fixator to my right leg in order to stabilize it and prepare it for the extensive surgery to follow after the swelling went down. I had an obnoxious roommate named Charles. I prefer to call him Chuck. He was a very unhappy and self-important ass. Chuck took his frustration and displeasure over his condition out on anybody who would take it. And most of the caregivers would. I did not understand his particular abusive behavior. I could no more mistreat these caregivers than claim I would one day be whole again. Jesus was not going to save me. Heaven wasn't going to give me back my leg. I had destroyed it and no prayers were going to put me back together again. Only a gifted surgeon and his team of beauties could perform the miracle I needed. I became the luckiest man alive because of them, that and learning I had a spouse who cared more for me than I ever knew. Every day was a new discovery about my relationship to the world, my spouse, and these other human beings. There was never a day that I felt blessed over what had happened to me, even though I was experiencing some of the greatest examples of love I could ever imagine.

Ram Dass says he feels blessed. He says he was stroked by grace. I say the obvious occurred in that he had an awful stroke and his talk is slow now and not as clear and sharp as it used to be. I see him wheeling about in a wheelchair and needing a motorized lift to get his ass back up his steps and into the house. The letting go, I understand. Feeling blessed because of it, I do not. Thinking that this is only another step in his current incarnation is nonsense. But I know it makes him feel better about it. Just as it feels better to those of us who think we'll see a loved one again up in heaven. Or that we'll never die because we are promised eternal life if we only follow a few basic rules. Or that up there in heaven we can see everything that goes on down below us on this sinful earth we were never so secretly eager to get off of unless an excited convert asked us so. Oh please. We've had our chance and we, for the most part, probably blew it. The moments we had together when we could have said the right thing, or behaved in a more admirable way, we did not. We have made choices. Some good, some bad. And I believe the baritone cowboy narrator, The Stranger, played by Sam Elliott in the Coen brothers film, The Big Lebowski , when he states, "Well, a wiser fellow than myself once said, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear, well, he eats you."