LIFE, DEATH AND COVID

I was asked yesterday what I thought the government should do about Covid, and I said I thought it should just let it happen. I'm not intending this as a political point, for I try to keep politics out of this blog. I'm intending it as a shamanic point, in the sense that the longer this lockdown goes on, the more I feel it is about fighting nature. This is something we do because it expresses the basic mindset we have of nature as something to be conquered, and in-so-doing we come to feel we are gods. Hubris and heartlessness. Buddhism calls this the realm of the 'jealous gods', who try to chop down the tree of life, or kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Sure, take precautions against disease. But 'disease' is also a form of life, and we need to come into relationship with it, we even need to find a way of expressing gratitude to coronavirus, because it is teaching us a lot. About becoming slower and more reflective and more connected to others. And less driven by work-as-an-end-in-itself, a strange obsession that dominates us for historico-religious reasons. (The Protestant Work Ethic.) Coronavirus is not an enemy.

 

And it teaches us about death. It has just the right level of fatality to get us to think and debate. Much lower, and we could ignore it like the flu. Much higher, and it really would be a deadly disease that requires drastic measures, including the sacrifice of large parts of the economy. As it is, it can be argued either way. In my opinion, the fear of Covid, which I experience as a soggy blanket enveloping us, but which I do not experience myself, is out of proportion. It highlights our attitude to death. And that is a huge subject.

 

And I think from a shamanic point of view, death is nothing to be afraid of. Life is the dream of Spirit, and like Spirit is ultimately unknowable. Death is no different. Life teaches us to trust death.

 

“And because I love this life. I know I shall love death as well." (Tagore). Death is to be cherished.

 

Life is a series of transitions, each of which brings us closer to death. In this sense, death is just life in another form. Those transitions may be very difficult at times, but ultimately there is new life in them, and our suffering is often our resistance to the change that life requires, and a clinging on to what is safe and known. Life can be ruthless in this sense, for its law is change and unfoldment. And we may look back on a period of change, thankful through gritted teeth for what it has made us, in the knowledge that we would never have volunteered for such change.

 

It is natural for humans to be afraid of death. We project into the future and we see it coming. And it means the end of all that we currently know. If you are a great Medicine person, then you are great precisely because you do not need to hang onto the known. And so Spirit can flow unobstructedly through you. And I guess we are all open to deep change to different degrees. It is a choice we can keep making. If we choose, we can back off from those wake-up calls that life regularly gives us. My Dad used to throw money at them and carry on as before.

 

But I think our culture has a particular difficulty with death, over and above the natural human fear. There is a pervasive philosophy – or rather, superstition - that only matter exists, of which consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon. And this means death is an extinction. It is a nihilist philosophy espoused by the unsophisticated, however many university degrees they may have.

 

A moment’s reflection shows us that there is something as weird as you can possibly imagine going on, because this reality around us, in all its depth, is a construct of the brain. The idea of the brain itself is also a construct. These constructs serve a purpose, they make a kind of sense to experience which is unique to each of us, but within which there is sufficient overlap for us to be able to communicate. It is staggering when you have those moments where you realise that yes, this reality is just a construct on a deep level. Those moments where life has slowed down enough for us to see these baffling things. Slowed down, maybe, in a lockdown kind of way.

 

See ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ by Oliver Sacks for an account of people with neurological injuries which resulted in the breakdown of some of the categories of reality that we take for granted.

 

So the more we can feel the contingent, constructed nature of our experience, the more evanescent it becomes, the less there is to hold onto, and the more death comes to be one more experience within that flow. Death and life are in a sense the same thing, they are just different experiences within the same flow of consciousness. Death does not have the limitations that we experience within life. For some, this is terrifying. For others, it is liberating. And for many of us, it is probably a bit of both.

 

I have just been reading Irvin Yalom’s memoirs, ‘Becoming Myself’. He is a famous, and leading, psychotherapist in the US who has written some great stories from the psychotherapy room. But he has this place I can’t go to, in which he treats death as an extinction, and dogmatically leads his patients away from other views because, he says, they are just false comfort. For me there is a soullessness in this approach, despite his wonderful and insightful humanity in other ways. Now this guy is certainly not unsophisticated, despite what I said earlier. So what is it about?

 

I view the idea that death is an extinction as a kind of soul loss. There is a brutality about it that I don’t think is informed by natural experience, which is that Life and Spirit are ultimately benign. We are taken care of, there is some kind of continuity after death, even though we don’t know, and probably can’t know, what that is. In his 1959 Freeman interview with the BBC (on Youtube, which I highly recommend), Jung says that his elderly clients do not have dreams that suggest an extinction. Rather, they suggest life continuing. As Jung says, this does not ‘prove’ that there is life after death. But, as he continues, the correct way to live is according to nature, and nature does not behave as though there is an extinction. I call this sound shamanic reasoning!

 

In Yalom’s case, he grew up poor and Jewish in New York, and he has never wanted to talk about what happened to his European relatives in the Holocaust, all of whom were exterminated. After the Shoah, for many, God no longer existed. I think there is something very bleak driving him under his ‘rationalist’ philosophy. I think a one-sided rationalism, which so characterises our culture, is a kind of soul loss.

 

Nowadays we have death as extinction. Before that, we had death as the threat of eternal hell. What an appalling, perverted thought that is. What a crude, heartless way of controlling people. That thought, death-as-grim-reaper, is still within us, alongside the other image of death-as-extinction. For really these are just images of something we know nothing about. All this makes for an confused and exaggerated fear of death, that is fuelling our collective response to Covid. Death for many of us is such an appalling idea, that advocating an acceptance of the low Covid fatality rate is seen as callous, of which I have been accused a number of times on FB. Someone always wheels that one out when I talk about changing our relationship to Covid.

 

So I think Covid is an opportunity to reflect not just on how we live – and there seems to be a collective level of reflection on that occurring – but also on our attitude to death, and I have not seen much of that. And that is maybe because Covid has become so loaded with fear for many people that it is difficult to speak of these things in public.