Accepting Mortality

From the point of view of body and ego, there is no safe walk through life, and no one gets out alive. How you respond to the unsafeness of life will determine much of your character and life experience. Handle it well and the dangers to body and ego will leave your soul intact and perhaps even enhanced by a challenging incarnation. That’s the short version, but for those with the time and inclination to go deeper, there’s more: There is no safe walk through life. This card arose from a visit to my parents who live in the Bronx. My dad, who is just shy of 93, has moderately advanced dementia. Often he can seem pretty disassociated, but he also has flashes of high lucidity. While I was there, my mom, in a paternalistic voice, told him, “Now, take a safe walk to the bathroom.” My dad replied, “I can’t take a safe walk through life.” Sometimes people may sum up their central life theme in a single sentence. I’ll never forget the statement made to me by an inner city kid when I was the building security coordinator of a public high school in the South Bronx during [...]

“My Avatar betrays me. It is a mortal corporeal version 1.0 requiring constant, expensive upkeep. It carries me, like an arrow through linear time. It includes a brain that builds a simulacrum of this sensual world. I want to perfect my Avatar with mouse clicks, but it stubbornly adheres to source codes I cannot access. What an uneasy alliance I have with this quintessence of dust.” — Facebook status update by Jonathan Zap, 2010 At war with your bodily nature. Most of us are highly ambivalent about corporeal incarnation. We often resent the limits imposed on us by being incarnated in a physical body that can’t always do what we want when we want it. Many are at war with how their body looks, with aging, and corporeality in general. Like most wars, all concerned are harmed. The positive aspect is that this may be a propitious time to make your peace with being embodied. That’s the short version, if you have time for a bit more: Don’t judge yourself by conditioned body-image notions. You are much more than your corporeal body image, and your corporeal body is much more than its topographical reflection. That’s the short version, if you [...]

“My Avatar betrays me. It is a mortal corporeal version 1.0 requiring constant, expensive upkeep. It carries me, like an arrow through linear time. It includes a brain that builds a simulacrum of this sensual world. I want to perfect my Avatar with mouse clicks, but it stubbornly adheres to source codes I cannot access. What an uneasy alliance I have with this quintessence of dust.” — Facebook status update by Jonathan Zap, 2010 Don’t judge yourself by conditioned body-image notions. You are much more than your corporeal body image, and your corporeal body is much more than its topographical reflection. That’s the short version, if you have time for a bit more: Body Mountain There are many ways in which the body can be our mountain. Like climbing a mountain on a stormy night, corporeal incarnation presents us with one risky challenge after another. We live in a time where denial of the body has generated the polarized opposing view, the body-centric perspective. Neurological materialists believe that consciousness (if they admit such a thing exists at all) is merely an epiphenomenon, or secondary effect, of biochemical process in the brain. This unproven assumption is definitively contradicted by some of [...]

“Man must make his peace with his seasons or the gods will laugh at him.” – Mary Renault “The fates guide him who will; him who won’t, they drag.” — Ancient Greeks Each of the seasons of aging — youth, middle age, old age — has its hardships, trials, and rewards. Dorothy Canfield Fisher said,”One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it’s such a nice change from being young.” But we live in a culture that interprets aging as the slow emergency, something to resist at every moment. As an ad for an “anti-aging” cosmetic put it, “I don’t plan to grow old gracefully. I plan to fight it every inch of the way.” The seasons become your enemies when you fight them, your allies when you work with them. The seasons of life temper the soul, and people of average life spans end up going through all of them. Accept the season you are in with grace, learn and develop from all the hardships, trials and rewards of our mortal seasons.

“Our ideas about death define how we live our lives.” — Dag Hammarskjold The fear of death (in you or others) is a sometimes hidden, potent force affecting personality and behavior in strange and varied ways. To compensate for this fear, some will seek to control others, objects, money, the appearance of youth, etc., in vain, hollow attempts to stave off the fragility of corporeal incarnation. The fear of death can warp the perception of time, body, money, property, ambition, relationship, power and probably any other human attributes that can be named. Western culture is in denial of death and encourages us to think we can cheat it through dieting, plastic surgery, cosmetics, exercise, romantic adventures, exciting purchases, and so forth. The fear of death seems to be located in the ego, whereas the Self, aware that it did not begin at birth, perceives death as change, not annihilation. The ego may view death as an emergency, but for the Self it may be an emergence. Death is a guaranteed portal, an event horizon, an opportunity to step across the threshold. We cheat ourselves by viewing it negatively or denying its inexorable approach. Tolkien called the desire to avoid aging, [...]

“My Avatar betrays me. It is a mortal corporeal version 1.0 requiring constant, expensive upkeep. It carries me, like an arrow through linear time. It includes a brain that builds a simulacrum of this sensual world. I want to perfect my Avatar with mouse clicks, but it stubbornly adheres to source codes I cannot access. What an uneasy alliance I have with this quintessence of dust.” — Facebook status update by Jonathan Zap, 2010 Make friends with your animal nature. We are mammals and primates. Many have sought to make spiritual progress by repressing our animal nature. But we do not benefit by either repressing that nature or by being ruled by it. Make friends with your animal self, work with it, integrate it as a valid part of who you are. Regard it as neither alien to who you are, nor all of what you are. Most of us are highly ambivalent about corporeal incarnation. We often resent the limits imposed on us by being incarnated in a physical body that can’t always do what we want when we want. Many of us are at war with how our bodies look, with aging, and mortality in general. We may [...]

“My Avatar betrays me. It is a mortal corporeal version 1.0 requiring constant, expensive upkeep. It carries me, like an arrow through linear time. It includes a brain that builds a simulacrum of this sensual world. I want to perfect my Avatar with mouse clicks, but it stubbornly adheres to source codes I cannot access. What an uneasy alliance I have with this quintessence of dust.” — Facebook status update by Jonathan Zap, 2010 You are much more than your body — don’t judge yourself by its reflection. The positive aspect is that this may be a propitious time to work on that. That’s the short version, if you have time for a bit more: Don’t judge yourself by conditioned body-image notions. You are much more than your corporeal body image, and your corporeal body is much more than its topographical reflection. That’s the short version, if you have time for a bit more: Body Mountain There are many ways in which the body can be our mountain. Like climbing a mountain on a stormy night, corporeal incarnation presents us with one risky challenge after another. We live in a time where denial of the body has generated the polarized [...]

“My Avatar betrays me. It is a mortal corporeal version 1.0 requiring constant, expensive upkeep. It carries me, like an arrow through linear time. It includes a brain that builds a simulacrum of this sensual world. I want to perfect my Avatar with mouse clicks, but it stubbornly adheres to source codes I cannot access. What an uneasy alliance I have with this quintessence of dust.” — Facebook status update by Jonathan Zap, 2010 Are you a mortal body? An immortal spirit? Both? Core inner conflicts about our embodied nature often underlie troubled relationships, depression, anxiety and many other life problems that might seem to be about other things. That’s the short version, if you have time for a bit more: Body Mountain There are many ways in which the body can be our mountain. Like climbing a mountain on a stormy night, corporeal incarnation presents us with one risky challenge after another. We live in a time where denial of the body has generated the polarized opposing view, the body-centric perspective. Neurological materialists believe that consciousness (if they admit such a thing exists at all) is merely an epiphenomenon, or secondary effect, of biochemical process in the brain. This [...]

“Our ideas about death define how we live our lives.” – Dag Hammarskjold The fear of death (in you or others) is a sometimes hidden, potent force affecting personality and behavior in strange and varied ways. To compensate for this fear, some will seek to control others, objects, money, the appearance of youth, etc., in vain, hollow attempts to stave off the fragility of corporeal incarnation. The fear of death can warp the perception of time, body, money, property, ambition, relationship, power and probably any other human attributes that can be named. Western culture is in denial of death and encourages us to think we can cheat it through dieting, plastic surgery, cosmetics, exercise, romantic adventures, exciting purchases, and so forth. The fear of death seems to be located in the ego, whereas the self, aware that it did not begin at birth, perceives death as change, not annihilation. The ego may view death as an emergency, but for the self it may be an emergence. Death is a guaranteed portal, an event horizon, an opportunity to step across the threshold. We cheat ourselves by viewing it negatively or denying its inexorable approach. Tolkien called the desire to avoid aging, [...]

“Our ideas about death define how we live our lives.” — Dag Hammarskjold The fear of death (in you or others) is a sometimes hidden, potent force affecting personality and behavior in strange and varied ways. To compensate for this fear, some will seek to control others, objects, money, the appearance of youth, etc., in vain, hollow attempts to stave off the fragility of corporeal incarnation. The fear of death can warp the perception of time, body, money, property, ambition, relationship, power and probably any other human attributes that can be named. Western culture is in denial of death and encourages us to think we can cheat it through dieting, plastic surgery, cosmetics, exercise, romantic adventures, exciting purchases, and so forth. The fear of death seems to be located in the ego, whereas the Self, aware that it did not begin at birth, perceives death as change, not annihilation. The ego may view death as an emergency, but for the Self it may be an emergence. Death is a guaranteed portal, an event horizon, an opportunity to step across the threshold. We cheat ourselves by viewing it negatively or denying its inexorable approach. Tolkien called the desire to avoid aging, [...]