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The Home of Evolutioneers

The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 21: The Sweet Perfume of Decaying Flesh

Yesterday I remarked to a friend just how extraordinary it is to experience this mysterious play of life. For years, the very fact of being incarnated struck me as a problem. An aching, empty feeling colored much of my youth. Over time, this emptiness has faded, revealing a luminous ground that eternally supports me. I shared with her my puzzlement over when it happened, when life stopped being a problem. Somehow during years of torment and separation, at times painfully disconnected from the Truth, an alchemical process brewed in me. I kept my trust in that stubborn internal flame, and in turn the perception of life as a problem loosened its grip. Bit by bit, the fire of truth incinerated my delusion, seared away my belief in problems. Pleasure and pain certainly still exist—I get lustful, furious, and terrified, crave easy feelings and comfortable things—yet life has ceased to be the problem it once was. Today, life is more like a wild garden in full blossom, a place to be explored. In this garden lives a tapestry of freshly sprouted wildflowers to tend to; velvety saffron roses to savor, mindful, of course of their sharp thorns; a craggy yet sturdy oak tree to lean against; gnarly vines to get tangled in; thick ochre mud to squish into without getting stuck; and crispy leaves falling from a dying Japanese maple, foreshadowing my eventual return back to the earth. I inevitably encounter grief and discomfort as I explore the obscure and prickly recesses of the garden of my life, yet to the degree that I resist these distasteful feelings (or seek the yummy ones), only then does life become a problem. Straddling East and West The Divine beckoned me at an early age, but it took many years before I turned inward to see who called. At five years old, I tugged for my mother’s attention as she sat serenely, eyes closed, on a black zafu in her bedroom in Honolulu, Hawaii. She fruitlessly attempted to be a serious Zen student by day and a corporate wife by night. When I was six my parents gave up trying to change each other and got divorced. At seven my older sister and I trekked to Northern California with our mother to live in a Christian monastery that housed severely abused foster children. This year was laden with a mixture of grace and darkness. We lived on one hundred acres of rolling apple orchards, had free rein to ride the horses of the house, and attended contemplative chapel services that drew on teachings from both Jesus and Lao Tzu. Yet we were regularly hit with ping pong paddles, rulers, and the massive, beet red hands of a domineering man, the head of the community. This paradoxical mosaic, a crash course in freedom and fear, bewildered me. At eight we were back in Hawaii. I was living in Kula, Maui with my mother and sister in a funky, crimson house with a curvy metal roof the color of spinach. One afternoon I sauntered home from school after a tough day of third grade. A tawny horse grazed in its pasture down the street from our house and the sight of its graceful swooshing tail soothed me. The brisk Kula wind felt delicious after years of humid Honolulu weather. As I approached my home, though, animal howling and piercing screams boiled from our living room. These untamed sounds rode on a background of wild tribal drumming and some bizarre synthesizer. As I approached the driveway, I saw the walls of our rickety abode actually shaking, vibrating as if a tractor were plowing the shaggy carpets of my safe haven. We lived on a main thoroughfare to Haleakala Crater, and my cheeks flushed with nervous blood as I looked around to see if anyone else was witnessing this ghastly sight. Luckily, the coast was clear, so I crept up to the front door and, crouching like a secret agent, peered into the old-fashioned keyhole. A group of naked people wearing blindfolds leapt about my humble living room—jumping, shouting, dancing, and pounding cushions on the floor. The men had long hair and scraggly beards, and the women undulated with wild abandon. I shuddered with disgust and sprinted to the backyard to wait out this fantastic affair. Huddling beneath a banana tree I briefly considered running away from home, but instead when the sounds subsided I sulked back to the house. Ten years later I would revisit and embrace this scene, which I came to understand as an invocational and cathartic meditation called "Dynamic.” I would even experience its liberating effects on my conditioned and often constricted body, mind, and soul, but that day I was simply horrified that my mom was not "normal." At nine years old my mother announced that she was packing her bags and moving to India in search of enlightenment. When given an option, my sister and I instead chose the straight and narrow path, a life with my highly successful father that included financial security, Republican values, and Honolulu’s finest elite college preparatory academy. For the next seven years I straddled those two worlds: my father a CEO of a large Hawaiian company, and my mother clad in brilliant orange flowing robes, a dedicated devotee of an Indian guru. While my father made a six-figure income and became a distinguished public figure, my mother gave away her belongings and took on a new Sanskrit name. Our home hosted Hawaii’s top business and political leaders, while our summer and Christmas vacations were spent at the controversial ranch in Oregon — Rajneeshpuram — a utopian oasis for my fledgling hungry soul. I was raised in a world of contrasts and paradox. As a freshman in high school I became accustomed to, yet increasingly sickened by the affluent and glamorous scene that surrounded me: bronzed waifs with bulimia; sixteen year-olds driving Porsches and BMW’s; and classmates being groomed for Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. I felt insignificant and dumpy. I fought back by wearing black spray-painted hightops with the names of perverse punk bands that I pretended to like written all over them. A shaven head, clove cigarettes, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood were my symbols of rebellion. I used a fake ID to hang out at the trendy punk club on the Waikiki strip, and guzzled untold quantities of Vodka and Peppermint Schnapps to dull the anguish and boost my fragile confidence. By this time it had become clear that something essential was missing in my life. An aching inner hole had opened onto abysmal depths that I could no longer ignore. I endured that excruciating ache for the next four years, until one fateful night while walking Lanikai beach in a storm, I shouted to an unsuspecting classmate, “I KNOW there is more to life than this, I just know it's out there! I want to discover love.” Death and Rebirth on Holy Soil Following in my mother's footsteps, at eighteen I traveled to India to be with Osho (previously known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). One month after graduating from high school I took sannyas, formally becoming Osho’s devotee. Maitreya, an old Indian disciple with gentle eyes and wiry silver hair, presided over the ceremony. Once a figure in Indian government, he was said to be enlightened and was amongst Osho’s first sannyasins. He presented a Sanskrit name to me, symbolizing rebirth into a new life of a devoted seeker. For the first time in my life the gaping hole in me was filled. The day after this momentous occasion Maitreya “left his body” as the Indians say. His was the first dead body I ever witnessed. As his corpse lay on a bamboo and canvas stretcher, adorned with a blanket of rose petals, throngs of devotees blissfully swayed around him. Tambourines, bongo drums, guitars, bamboo flutes, and lustrous voices filled the city block, as hundreds paraded to the nearby burning ghats where this wise man would soon be transformed into a pile of ashes. I danced late into the hazy Indian dusk in a state of rapturous abandon as the sweet smell of death brought life even closer. In a moment’s pause, I reflected back to only one month before when I sat amongst fashionably dressed teens in the center quad of my high school. I had finally come home. It was on this ancient soil that I first experienced the fullness of life, tasting true blessedness. I would sometimes walk the pearly marble path next to the tented Buddha hall alone, at night during music group. The trees that surrounded the hall had tiny sparkling lights in them and when it rained the path turned a twinkling, leprechaun green with their reflection. As I walked along the path late one night—shimmering emerald footsteps skipping to the beat of my favorite love song to the Beloved—I remember sensing that this was it, I was for once complete. Sitting at the feet of my master, I experienced waves of devotional ecstasy. I wept. I laughed. I fell apart and reassembled myself over and over during my three years in India. My life revolved solely around awakening. I slept on a narrow coconut fiber mat in the living room of our modest flat. A piece of woven cloth posed as a door. At dawn I would sit on the balcony of our minty green apartment building contemplating the river and the burning ghats beneath me. Dogs and goats wandered the banks, as women young and old squatted to scrub their laundry against jumbo rocks. Sometimes Indian families would stay up all night in the muggy Pune air, chanting to their deceased beloved whose body lay aflame on the funeral pyre. The freshly cleaned laundry that I hung on my balcony to dry inevitably reeked of human remains after an all-night burning. The presence of death enlivened me, though, it was a call to be ever more alive in this very moment. As my peers attended some of the most prestigious colleges in the United States—getting drunk, laid, and knowledgeable—I sat along the river in India smelling the foul scent of bodies being burned. Yet it all seemed so completely ordinary. Eventually, however, the West beckoned me home with my growing yearning to get a formal education. I also wanted to re-enter “the world” as we said in the ashram, and test out my new learnings, to see whether I could be a Buddha outside the Buddha-field Osho had created. The next few years brought difficult tests, for my newfound happiness proved fragile outside the liberating and protected space of the ashram. Chasing after an agonizing love affair, I traveled to Boulder, Colorado where I quickly fell into a depressed stupor. At my lowest point, I tromped to work in the slushy Boulder snow, briefly contemplating throwing myself in front of by a passing car. I desperately wanted the pain to end. As high as I had flown in India was how low I plummeted when I couldn’t find the source of truth within me. The fact that I had tasted absolute fulfillment made the misery even more bitter. For several years I traveled back and forth between India and the United States, in an arduous attempt to embody that which I had discovered in India, amidst the trappings, seductions, and anguish of North American culture. At twenty-one I once again entered the sober world of academia, struggling to find meaning and spiritual community on the Berkeley campus. Over the next decade I slowly learned to embrace both East and West. And now I find myself to be an amalgamation of sorts, a distinctly spiced soup flavored with the curried wisdom of Eastern spiritual traditions, and the tart, clever intellect of the Western mind. The broth of this soup is textured both with teachings on enlightenment and strategies to achieve worldly goals. The vegetables in the soup are a savory mix of contrasting values and experiences: poverty and affluence, service and success, inner riches and material wealth, and being nobody as well as being somebody. The gifts from East and West are leavened, kneaded, and baked within me, and my service in the world rises out of the nourishment I have received. In embodying these contrasting poles of existence, again and again I’ve contemplated death. I have been haunted by it in strange but somehow reassuring ways. Death is not just a physical process but also applies to psychological and spiritual change. It reminds me of the transience of all forms and all ways of being. Leaping from one mode of existence into another — from an ashram to a university, from single life to marriage, from one country to another — I am asked to die to the old self I so treasure. And thus, as I have journeyed forward, I attempt to embrace each new miniature death more amicably, even joyfully. Death on My Shoulder Perhaps it is brought on by the blazing mountain air that envelops our secluded dwelling miles above the Silicon Valley, or perhaps it is due to the fact that I am not in school, but the summertime often feels like an extended meditation retreat. It is something akin to an accelerated independent learning course on a variety of contemplative topics. I choose the weekly lessons, or rather they choose me. Such was the case one parched afternoon when I delved deeper into the topic of death. I was mired in personal suffering; I had just become engaged and was flooded with panic and doubt about getting married and relinquishing the promise of monastic life once and for all. My sister gave me a tape set by Joan Halifax called "Being With Dying.” For the following week I listened to these tapes for the better part of my waking hours. The Buddhist teachings on death transformed the poison of my intense suffering into food for awakening. I lived with death on my shoulder, remembering moment to moment the impermanence of life and the inevitable reaper that awaits at any instant. An urgency brewed in me. I poured over a Tricycle magazine issue on death, eating it with an appetite of one facing her demise. I was awed by the photos of the charnel grounds in Nepal, the spot where Tibetans hold sky funerals in which bodies are chopped from head to toe and left for frenzied vultures to devour. The thought of my body being chopped up after death and fed to these wild birds struck a deep chord that illuminated my attachment to this vessel of my body. The following week my fiancé and I drove to Berkeley one Friday afternoon to sit in satsang (a gathering in the name of truth) with the Advaita Vedanta teacher Isaac Shapiro. During the two hour sojourn, we were fighting about something trivial that seemed quite important at the time. At one point I said to him, “You know we could die any moment.” Ten minutes later as we rolled into Berkeley on the Warren Freeway, traffic began to slow. And then like a surreal scene out of a movie, two teenage boys with blood-strewn faces came staggering into traffic. They were dressed in hip baggy clothes and looked to be about seventeen. Their arms flailed while they moaned and shrieked as if to both God and those of us in traffic, “Somebody HELP!” My heart rate quickened as we pulled off the road and saw an overturned car with a limp young boy lying in a pool of blood on the pavement beside it. He looked about the same age as his bewildered friends. Crouched over the body, a fourth young man begged his unconscious friend, “Hold on! Don't give up, Cousin!” A group of onlookers wandered about the scene aimlessly, asking those awkward but somehow reassuring questions that give a sense of purpose in such moments: “Have you called 911? Do you know if he’s breathing? Should we try CPR? No, he’s bleeding too much. Did somebody take his pulse?” The scene felt choreographed, as if I would peer behind the eucalyptus tree and see a camera crew and makeup team. “Cut!” But this was the real thing. We approached the young man lying on the pavement and knelt on either side of him. I lamely lay my black knit sweater over his back as if to protect him from the chaotic energies that encircled him. I cradled his left hand which twitched ever so slightly. I did not know if he would make it, so I silently supported whichever direction he needed to move—toward life or toward death. Whatever spiritual practice I had done up to this point was all I had to draw on: I prayed, I meditated, I opened my heart and bathed him in love as best I knew how. My mind hovered in the delicate quiet between life and death. I was humbly receiving a teaching on death by this kid whom I only knew as Cousin. I gazed up from the commotion at the hills above the freeway where my grandfather lives. He is ninety-one years old and bursting with aliveness. An old man running towards life, a young boy hurtling towards death. Strange. The hand I was holding stopped moving. Sirens announced the arrival of officials upon the scene. We were told to move away if we were not witnesses. Before leaving I approached each of the three young men who were wandering about the freeway. Perhaps on another occasion I would be intimidated by their burly youthful presence, but that day all I wanted was to hug them, to hold each weeping stranger as they spun with shock. I cradled each young man, and we both held on to each other tightly as the universality of grief was palpable. As we walked back toward our car I paused and looked again at Cousin on the pavement. Now he was covered with a large turquoise tarp. I silently said goodbye and wished him a most peaceful journey. Later that night while sitting in satsang, I peered down at my hands. They were crusted with dried blood. Death flirts with me each morning as I say farewell to my husband. I savor the moment for I know this could be our last meeting in the flesh. It hovers near as I traverse the steep mountain roads surrounding our house in the blackness of night. The impermanence of life shatters my self-image when I gaze into the mirror and see the rotting corpse that my body will one day become. As I cling to my position during an argument, wrangling to hold onto my opinion, a micro-death occurs when I instantaneously let go. In that moment I fall into the void, landing splat in the stark here and now. The presence of death presses in on me, shaking loose and revealing my terror of the ultimate unknown. At the same time, death is a constant reminder of the flowing fullness of being in a body, alive in this moment. Embracing the miniature deaths of each moment has subtly transformed my spiritual journey. Once a frenzied quest, it is now more of a gentle unwrapping. The tangles of constriction around my soul are gradually loosening, so that Being shines through with greater ease and delight. I would now describe my search for God as an inward dwelling, a sweet and constant deepening into who I actually am. The truth of me arises in the dynamic space between form and formlessness, body and spirit, life and death. * * * * Vipassana holds a master's degree in Counseling Psychology and is pursuing her Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where she researches the body-self relationship in contemporary female mystics, teaches a course on women's spirituality, and works as a psychological intern. * * * * If you would like to purchase the Radical Spirit book from which this essay was drawn, please email us at manage@universespirit.org and we will email you back details. Every week we will post another article on generation X spirituality from the book Radical Spirit. For more articles, and more about Evolution Spirituality and who we are, go to integrativespirituality.org .

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