10

Dying

The subject of death is a topic it seems most of us would generally rather avoid. The Gita tells us, “As the dweller in the body experiences in the body childhood, youth, and old age, so passes he on to another body. . . . Certain is death for the born and certain is birth for the dead. Over the inevitable, you should not grieve.” That’s the basic position the Gita puts forward, but people have been reading the Gita for years, and at the same time grieving over death and remaining incredibly afraid of it. Most of us try hard to keep any thoughts about death at arm’s length—especially thoughts about our own death, because if there is anything that is a panic trip for most human beings, for most entities, it is the thought of losing their entity-ness as they know it to be. Our deepest root fears and anxieties concern our survival, and while we may be willing to talk about death in a sort of abstract, academic way, we’re not overly eager to bring it up close and personal.We don’t want to let it in at a level where we’re really feeling it.

So in order to personalize the issue, to bring it home and relate it to our real feelings, what I’d like to do in this chapter is to share with you a series of experiences—experiences that led me to a change in my own perceptions about death. They are the experiences that have taken me from what I believed back in, say, 1960, to what I believe now. I’ll just share these stories with you, because it is the sum of those experiences that changed my perspective.

Back in my psychologist days, I was very much attached to seeing the personality and the body as “real.” And because as far as I was concerned they were not only real but the only reality back then, I believed that when you died, you were dead—that was that. And since there was nothing to be done about it, you might as well ignore death and enjoy life while you had it.The game of life, as I saw it then, was to be optimally happy at every moment; death clearly didn’t seem to have much to do with happiness, so the topic was best avoided or denied. (The psychologist back then wouldn’t have said “denied,” of course; I would have said, “realistically coped with.”)

Then I started taking psychedelics. They turned out to be my first real teachers about dying. In the course of my explorations with psychedelics, I had a number of experiences in which I ceased to be as I ordinarily knew myself to be, and then, after a time, reentered my ordinary awareness.That is, in a certain psychological sense I had died and been reborn, and those experiences changed my relationship with death in a very profound way.

One of those death-rebirth experiences was the motel trip that I’ve already told you about. Another happened during my initial experience with psilocybin. I’d taken the mushrooms at Timothy’s house, as I mentioned before. At one stage in the trip, I was sitting alone in the semidarkness of the living room, when I saw across the room from me, some eight feet away, a being who, I was surprised to realize, was in fact myself. That “me” was standing over there, and he was dressed up in a mortarboard and an academic gown; I thought, “Oh, wow— there’s Richard-Alpert-as-Professor.” And from there, one by one, the being took on each of my social roles: a professor, a pilot, a cellist, a lover, an achiever—role after role. I saw it like a series of costume changes: Richard wearing a pilot’s helmet and goggles, Richard in a tuxedo playing the cello. And each role I let go of, let go of, let go of. Finally, what I saw, over across the room, was whoever Richard was way back when I was a child, when my parents first started labeling this entity: He’s a good boy, or he’s a bad boy, or whoever Richard was. It was now “essence Richard-ness” standing over there. I got a little anxious when I saw that one; I thought, “Will I have amnesia if I give this one up?” But I reassured myself; I thought, “Well, it’ll be okay, because I’ll still have my body.”

That, however, turned out to be a premature conclusion, because as I looked down at the couch where I was sitting, I saw the entire couch—the whole thing, from one end to the other—and there was nobody sitting on it.

Now, there was nothing in my psychological training that had prepared me for that moment. I was about to freak and yell for Tim—to “bad trip it,” you might say—when I suddenly thought, with my Jewish-humor-mind, “But who’s minding the store?” That is, “Who is it who’s about to scream?” If everything I thought I was, including my body, wasn’t, then who was left to scream? Who was that being? Suddenly, all the anxiety was gone; it just drained out of me. I felt I had met a new being in myself, one that wasn’t connected with who I’d always thought myself to be.

With that, the “who I’d always thought I was” started to lose its power to scare me quite so much. When Harvard kicked me out and I lost my professorship, it wasn’t like I was losing my self-ness; I was just losing my professorship-ness. When I lost my hair, it wasn’t like “I’m losing my hair!” It was like “Look at it go!” My identity started to be less and less connected with my body, or my personality, or my social roles.

It turns out that the process of dying is all about letting go. So I treated my psychedelic experiences like little inoculations, opportunities to practice letting go: letting go, letting go, letting go, one by one—and then the Big One. The psilocybe mushrooms and the other psychedelics I used gave me the chance to work with that letting go process—letting go of my personality, of my ego, of everything I thought I was. And through those death-rebirth experiences, my understanding of dying changed.

If you would like to see the way doctoral dissertations confirm that which we already know, a dissertation done at the University of California in Berkeley demonstrated that people who had taken psychedelics, and people who had meditated for more than three years, were significantly less anxious about dying than anybody else in the whole population. Anyone who’s done either of those practices could have told them that!

One researcher, Eric Kast, did some pioneering studies at Chicago Medical School using LSD with terminal cancer patients. One of the patients, a nurse, said, “Yes, I know that I am dying of cancer, but look at the beauty of the universe!” At that moment, she had extricated herself from identification with that which was dying, and had identified instead with the universe, in which her death was just one small part.

At around the same time that I took that first mushroom trip, Tim and I began working with Aldous Huxley, who was then a visiting professor at MIT. Aldous introduced us to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.The Tibetan Book of the Dead is quite extraordinary. It’s an ancient text which is read to Tibetan lamas at the time of their death and for forty-nine days thereafter, to guide them through the experience of dying and what follows. It’s like having someone at your elbow as you’re dying, whispering, “Right here, stay right here. Stay with each moment, be with your dying. Let go . . . it’s OK. Let go . . . it’s all right.” What a support system! If the process of our death permits it, it would probably be a good idea to arrange to have such a person around.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is concerned with the bardos, or “islands,” which are the states of consciousness or planes of reality that one passes through after leaving this physical plane. It’s not that those bardos just suddenly appear at the time of death. They are planes of reality, and they’re around all the time. They exist right here, right now; all of the bardos that are mentioned in the Book of the Dead are right here, could we but see them. As long as we’re alive, however, the ego screens us from those planes—that’s one of its mechanisms for keeping us focused on everyday states of reality. But once we’ve died, our egos aren’t around doing that anymore, so we suddenly become aware of those other planes. Were we open to them, we’d be experiencing all the bardo states right now.

What was extraordinary for me, in reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, was that I kept coming across descriptions of bardo states and thinking, “My God—that’s what happened to me last Thursday night, when I took that psilocybin!” It was pretty weird to have a twentyfive-hundred-year-old book describing the things that we were experiencing on psychedelics, which we were calling “indescribable” or “ineffable.” Here it was, and it had all been written out and choreographed twenty-five centuries ago.

Tim and Ralph Metzner and I subsequently did a “translation” of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into the language of a psychedelic trip, and published it as a book called The Psychedelic Experience. We treated the Book of the Dead as a guide for dying and being reborn through the use of psychedelics; we wanted to begin to make manuals available for using psychedelics in a sacred way.

At about the same time as I was going through all those changes via my early experiences with psychedelics, my mother was dying. She had had a blood condition, which had led to an enlargement of her spleen, and when the doctors finally had to remove the spleen, she died. Going through all that with her became another rich teaching about death.

I saw in the course of my mother’s dying the way we try to cover up the decay of the body, the way we try to mask it. It’s part of our way of hiding from what’s happening. I remember visiting my mother when she was very close to death; she had an infection in her gums, so her bridge didn’t fit anymore, and the nurses had removed it. In all the years I had known my mother, I had never been allowed to see her without her teeth. Now there she was, at the point of dying, and with the little bit of energy she still had left, she was holding a fan up in front of her mouth, lest her son should see her without her teeth. Little vignettes like that show us how hard we try to push away any acknowledgment that the body is decaying.

I saw the denial that exists around death. As my mother got closer to dying, I began to spend a lot of time with her at the hospital. I would come to the hospital stoned on this or that, and she, being kept from her pain with various medicines, would also be stoned on this or that (although she would never have called it that; the doctors were “treating her”—that was the way she would have put it). Mother and I would sit quietly together, and we would share moments of incredible presence, just meditating, being silent together, holding hands. As we sat there together, other people would come into the room— nurses, doctors, my father, my aunts and uncles. They would all be involved in hysterical denial of what was happening. They would say, “Gert, you’re lookingmuchbetter.” Then they would walk out into the hall and say, “She won’t last a week.” It was horrible—nobody could be truthful with her, because they were all so afraid of acknowledging death.

Denial permeates the whole system, and all the relationships in it. A young nurse once told about her experience with a patient who was dying of rheumatic heart disease. She talked about how guilty she would feel as she entered his room each day, knowing she was going to live, while he, a man of her own age, was about to die. She said, “I knew he wanted to talk to me, but I always turned it into something light—a little joke, or some evasive reassurance which had to fail.The patient knew, and I knew—but as he saw my desperate attempts to escape, and felt my anxiety, he took pity on me and kept to himself what he wanted to share with another human being. And so he died and didn’t bother me.”

Another nurse wrote in her diary about the usual responses to a patient’s direct question, “Am I going to die?” This was her list.

Moralizing: “You shouldn’t talk that way, Mr. Jones. No one knows when he is going to die.”

Stating facts: “Your pulse is strong and steady, and your color is good. I don’t think you are going to die today, Mr. Jones.”

Direct denial: “I don’t think you will die today, or even tomorrow.”

Referring the patient to another person: “I am unable to tell you that. You should ask the doctor; he’s better able to tell you.”

Philosophizing: “No one really knows what the future holds.”

Changing the subject: “Who is that in the picture on your night-stand?”

Kidding the patient: “Oh, come on now, Mr. Jones.You’re probably going to outlive me!”

And finally, there is simply avoiding the question altogether, and turning away.

At one point, when my mother and I were alone in the room, she said to me, “Rich, I know that I’m going to die. But nobody will talk to me about it.” So I said, “Yeah, I think you’re right. I think you are going to be leaving your body soon.” She said, “What do you think is going to happen then?” I said, “Well, I don’t really know. But I’ve noticed that as your body has been slowly decaying through this illness, it hasn’t changed anything very important. You are still who I know you to be, and I am still who you know me to be, and here we are.Yet all this decay is going on.” Then I said, “And from what I have read and from what I have experienced, I have a suspicion that when you drop your body, it’s all going to continue in pretty much the same way. There may be some confusion at first, but when that sorts itself out . . . there we’ll be.”

We had moments like that, moments when my mother and I found a place where we could be very peaceful together. But the minute she came down off the morphine or whatever it was they were giving her, she would go right back into her Jewish middle-class mode. Instead of acknowledging that she was dying, she would be “all better, getting healthier.” She would get busy controlling her scene: “Move this, do that.” In fact, the very last time I saw her alive, I was up in her room and we were having a beautiful visit together. But just then, the plumber arrived to fix her toilet. She completely forgot I was even there in her zeal to order the plumber around and get the toilet fixed. That’s who she was busy being, at the moment when I last saw her.

I took LSD to go to my mother’s funeral, which made it interesting, because, of course, she was at the funeral, too. She and I were hanging out together, and seeing it all as really quite beautiful. We enjoyed all the loving people coming together, and it was a very happy occasion for both of us. That put me in a rather peculiar position, though, because according to the customs of funeral showbiz, they had seated the mourners of the family on one side of the casket and everybody else on the opposite side, so they could look at the mourners mourning. I was in a state of great happiness, being there with my mother, but I realized that one smile, and it would all be over. “Look at that!! He’s the one that takes drugs.Wouldn’t you know? He laughs at his own mother’s funeral. The depths of depravity!”

There was an interesting moment, though, later in the funeral service, when Mother let the rest of the family in on the game. On each of their wedding anniversaries, my mother and father had always exchanged one red rose, as a token of their continuing love for one another. At the funeral, my mother’s coffin was covered with a blanket of roses; when the coffin was being wheeled down the aisle, just as it passed the row in which my father was sitting, one red rose fell off the blanket and landed at my father’s feet. Now, seated in that row were my father, a very conservative Boston attorney and ex-president of a railroad; my oldest brother, a successful New York stockbroker; his wife, a Long Island wife-of-a-successful-stockbroker; my second brother, who, at the time, was under the impression that he was Christ; and me. All of us looked at the rose—we all knew the story about the anniversary roses, of course—and as we started to file out, my father bent down and picked up the rose.

We went out and climbed into the Cadillac limousine to go to the cemetery. My father was holding the rose, and nobody was saying a word. Finally my brother, Christ, said, “Well, I guess she sent you a message”—and everybody in the car agreed! Can you imagine that? Not just Christ and me, but the attorney and the stockbroker and the Long Island matron all agreed.They all said, “Yes, that’s right. She sent you a message.” It was a beautiful moment, in which the emotions of the situation had led everybody to transcend all their cynicism and doubt, and to allow for the possibility that something like that had actually happened: that a message had come from my mother “from the beyond,” which meant that some part of her was still around.

Of course, my father’s immediate question was “How can we preserve the rose?” He’s a materialist, right? It isn’t enough that we got the message—we have to preserve the rose. Well, that started a frenzied plan of action, which led to numerous phone calls, which ended up with our locating a company that said it could encase the rose in a plastic bubble full of some kind of liquid that would preserve the rose “forever,” so that we, for all eternity, could have this red rose. We air-mailed the rose to the company, and when it came back in its plastic bubble we put it on the mantelpiece.

Well, the years passed. It turned out that the procedure for preserving the rose wasn’t quite foolproof, so the rose got all deadish and the water got all black. And now on the mantelpiece was this globe of brackish water.

Eventually, it came time for my father to marry again (to a wonderful woman; I gave the bride away), and now there was some question about what to do with this eternal memento sitting on the mantelpiece.That whole clinging thing of “preserving it for eternity”: Now that you’ve got it, what do you do with it? Well, the rose gradually made its way to less and less prominent places, and then eventually was relegated to a closet at the back of the garage that was set aside for all the things we were preserving eternally. (I did later rescue it from there, and for a long time kept it on my puja table, but somewhere in my many moves it vanished, and I don’t know where it is now.)

My deepest teachings on the subject of death came from Maharajji, my guru—but interestingly enough, my mother cropped up several times in the course of my connecting with him. First of all, she appeared to me on the ceiling of my hotel room in Nepal, while I was lying there trying to decide whether to go on to Japan with my friend David Padwa, or to go back into India with Bhagawan Das and do temple pilgrimages. Going to Japan would be secure, and first class all the way. Going back to India, on the other hand, meant that I would be without much money, and it would all be kind of nitty-gritty and wild. As I was sitting there trying to figure out what to do, my mother appeared. She looked down at me with a look that was both peeved and pleased at the same time. The middle-class mother-role was peeved, saying, “When are you going to settle down and become a responsible member of the community?” But the other, pleased, part of her was saying, “Go, baby, go!” I’d always suspected that the other little part of her was in there, but I hadn’t been able to see it because I was so used to dealing with the middle-class woman and with all the Freudian stuff about mothers (all of which was totally applicable to her and me). But there she was, in a hotel in Kathmandu, encouraging me to go on to India—where, as it turned out, Maharajji was lying in wait for me.

A few months later, when I first met Maharajji, it was through an exchange regarding my mother that he blew my mind and opened my heart to him. The day I met him, Maharajji said to me, “Your mother died last year.” He closed his eyes and he said, “She got very big in the stomach before she died”—which was true, because of her enlarged spleen. I said, “Yes.” Then he spoke the only word that he said in English; he looked directly at me and he said, “Spleen.” That is, he named, in English, the organ that had killed my mother.That one word brought my mind screeching to a halt. How did he know? How did he know? My mind was like one of those pinball machines going “Tilt!”—it stopped dead in its tracks! And then my heart could open to him.

The next day, Maharajji said to me, “You know, your mother is a very high being.” I said to the translator, “Didn’t he say she was a very high being?” The translator asked again, and Maharajji said, “Nay, nay—she is a very high being.” I suddenly experienced a whole figureground reversal: I saw this high being, who had taken on an incarnation as a middle-class Jewish woman from Boston, but who had, in some subtle way, been supporting my going out and out and out, while all the time keeping up a veneer of total middle-class respectability— in fact, fooling herself with the disguise most of the time. I began to reperceive her, through that comment of Maharajji’s, and to appreciate the being behind the temporary roles we’d both been playing.

Maharajji totally reoriented my attitudes toward dying. He often spoke about death. He said things like these: “The body dies, but not the soul.” “The body passes away. Everything is impermanent, except the love of God.” “You can’t take anything with you when you die, because the world is just a dream, an illusion.” For Maharajji, death was an escape from the prison of that illusion—“escaping from Central Jail,” he called it.

One day, walking along with one of the devotees, Maharajji said, “So-and-so—this old woman devotee—just died.” Then he laughed and laughed. The devotee who was walking with him said, “You butcher! What are you laughing about, if she just died?” Maharajji looked surprised and said, “Do you want me to pretend to be one of the puppets?” He was saying, Should I make believe I’m sad? She just finished her work, and left the stage.

Maharajji was lying on his tucket at the temple one day. Suddenly he sat up and said, “Somebody’s here.” The people around him said, “No, Maharajji. Nobody’s here.” He said, “Yes, yes, someone has just come. Nobody thinks I know anything.” A few minutes later a man came into the compound, and started toward Maharajji’s tucket; he was the servant of one of Maharajji’s old devotees. Maharajji yelled at him, “I won’t go. I won’t go. I know he’s dying, but I won’t go.” The man said, “How did you know this, Maharajji? Not even the family knows. But yes—he is dying, and he is calling for you.” Maharajji said, “No, no, I’m not going to go.” Everyone begged, “Maharajji, please go! That man has been your devotee for so many years.” Maharajji just kept saying, “No, no. I won’t go.”

Finally, Maharajji reached over and picked up a banana. He handed it to the man and said, “Here, give him this banana. He will be all right.” The servant pranamed and thanked him, and ran home with the banana. He mashed up the banana and fed it to the dying man; the man ate the banana—and as he took the last bite, he died.

Now, what are we to make of that story? What’s “all right”? Maharajji didn’t say the man was going to live—he just said he’d be all right. Why do we think that has to mean remaining in this incarnation?

When I first went to India, in 1967, I was still in my Land Rover phase. My friend David and I were driving around India in a big Land Rover, with Vivaldi concerti on the tape recorder, eating canned tuna fish and drinking chlorinated water and keeping the windows closed so the germs wouldn’t get in. When we arrived in Banaras, we stayed

Hatha Yoga Class: Near the end of one of the yoga sessions, the students practice a deep relaxation posture called savasana, or the corpse pose. The open, relaxed pose facilitates the release of any physical or mental clinging.

at a first-class English-type hotel. But when I went out into the streets of Banaras, there it all was.

Banaras is the city of dying in India, and death isn’t hidden away there the way it is in our culture. In Banaras, when somebody dies, he is wrapped in an orange cloth and placed on a kind of wooden stretcher. Then he’s carried through the streets to the burning ghats, right out in the open, all to the chanting of Ram’s name. Quite different from our funerals, which have made the whole thing so antiseptic. Hindus try to go to Banaras to die, because if you die there, Shiva comes and whispers the name of Ram in your ear at the moment of your death, and that brings enlightenment. In other words, once you understand what the game is all about, it’s a very auspicious place to die.

The scene in Banaras, like the Tibetan monks reading the Book of the Dead, reflects an understanding that it’s important how we orient our minds at the time of our death. Both of those systems are reincarnational, and they both include two of the main ingredients in a spiritual view of death: first, that it matters what you are thinking about at the moment of death; and second, that the key to not being reborn is not being attached. Banaras and The Book of the Dead each creates a context through which you could, at the moment of death, go straight through the door and be in the arms of God. They each create a set of symbols and a set of rituals that at the time of death are right there to remind you what it’s all about. Krishna says in the Gita, “At the time of death, think of me.” These are techniques for making that more likely.

But none of that was I seeing, that first time I was in Banares. As I walked around the streets, what I saw then were all these human beings who were literally down to skin and bone, many of them with leprosy or some other horrific disease.They were dragging themselves around with their begging bowls, hundreds and hundreds of them. Each of them had a little pouch tied into his loincloth, or her sari, that held just enough coins to buy the wood for their funeral pyres.

Now, there I was in Banaras, walking through those streets. I’d just had a big meal at a nice, fancy, restaurant, with the ice cream parfait for dessert, and it probably cost more than these people had ever seen at one time in their whole lives. I had my traveler’s checks in my pocket, and I was out to see the sights of Banaras. But the more I saw, the more uncomfortable I grew, because I was feeling such incredible pity for all those people around me. The thought that I was holding traveler’s checks while they were there with not enough to eat—I couldn’t stand it! I literally fled back to the hotel room and hid under the bed. It was just too much for me. It was, in a way, like the Buddha’s encounters with the old, the sick, and the dying.

It was not so many months later that I went back to Banaras. But in the meantime, I had been with Maharajji, and so I had been opened to new possibilities about the nature of the game. And through that, I had begun to understand what Banaras was all about. I walked down by the burning ghats. The burning ghats are the places on the bank of the Ganges River where bodies are cremated, where the cremation fires have been going on since forever. I spent a whole night standing in the middle of the burning ghats, with the bodies burning all around me, smelling the smoke of the burning flesh, watching the skulls being cracked with a stick, and hearing Shiva whispering, “Rama, Rama, Rama.”

And now when I looked at those people dragging themselves through the streets, I saw something totally new. I saw it from their point of view; and to my amazement, I suddenly saw that what they were feeling was great pity for me. Because they knew they had made it—and the chances of my ever making it were very slim, indeed. Look at me, rushing around, not knowing where I was going—the shoe was suddenly on the other foot. And with that new understanding of what was going on, what I saw was the deep joy in the scene. They were happy—they knew they were almost there!

At Maharajji’s funeral pyre, there was one old devotee who sang and sang all night long at the top of his lungs, “Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai, Jai Ram! Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai, Jai Ram!” The next day, people asked him why he was singing that way, without any trace of sadness. He said, “When I looked at the funeral fire, I saw Maharajji sitting upright, laughing, and Ram standing next to him pouring ghee over his head so that he would burn faster. And all around overhead were the gods and goddesses, raining down flowers from above.”

The body dies, but not the soul. That’s what Maharajji was telling us. It’s what Christ was trying to tell us as well. What Christ was saying to all of us was “Look, don’t freak out. I’ll show you how it’s done. You’re worried, so I’ll run through it; then you won’t be afraid anymore. I’ll go through all the suffering, even the suffering of the final doubt: ‘Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?’ I’ll take it all on, so you can see that it’s really all OK. I’ll even die, and I’ll show you that that’s no big deal, either, and then I’ll drop back, just to let you know that it’s all cool, that nothing much changes with death.” I began to see the power of that teaching to liberate, once we get past the “poor Christ, hanging there on the cross” business. There’s nothing to be afraid of—that was Christ’s real teaching.

When Ramana Maharshi was dying of cancer, his devotees said, “Please, Baba, heal yourself!” He said, “No, no, this body is done.” They begged him, “Don’t leave us! Don’t leave us!” and they all started to weep. He looked at them with bewilderment and he said, “Leave you? Don’t be silly. Where could I go?”¹ He was telling them, I’m here; that won’t change. It’s just the body that’s leaving.

Well, all those experiences- with psychedelics, with my mother, with Maharajji—began to add up for me, and to reshape the way I thought about death.They gave me a new perspective on things, and I began to see the way we, as a culture, were really doing a job on ourselves about the whole subject. We try very hard to pretend that if we hide death in the closet and never mention it in polite company, it won’t exist. But the truth is, the more we try to hide from death, the scarier it gets. I saw that—and that led me to decide to start focusing more on death, to start talking about it more in my lectures and getting more involved with it in my work. And it seemed clear to me that one obvious way of getting involved would be to start hanging around with people who were dying.

Ginny Fiffer was a friend of Aldous and Laura Huxley, and when I met her she was dying of pelvic cancer. Ginny was an intellectual, part of the Ernest Hemingway crowd “way back when,” and she didn’t have much use for any kind of mysticism. She thought all that was some kind of bullshit. When I came to visit her the first time, she was still full of arguments. She asked me, “What do you think about all this dying business?” I told her what I thought, and she said, “I think that’s a lot of crap!”

Some weeks later, I came back to visit her again. She was very weak by then—too weak to talk to me, and in great pain. The cancer was eating away at the nerves all through her stomach and thighs, and she was writhing in pain, just continuously writhing on the bed.

I came into Ginny’s room. I sat down next to her bed, and I proceeded to meditate. But I didn’t meditate by going away from her, into myself. I meditated with my eyes open, and I meditated on her decaying body. I used a Buddhist meditation, which the monks traditionally did in the charnel grounds, where corpses were left out in the fields to decay. The monks would go and meditate on the swollen corpse, on the festering corpse, on the corpse infested with worms, and finally on the skeleton. The value of the meditation was that it loosened one’s attachment to the body. Some people are repelled by all that; they think the corpse meditation is very negative. But it’s actually just counteracting all the denial and the Pollyannaish positiveness that we get so lost in.

Meditating there with Ginny, I saw the decaying body, and I saw the pain. But instead of being freaked by the emotions which that aroused, I let the feelings be present—and at the same time, I was the witness of it all. It was all right there: the awe-full beauty of the universe. It got very, very peaceful in the room, and very, very deep; the whole space filled with a kind of purplish glow. It was quite an extraordinary moment. After we had been in that space for maybe twenty minutes or so, Ginny turned to me and said, “I feel so much peace.” Yet all the time, her body was writhing in pain. The pain was still there—it didn’t go away. But Ginny had pulled herself out of the place where she was identified with being the person who was in pain. That was no longer who she was. She had connected with who she was behind that.

That experience with Ginny taught me a little bit about how we can work with pain. The toughest things about death are the pain and the fear. If we aren’t prepared, if we aren’t conscious, the pain and fear will create a lot of confusion; our minds will get lost in them.We need strategies for approaching them. When we meditate, and our legs hurt or our knees hurt, and we learn how to sit with that pain, to be open to it, we are beginning the long journey of learning to deal with whatever intense or unexpected pain might be connected with our dying. Ginny was a teacher for me, in showing me the need for that and in helping me see how to deal with such pain.

There was another lesson I learned by being around people who were dying, and that was how deficient our culture is in providing places for dying consciously. We don’t have a Banaras here; instead, we have hospitals. There was a friend of mine, Debbie Love, who was dying; she was married to Peter Mattheissen, who’s written all those beautiful books about Nepal and the Himalayas. While she was dying, Debbie was a patient at Mount Sinai Hospital in NewYork City. Now, hospitals are very tricky places to die in; they are designed to keep people alive by whatever means possible, so when you die you represent a failure of the system.

Debbie was a member of a zendo in New York City, and all of her fellow Zen students decided that instead of meditating at the zendo every evening, they would come and meditate in her hospital room. So each evening they would converge on Mount Sinai Hospital, and pretty soon Debbie’s room had been converted into a temple. There was a little puja shrine, and all the students, dressed in their black robes, would line the walls, doing zazen.

The first evening that the students met in Debbie’s room, a gaggle of young resident doctors arrived in the middle of the meditation. They pushed open the door to the room and charged in, prepared with their hale and hearty “Well, and how are we doing tonight? Let’s see your chart. Have you been a good girl? Did you eat all your dinner?” But they’d walked into this temple. They got as far as “Well, and how are we do—” and they stopped in their tracks.

By the third night, instead of barging in, they were gently opening the door, coming in, and standing quietly for a few minutes looking at the charts, and then leaving. They were doing their work, but they weren’t dominating the scene. They were like the doctors for a football team; the doctors don’t call the plays—they are merely there to help you if you break a leg. They are the servants of the system rather than its masters.

Debbie’s experience showed me the possibility of creating a space for conscious dying right in the middle of the system. But, of course, it would be nice to have a space where that kind of environment for dying is not just accommodated, but supported and encouraged. What that has led to in my own thinking is a program I would like to call “Dial-a-Death.” If you were dying, and wanted to die consciously, you’d dial us up.We would send somebody over who wanted to work on themselves through the process of being with someone—namely, you—who was trying to die consciously.

See, there are no professional die-ers, but there are many of us, myself included, who find it an incredibly powerful sadhana to work with someone who’s dying. And there are plenty others of us who are dying, and who would like to have around them somebody who’s done enough deep inner work to be really present with them in that space. So “Dial-a-Death” would be like a yenta, or a marriage broker—somebody who arranges relationships between what we might call the die-ers and the guides.

Eventually, I would imagine that we will have Banarases in the West. We will have scenes where people can come and say, “This is where I want to die. I would like to die among people who aren’t busy denying death, or trying to cling to life.” People coming to such a dying center will be able to decide which kind of doctor they want, and how much medication they need, and what sort of religious metaphor they would like to die in.They could die in a Christian metaphor, or a Muslim metaphor, or a Buddhist metaphor, or a Hindu metaphor, or whatever. There would be people available from each tradition, and we would do all we could to have every tradition represented: Wiccan, Zoroastrian, Rastafarian, you name it. That is, we would do our best to arrange whatever setting the die-er felt would maximize her or his chance of being turned toward God at the moment of death. But although “Banaras West” is a nice vision for the future, at the moment we work with what we’ve got, and Debbie was a good teacher for me in how that could be done.

In any case, dying in an ideal environment presumes that we will have some time for preparation, and for a certain number of us, that won’t be the case. For some of us, death will arrive very suddenly and unexpectedly. It can happen to anybody, at any moment. Within a period of one week at Naropa, for example, I dealt with a woman who had learned she had malignant cancer, with a boy who fell off a mountain and died, and with a woman who was in an automobile accident in which her companion was killed. All unexpected, all shattering.

Sudden death is in many ways more difficult to work with spiritually.There isn’t time to arrange an external environment that turns us in the right direction. There isn’t time to prepare ourselves—here it is! It becomes then a question of our inner environment at that moment, and once we realize that death can happen at any instant, we start paying more attention to the moment-by-moment content of our minds. We begin asking ourselves, “If I were to die in this moment, would my thoughts be turned toward God?”

That’s where a practice like mantra can be so helpful. You carry a mala in your pocket, and as you’re walking along you’re turning your mala and chanting, “Krishna, Krishna, Krishna,” or “Christ, Christ, Christ,” or “Rama, Rama, Rama,” or “Allah, Allah, Allah.” If you’ve been filling your mind with the names of God all throughout your life, you’ve got a better chance of their being there at the moment when you’re dying. Mahatma Gandhi was walking out into his garden, just another ordinary day, when he was shot three times by an assassin. He didn’t say, “Aaargh!” or “I’ve been shot!” or “Long live India!” He just said, “Ram,” and he died. He was so ready that even at the moment of the totally unexpected, he went right toward God. Just,Yeah—here I come. Wheeeee! Look ma, no hands. I’m free!

What we need most at the moment of death is incredible clarity of consciousness. Since dying is one of the most profound events of our lives, don’t we owe it the respect of preparing for it, so that when it comes we can deal with it consciously? Confucius said, “One who sees the way in the morning can gladly die in the evening.” Sadhana is the preparation, so that at any moment, no matter how unexpected that moment might be, we are able to let go of the thought of our own existence.

There was one more lesson that I learned from hanging out with people who were dying, and that was that I could be sucked in by all the melodramas surrounding death just as easily as the next guy. I learned firsthand about the depth of my own denial around the subject.

Wavy Gravy once introduced me to a young fellow who was dying of Hodgkin’s disease. Wavy knew I was interested in being with people who were dying, and this fellow wanted to talk with me, so Wavy set things up. We met over at Tom Wolfe’s house. I sat down next to the fellow and I said, “So, I hear you are going to die soon.” He said, “Yeah.” I asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

He proceeded to tell me about how he was planning to die. He was in what’s labeled stage 4B of the disease, which is the terminal stage. He had been through all the medical treatments, and he had decided that he wanted to go out on his own, in order to avoid the pain of the end stages of the illness. He was planning to take LSD, and then to overdose on heroin. I said, “That sounds reasonable to me. However, you ought to plan it very carefully and prepare yourself, so you won’t get freaked out by the drugs.You should work with them in advance, so you will know how to stay conscious with them when the time comes.” He said, “When I get too weak to move around, I think that’s when I’ll do it.” I said, “Whatever you want—it’s your death.”

He went to light a cigarette at that point, and I noticed that his hands were shaking very badly. I thought, “Uh-oh, what am I doing? I’ve freaked him out by talking so casually about dying. Look how I’ve scared him.” So I said to him, “Hey, man, am I freaking you? Because I don’t want to do that.” He said, “Oh, no—you don’t understand! I have been looking and looking for the strength to die.You are the first person who’s come along who isn’t totally freaked in their vibration as soon as we get anywhere near the subject. You’re giving me the strength I need. I am just absolutely overwhelmed by it.”

He and I started to hang out together after that. We actually did a movie together, in which we talked about his dying. His hair had fallen out because of his medicine, but he always wore a long hippie wig. In the middle of the movie, I had him take off his wig; it really blew the audience apart.

It was an experience with that fellow that showed me just how easy it was for me to get sucked into the melodrama and denial around dying. One afternoon, he and I were driving along Highway 1 in California; if you’ve ever driven that highway, you know that it’s a very narrow, curvy road with great, long drops straight down to the ocean. I was driving along; he was tilted back in the passenger’s seat, and he and I were admiring the waves and the sky and the beauty of the day. At one point, we stopped for gas, and as we started to get back into the car the fellow said to me, “Hey—could I drive? It will probably be my last chance to do it.” Now that’s a pretty heavy one, right? Twenty-three-year-old guy, big investment in driving . . . So I said, “Sure, of course.” He got behind the wheel, and we started off. As we approached the first curve, I suddenly realized that he was too weak to turn the steering wheel, and that we were aimed straight for the cliff. So I casually reached over, and (all the time making believe that I wasn’t), I turned the wheel and steered us back onto the road. Then we careened off in another direction, and I very casually turned the wheel again.

I was sitting there, driving surreptitiously, when all of a sudden it dawned on me that I was involved in a vast conspiracy to deny the present moment. His anxiety was so deep, his clinging to who he thought he still was was so desperate, that he couldn’t surrender into who, in fact, he truly was at that moment—which was somebody who was too weak to drive. And I had been sucked right in! I had gone right along with the whole charade. So I said to him, “Hey, man, you know what? We’ve gotten into a kind of conspiracy here, pretending you’re still able to drive. At this point, you should be laying back and grooving, and I should be chauffeuring you around. We should just relax into what is, instead of trying to hold on to the past.”

I told him the story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones about the man and the strawberry.² Remember that one? A man was being chased by a tiger, and to escape he started to scramble over the edge of a cliff. But as he did so, he looked down and saw another tiger prowling around below him. So there he was, perched precariously on a tiny ledge of rock, a tiger above him and a tiger below. And as he clung there, between tiger and tiger, he noticed that growing right there in front of him was a wild strawberry plant, and that on it was one single red, ripe strawberry. The man plucked the strawberry and ate it. And the last line of the story is “How sweet it tasted!” So I said to the fellow, “Enjoy the strawberry of this moment.”

That whole experience, of slipping into the melodrama and denying the truth of the moment, showed me just how seductive the conspiracy is, and how easy it is to get caught in the denial process when we’re around someone who’s dying. Denial is the first of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of dying, and we can see why it would be the immediate reaction. Death is so inconsistent with who we think we are that we simply deny the possibility; you tell somebody they’re going to die, and the first thing they’ll say is, “No, not me. The diagnosis must be wrong.” After the denial comes anger: “Who’s done this to me?!” Then comes the third stage—bargaining to have it changed: “If I’m good and take my medicine, I’ll get better.” When it’s clear that the bargaining isn’t going to work, depression sets in. And finally, after the depression, comes acceptance.

However, I don’t think Elisabeth goes far enough. Acceptance isn’t the end point of the possibilities. Those five stages are all psychological states we go through when we’re facing death, and that’s still shy of a spiritual point of view. Acceptance can be merely saying, “Okay, I’m going to die. Right.” And in that are still the subtle clingings attached to the thought, “I am going to die.” A spiritual perspective takes us beyond acceptance. For someone on a spiritual path, death is a doorway, an opportunity, and all our practices are done to prepare us for that moment.

If we have adopted a reincarnational model for ourselves, we appreciate the fact that the thought we are thinking at the moment of death is a critical thought, because that thought influences what happens next. That is, whatever our desires at the moment of death, we go to the realms where those desires can be realized or fulfilled. It’s

Sunrise after All-Night Chant: Guru Purnima, the full moon of the guru, was celebrated with an evening slide show of Maharajji photos, followed by an all-night chant. Chanting throughout the night is a profound spiritual practice, and the deep inward journey is reflected in the faces of Ram Dass and the other participants as dawn arrives to end the ritual (see page 274).

summed up in that Gita passage I quoted earlier, where Krishna says, “Those who pray to the gods, go to the gods.” But the deva lokas and the hell lokas, all the different realms, turn out to be just more incarnations, just more forms. They may seem more interesting than the plane we’ve incarnated into this time, but they’re still just more veils between us and the Beloved.

If we want to avoid taking any more forms at all, the best thought we can have at the moment of death is no thought. At the moment of death, we all enter into the clear light—all of us. Each of us experiences Brahman, nirvana, the Void. But it takes a disciplined mind, a spiritually prepared mind, to resist the intense pull of the karmic forces—the powerful impulses of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that keep drawing us back into form. As soon as a strong-enough desire happens by, we turn away from the light to follow it, and we start to descend through the bardos, one by one, pulled by our karma, until we come to the plane where that desire can manifest or be fulfilled. But someone who is without any desires at the moment of death—someone who can say, “This is life.This is dying.This is death. Yes!”—that person grabs for nothing, and pushes nothing away. And so, through dying, that person becomes free of the Wheel of Birth and Death. Dying, that one is born into God.