210. Surrender to the Sacred

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Surrender to the Sacred

From The Five Invitations

This is the part of the book that most evokes the transformative aspect of death that makes me think of Dostoevsky. And yes, I do agree that thinking about death can lead you to live better. To think about what is really important, even if you don't go all the way to "surrendering to the sacred" and leaving shallow earthly concerns behind.

And yes, Ostaseski does include some stories where we can see ordinary people making spiritual progress as they "actively die." But I don't recall any tales of already self-aware people gaining essential knowledge as they pass through an elemental death. 

There's no doubt in my mind that Zen Hospice is the best place to die slowly, but is there any reason to believe that a slow, Zen Hospice death is preferable to a quick death like Ficre's in The Light of the World?

Or to put it another way, isn't the ecstatic, spiritual peace people claim to experience in near-death experiences the same -- or very similar to -- the excruciatingly won sense of the sacred people sometimes gain through active dying? 

Or, to put it yet another way, why would anyone opt for a long slow death if given another option?

And that brings to a close the initial reading of this book.



Hospice and morphine are the two great magics reserved for "the end" in our times -- in the past it would probably have been religion in the sense Dostoevsky has in mind. Morphine is not the panacea people (like my mother) imagine -- though, in her case it really was a panacea in that it killed her within the hour. Both my parents were open to the notion of hospice and would have benefited from the experience Ostaseski describes. My dad was even accepted for "hospice," but there was no place he could get to on a weekend, so he received "hospice" care in the hospital which just meant that they gave up trying to cure him and tried to keep him comfortable without having actual hospice training. His final days would have been so much better if he had been at Zen -- or any other -- hospice.

My mother's doctors never accepted that she was dying, so hospice was never on the table. 

But here's the thing, I think my parents experience is actually a better guide to dying than the wonderful accounts in this book. Whatever control you think you have over how you will die is an illusion. Forget "Surrender to the Sacred," dying most often involves Surrender to Fate and very frequently to the Whims of the Hospital Industry. People want to die in their own bed or in a grassy field overlooking the Pacific, but if you're smart you will prepare for the worst death you can imagine. 

And that is actually a reason to read this book. So you can bring your hospice experience with you wherever you are. Frank, after all, is almost certainly going to miss your passing, so you're going to need to be your own spiritual guide.

Henry Ryecroft

I already referenced The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft once in connection with The Five Invitations (the Pascal quote), but I need to do it again. Gissing sometimes went off on tangents, but the core of the Ryecroft book had something in common with Ostaseski's book. Ryecroft, too, was facing the end. (As was Gissing.) Ryecroft left his life, the person he had been, behind and simplified so that he could focus on what was really important to him. In the book, it was the classic Victorian bequest that set him free, but you can imagine someone acting the same way as a response to the ideas in Ostaseski's book or a near brush with death.

The section on the Port Royal writers was as close as he got to talking about the sacred, but his endless walks and reading and gardening were Gissing's path to a life worth living. As I said in that blog, I wish Gissing had described more at the end. We don't get any of the hospice part of the tale, but we do see how Ryecroft's confrontation with death changed him.

Tenants

Our building is once again majority rental. A new resident moved into a previously owner-occupied unit and, in the process, managed to create a long gouge in the low ceiling above the stair landing. (No idea how.) I hesitated to patch and re-paint it as I wasn't confident our new paint was a good match for the older paint in that part of the building. But the landlord of the newly rental unit in question offered to buy more paint if there was a problem, so I took a shot at it. 

My first pass was spectacularly crappy. I had to sand it down a lot and apply a second coat. Looked fine when I left, but we'll see for sure after it dries and I view it in both day and night lighting conditions. Worst case, I'm thinking, is it will be something I might notice but no one else ever will. And I don't go up those stairs that frequently.

Our seismic retrofit is now a year in the past (the re-painting of the retrofitted walls is only six months in the past) and I still get a feeling of overwhelming relief every time I think about that whole experience being safely in the past. And, now I think of it, you could make a few quick find-and-replace changes to Ostaseski's book on death and turn it into a book on surviving a huge building project. Maybe Ostaseski and Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs could get together and co-author a book.

Greening

Starting tomorrow, my life is going to get crazy for a solid week. Like an ass, I signed up for three shifts at Oracle OpenWorld to see how they are going to work around the construction site in the middle of Moscone Center. I'm already regretting this. 

Then HSB starts on Friday. I have no idea if I will be blogging or not. I could have lots to say. I could just want to hide under the covers. The weather looks to be fair and mild -- perfect. We'll see. 

92. Rain + Music

Previous - 91. Rambling

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Rain

Last winter was our El Niño winter, and we did have more rain than in the previous drought years, but it wasn't what I had been hoping for. Now this winter is supposed to be a La Niña winter, yet we've been having even more rain than last year. Today it rained most of the day. So nice. 

We had been warned about all the rain, so I had planned to stay in, which I did. There was nothing I really had to leave for, and with the steady rain I wasn't tempted to run out for anything. I even had jobs planned, most of which I did -- or at least got started on. But I'm going to be so happy to get out tomorrow to get a bunch of errands in before the rain resumes next week. 

Not that I'm going to cower in my apartment all week because of rain. I really don't see how people who rarely leave their homes do it. I'm reminded that even Henry Ryecroft in his imagined Devon retirement, was constantly walking about the countryside like a good Jane Austen daughter. Maybe Gissing's real life lung problems played a part in Henry's endless walks, or maybe Gissing's boredom at being housebound (I imagine) also played a part. 

Alice Herz-Sommer didn't seem to be much daunted by her lack of mobility near the end, but then she still had her music. Music gave her the ability to leave her surroundings behind both in the camp and in old age. And that was one of the lessons of the Buena Vista Social Club, how music could keep people lively in old age. Unfortunately I am like Jane Austen's Lady Catherine de Bourgh in this respect, "If you are speaking of music...it is of all subjects my delight. There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.... " 

Musicophilia

This is a very poorly named book. Musicophilia would have been a much better title for the book about Alice Herz-Sommer. ("Chem-ophilia" would have been a better title for Uncle Tungsten.) This is largely a book about neurological dysfunction and oddities relating to music. 

I just read the section on musical hallucination -- which is when the music you "imagine" is so real sounding and so out of your conscious control that it usually takes time, sometimes days, for the subject to realize the music is coming from inside their head. On the one hand, it's not so surprising that the brain can generate music without the aid of the senses. As we've seen in other perceptual contexts, what we "hear" is not what our ears detect but what our brains do with that data. Musical hallucinations are just our brains replaying -- or sometimes playing with, as a sound designer might -- the music it has performed in the past. 

What interests me, as in the case of dreams, is all that our brains are capable of doing on their own. Our brains, according to Sacks' multitude of anecdotal accounts, can reproduce music we heard long ago and have forgotten about and with a degree of fidelity that is often better than what those subjects can obtain from actual music -- often due to hearing loss. 

And sometimes the music seems to be original and composers write it down and we have new art. (There is a footnote in the book that is so close to Adrian's story in Doctor Faustus as to make you wonder how common things like this are.)

Going further with what the brain is able to do "on its own," I come back to the always fascinating Multiple Personality Disorder. Because I also live in an open-air psych-ward, I've been thinking in recent days about the relationship between MPD and schizophrenia. The latter would seem to be a variation on the former in which the primary identity is aware of a 2nd identity but only through hearing its voice. (I mean the voice has to be coming from someplace. And is this the origin of the notion of demonic possession and exorcism? That would certainly make sense. People talking to themselves often seem like they are struggling with something trying to "possess" them, as was the case with some of the secondary personalities in the MPS examples I read.) 

You could do a very interesting variation on the movie Lucy with a subject developing the ability to control some of these powers our brains seem to have. Or, to fall back on Robert Pirsig's analogy of our brain as the hardware (or OS) and our consciousness as an app running on top of that system, the underlying "intelligence" running the show could become dominant with full control of all its neurological powers.

I just did a bit of research on schizophrenia (Wiki is having a really annoying fund drive which makes their site inaccessible to me -- since I just gave them money last month), I found this interesting tidbit on another site, "It is interesting that people who are born deaf and later go on to develop schizophrenia can also experience hearing voices.¹¹" And they report there are people with benign voices in their head, as opposed to the usual "command" and "persecutory" voices. The "persecutory" voices are the ones that reek of being MPD related, as they seem to know so much personal and embarrassing stuff about the subject. Here's a key passage, "Because they come from inside you, they have a perfect understanding of your whole psyche.²

"They understand all of your strengths and weaknesses, all of your secret fears and hates. All of the things you most love and care about, and because they know you so well they can attack you where they know that you are most sensitive and where they can do the most damage. For instance, the person may be told by the voices to harm the family members they most love. They may be told to give up their studies, sports, or the career they have worked at all their life. They may be told to harm themselves in the most painful ways.²"

An interesting question is, Are the people with schizophrenia, who at least retain control of their consciousness, better off than MPS sufferers who suddenly find themselves in surprising places? Would you rather be harangued in your head or completely lose control of your consciousness?


Getting back to musical, or auditory, hallucinations, there is often a connection with exposure to silence, either a particularly silent environment, like a boat on a still sea or someone in the middle of a desert, or the silence of hearing loss. Which reminds me of the "voice hearing" Sara Maitland and her passion for silence... while driving and flying all over the place. She never elaborated on her voices, that I can recall, so we don't know if they were something she wanted to hear or not. (Now I'm imagining myself meditating in the desert hoping to be told where I put that SciFi manuscript I can't for the life of me find, though I know I wouldn't have tossed it. Or so I can hear again that "Eclectic Mouse" LP I can not find even on YouTube. I should look again, things do turn up there... Found it! Here. I recognize the sound but not the songs. It's possible I had a later LP -- I would have guessed around 1972 instead of late '60s.)  

I've read another chapter now (the one about people either having or not having a musical ability) and am wondering if there are instances where one personality does and other personalities don't.

Next - 93. Vintage Space

59. Ryecroft + Landscaping

Previous - 58. Beethoven's 9th recalled

Henry Ryecroft

Actual rain is falling from the sky. This is our first proper storm since, I think, early April. I remember that rain because I was working outside all day the first weekend of Cherry Blossom Festival. Now it's the weekend following Fleet Week and the City is finally getting a good washing. 

The past week I've been thinking again about Henry Ryecroft, and this change in the weather brings him to mind again. The change of seasons. From now on we will be descending into winter. My greening work is done for the year. Despite a perverse urge to rev up my workouts, to get back to where I was on a couple exercises I've backed off of because of wrist problems last year at this time, I'm trying to ease off the exercise just a bit. To lay fallow, as it were, and give my body time to recover. (Though while this sounds sensible, I've come through the summer in such good shape it seems a bit silly.) I'm thinking I will limit myself to twice a week until the new year and then ramp up again.

Thinking of Henry Ryecroft, something else struck me, his attitude toward his health problems. And presumably this was true of George Gissing as well. Where as today we do battle with illness, he retreated to the countryside to try to enjoy what time remained. Today this would be a startling act for anyone not destitute or deranged. And yet who really enjoys those battles in and out of hospitals? I suppose enough people win to make it seem worth the effort, but I wonder.

Landscaping

I'm now learning a great deal about landscaping with gravel. We just want a thick layer of something in the back to prevent weeds from growing there. The ideal solution seems to be something called decomposed granite (DG). The one landscaper I've managed to get here to look at the site suggested it, and I've since studied up. If you pack it down, it almost resembles paving. The landscaper recommended five inches of the stuff to cover all the roots and vines down there. 

The problem is that bags of the stuff are quite heavy (over 40 lbs) and since that landscaper never got back to me with the estimate he promised, it looks like I may have to do this myself. An alternative is red lava, which is under 30 lbs for the same volume and cheaper as well. 

A great option would be 60 bags of the red lava as a base which would then be topped off with 57 bags of DG. This would give most of the advantages of the nearly solid (weed blocking) power of the DG but with a much lighter in weight (and cost) alternative underneath, where it shouldn't make much difference. 

There are several other options: pea gravel, and a general purpose gravel that is even cheaper but still heavy. Just thinking about my back and our budget, the thought of simply having 80-100 bags of red lava delivered rather appeals to me. If it turns out that isn't quite doing what we want, we can always add a layer of DG sometime in the future.

And I just now discovered I can first put down a heavy duty tarp for under $50. So maybe just 80 bags of lava rock? I just want to get past this so I can finish up the damn painting.

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