A Different Perspective on Suicide

There is nothing wrong with suicide.  You read that correctly.  Keep breathing. 

We live in a society where saying that suicide is acceptable is like saying that the moon is made of cheese. 

Robin Williams killed himself.  

He has been called a coward, his death has been blamed on depression, or addiction, and all his potential (and personal) reasons for ending his life are constructed in negative terms, like he broke the rules, like we, the living, lost control of his life.  

We assume that we have the right to pronounce a judgment: that he made the wrong choice, that it was a mistake, a momentary loss of reason that could have been prevented.

When a family and intimate friends lose a loved one, there is hardship and there is pain, there is a long period of mourning, a personal, living, struggle to understand, to find peace with the loss. 

When a society loses someone who makes them laugh, who entertains them, who they did not know personally, we might do well to look at our own problem, celebrity worship, and a mentally deranged idea that we somehow have a special and intimate connection with, and ownership over, people who do not even know who we are. 

Robin Williams had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  Most people who commit suicide have a serious physical or mental illness, some reason to no longer want to wake up and see the sunrise or feel a lovers embrace.  The things that make life worth living, no longer do.  What kind of society are we living in when someone is not allowed to make a decision not to go on living when they will be subjecting themselves, and their friends and family, to a long, drawn-out, degenerative illness, as their own life becomes more and more difficult to live?  

I know something about suicide.  My mother died by her own hand, by drinking a glass of water with a deadly dose of powdered phenobarbital dissolved in it.  She did this while I was holding her hand, while my little brother and I sat next to her, keeping her company and telling her how much we loved her. 

To watch my mother drink that cup of water, that would not nourish life, but would end it, was to witness the most courageous act that has ever been performed in my company. 

Have you ever been standing at a bus-stop or subway platform, and felt the air move as this large machine approaches, and think, I could just step in front of it?  Along with that thought, when I’ve had it, was always this immediate sense of dread or revulsion, an absolute feeling of “no-way, I want to live.” I would immediately move backwards, even if I was already a yard from the danger zone, I would make sure I was safe. 

The will to live is not something easy to surmount.  Killing yourself is not an easy task.  For a person with the will to live, pointing a gun at your own head is going to feel very unnatural.  If you’ve ever gone out shooting and someone next to you holding a gun starts to turn toward you, you get very uncomfortable, and probably tell them they should take a gun safety class, tell them to turn their ass around, and get that gun pointed in the opposite direction. 

In our society there is a prohibition against suicide, they lock you up if you try it, you are punished, stigmatized, people think you are sick.  My life, someone else tells me, belongs to them.  I don’t own my own life.  

I imagine the prohibition against suicide leads to more suicides than it prevents.  Do I know this to be a fact?  No.  But the suicide rate in the United States is certainly higher than it is in, say, Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, where my mother, brother, and I were able to go so that mom could be freed from her suffering and sickness.  

In a society where suicide is made available, in a compassionate way, maybe it becomes less appealing.  If my life was mine, maybe I would care more about it.  That feeling on the subway platform would return, having death right there, would make me pull back, remind me that I do want to live another day, to witness the great mystery of living.

Who am I to say that Robin Williams shouldn’t have killed himself?  I can’t even say that my own mother shouldn’t have killed herself.  It was her decision.  It was her life.  It was her suffering.  I could only witness, be there, be present, be a grown-up.  For any of us to judge someone for taking their own life demands an enormous amount of immaturity on our part, and is a symptom of what a society of emotional wimps we are.  

To kill oneself is to go against the fundamental instinct of life, it is to overcome the will to live.  If someone takes this step we should feel compassion for them, understand that their suffering may be beyond our comprehension, and understand that they may have made the best decision for them, and maybe even for their family and society. 

Of course we should offer mental health care to all our citizens, it should be a part of any reasonable universal health-care plan, and we should try and prevent and treat depression and other mental illness (suffering might be a better word for illness) and many of the other drivers of suicide, addiction, and violence. 

We also need to look at the stigma against suicide in our society, and ask ourselves whether what we are really trying to avoid looking at is what a miserable society it is that has to command its members to go on living, and to prohibit something that should be naturally unappealing, except in cases that those of us who still have the will to live might not be able to understand.      

There was no blood on the moon tonight.

There was no blood on the moon tonight. The moon was a sun. The total lunar eclipse, April 15^th, 2014, was a magical thing. A long performance, that made me aware of just how big this earth is.  We have a very long shadow.  How glorious, what a universe to behold.  Yet we forget how small the universe really is, with all its’ possible multiple dimensions, or its’ so called worm-holes, or mysteries, and imaginings.  

We’ve zoomed so far back in time trying to find out how it all began, made our projection of the totality of things so huge, so immensely beyond our mortal comprehension, that we’ve forgotten where we are, the only place there is in fact, for a human being to be. Right here.  Right now.  Where else is there?  Sure we’ve launched ourselves into space, but we were earthlings in space.  It wasn’t exactly outer space, nowhere even close to the edge of the sun’s orbit.  We haven’t left the neighborhood.  We are in orbit down here, and we are in orbit out there.  A few dozen earthlings went to space.  How nice.  Nothing like a little field trip to fuel the imagination and take us a little further out, into our science fiction adventure in forgetting our nature. 

What does it mean for earthlings to launch themselves off their life support system, their source of life, their home?  Can there be any rational explanation for it, or does it lead a clear thinking person to believe that these astronauts and their admirers, these imaginatively deluded, self-identified space colonizers, have forgotten that they are the earth? 

We are not separate from this planet, well, at least not according to evolutionary theory.  Here we are, billions of years in the making, uniquely suited to life on this planet, in this solar system, breathing this air, in this peculiar and unique atmosphere.  Really, where do we think we’re going? 

We can watch a performance like the moon, in the shadow of our home, getting comfortable in the darkness, turning off all the lights.  Even when our earth shadow turns off the lights on the moon, which turns our big night-light in the sky way down, one could still have a snack, in the faint glow of the golden orb in the night sky.  Tonight it was like the sun, about to set on the horizon, all soft orange and glowing, and it’s the moon, doing it’s same old thing, but longer, endlessly held there in a faint glow of perfect roundness, in our shadow.  On and on, held in our view, moving slowly nowhere.  Where did we lose track of our place in the solar system, passengers on this orbiting planet, full of blood, wet with the tides of the moon?

They call it a blood moon, but we are the bloody ones.  We are the one’s naming things, giving meaning to things, making up explanations for the universe, creating alternative universes with our imaginations, in concert with our inventions.  Telescopes: to take us further away from here and now, showing us images of a past we’ve convinced ourselves is comprehensible to us.  But we are always here, now, whether we are seeing backwards or projecting forwards, we can only ever do it from here, inside our minds.  We think we are the inventors, but we are inventions of the earth, conscious creators, in a little holding pattern of mental projection.  Someday if we return to sanity, we might even call it what it is, a type of collective psychosis.  But it’s an interesting adventure anyhow, in the light of the moon, halfway out of the shadow of our mother planet, reflecting brightly the light of our energetic seed, sunlight, as we orbit just so.  We think we are going somewhere, but we’ll always be now here, which means we are going nowhere. 

Where else is there? 

Here, now, then, there.

Two weeks ago I was laying on my belly in a little guest-room in Hawaii, turning right to look out at the broad pacific ocean.  I'm addicted to distraction.  The sound of notification chimes from my phone. I ignore it, but am tempted.  I'm constantly drawn back into Facebook, as though pulled, from a physical aloneness, into the digital public square.  There must be peers there, yes, but is it an illusion of togetherness? We seem to move ever so imperceptibly toward this falsity of companionship.  Where are these people? The implicit suggestion of the photographs and posts is that we are busy living, thriving, in a real world.  Yet, here we are, day after day, in the same digital sphere, called back, like salmon returning to our birthplace, to spawn.  If it's so real, so deep, so satisfying, so present, why are we sitting with our faces attached to a screen, updating this moment into a public journal; as if to say to each other "Hello!?" "Greetings!"  Here I am.  Living.  Here I am, I exist. The public square, the village, evaporated into ethereal digitation.

Collateral Damage and the 2nd Anniversary of My Mother's Suicide.

Ooh, how spicy are the consequences of public display in the blogosphere.  An angry ex.  A Jennlapse.   But at least the lunatic is writing again.  Yes, a few days ago we wrote the previous post, and a recent breakup had brought up feelings about that unattainable gal from Long Island that seems to always pop up on the periphery under circumstances of uncertainty.  Then a mysterious "friend" sent a link to that post to my beautiful ex-girlfriend here in Mountain town.  A sweet girl, a tumultuous relationship, another addiction that was nearly impossible to give up.  Are we just addicted to quitting?

For whatever reason, I've been conditioned to write about things that might be better kept private on this here blog that nobody reads.  And I'm glad to be back online.

So that brings us to the two year anniversary of Take off day.  I'm pretty sure that two years ago today, my brother, my mother, and I, were in Zurich.  When my brother and I left Switzerland, there were only two of the original traveling party still alive.  My mother had chosen to end her life, with dignity, grace, and steadfast bravery.  Scroll down for a couple years, (and I haven't written much the last few years), and you'll probably find a post about my mother's exit from her body bag.  I didn't keep that a secret either.  So, what you see is what you get.

Adios Mom.

FD  

Missing the Boat

Aloha, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and Jenn.  Boy did I ever not get this, it took me so long to understand.  Here I was, posting this picture, with this quote, on the Open Mind Project Facebook page, as though I had some understanding of it, or could have any claim to living up to it.  How very far from the truth.  Alas, I am one who has been guilty of loving in the least freedom giving sense.  It is the way I loved the girl I have never been able to forget about, but that I most certainly drove further from my heart, than her great geographic distance already had her placed.

I had to be loved with that needy desperation to understand how impossible and destructive of real love, it is to be in relationship with that need.  If "she," variously called the grouse, Jenn, the muse, the madness, etc, the one I never could quite forget about, ever did love me, I must have destroyed it early on.

But, does that mean that the love is gone?  I don't think so.  The end of love is the beginning of freedom.  The end of love is only an illusion, a mirage of loss.  Love never ends, just like nothing, in the real sense, ever ends.  Nothing is permanent, no life, no love, no human being, nothing mortal, alive, existent.  But Nothing, The Nothing, is itself permanent, in the sense of being the vessel of all existence.  The Great Nothing, the Void, Sunyata, or Emptiness, the space in which all matter exists, is the womb of all creation.  Just as the self is an illusion, in that no matter how deeply we look into our "selves" we, upon honest reflection, are likely to find no permanent, enduring self, a being separate from the consciousness which is experiencing and discerning life through it's limited scope of understanding, so to are disconnectedness, or ultimately impermanence, just an illusion, because in our most certain demise, our individual concepts of our "selves" will pass away, and what endures is the continuing thread of existence, whole, unified, and undifferentiated by the self-centered consciousness of I.  And so, we are always all in this together, infinite little miracles, particles of existence, integrally laced into the larger whole, which is itself at home in the vast emptiness that is the womb of everything.

Real Love, like Real God, or any other expression of that essence of beauty, truth, permanence, Importance, which we cannot express in our limited language, or as Anselm defined it: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," cannot end.  Nor can it ever be effectively expressed by a need, a desperation, a self-centered feeling of lack, which seeks some external stamp of approval to fill it.  That love, which expresses itself as need, is also an illusory form of love, because it stems from an illusory self, a self that feels it needs something to make it complete.  So, instead of sending "her" another email, with this picture along with an apology for all the neediness, and self-centered illusion of love that I have been lambasting her with the last 15 years (including the last 3, which have consisted of a persistent effort to "leave that girl alone"), I wrote a blog post, in some hope (hopefully not a need) that she might find me pleased with her freedom, her smile, and happiness, if only glimpsed for a moment, in a glance at her Facebook page, and the view from her seat in the western wilderness. 

Good evening friends,

Franklin Delanor. 

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A Message from Father Christmas

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages! This is the big white man with the long white beard, and the red jacket; the one who knows whether you are awake or asleep, who knows whether you’ve been good or bad, the one with all the Hoh, Hoh, Hoh’s!  

I’m the one who comes to your home in the night, the one you leave offerings for, milk of the holy cow, and sweet, tasty, morsels of cookie manna from ovens.  You know what I like, and you aim to please me so that I shall reward you in the hereafter-coming year.  That’s right, I’m Santa Clause, most people call me Santa, but just try moving that n to the end.  You can see my Santa Claws.  With just the move of that one letter, my letters transform into the name of that oft disparaged nemesis of the being who’s birth I come to remind you to celebrate!  Satan?  No, I’m Father Christmas.  But you won’t find me in the Bible, nor will you find me in the North Pole. 

Your parents, at some point, will probably fill you in on the fact that I’m not real, if you don’t figure it out for yourself.  But it’s pretty amazing, considering how many pictures there are of me everywhere, or simply how many car commercials I show up in, that so many adults seem to know that I’m not real.  

Well, they tell you I’m not real, but so many of you still leave me milk and cookies, so many of you bring your children to sit in my lap.  What are you trying to do to yourselves?  

Are you trying to train yourselves to believe in a white bearded being who flies through the clouds, surrounded by cherubs, I mean elves, and judges your actions and either punishes you with coal or no presents, or rewards you with stuff? 

I’m just curious.  This is a pretty incredible cultural phenomenon, in case you haven’t noticed.  Just listen to all the Christmas music on the radio, see all those Jesus stories on TV, look at the big Christmas tree in Washington D.C., how about CNN, FOX News, and other news outlets, showing one Christmas related story after another?  Christmas is a Christian Holiday, in case you didn’t know.  Have you noted my remarkable resemblance to Jesus’s father, as depicted by Michelangelo, one of the first images of God in a simple Google search for God? 
Weird, right? 

Now go shopping, I command thee.   

    

 

It's Not the End of the World

         Since Dec. 21st, 2012, is upon us, and since I can’t seem to get away from advertisements for End of the World celebrations in Aspen, I must speak up and defend my consciousness from this assault.  I’m sorry to be the bearer of good news, but I must inform you, despite your highest nihilistic hopes, it’s NOT the end of the world.  Belly Up, our little local music venue, is having an “End of the World Party.”  There are lots of “End of the World” parties on this day of “planetary alignment.”  There are rumors of a “cosmic shift,” or a “radical transformation.” But rumors of some predicted Mayan apocalypse are an insult to our archeological and anthropological education.  The mainstream seems to be missing the information boat, the one carrying the facts, rather than the imaginings.   

         One fact is, the Mayan’s don’t have an apocalyptic cosmology.  We do.  The Mayan astrologers and priests, who created this calendar that we have interpreted as heralding the end of the world on the equivalent day in our own calendar, Dec. 21st, 2012, did not see the end of this particular period of time as being the End Times, but just the beginning of a new B’ak’tun.  A B’ak’tun, it turns out, is approximately 394 of our years long.  20 B’ak’tun’s make a Piktun.  In the equivalent of our calendar year, October, 13th, 4772, (two thousand seven hundred and sixty years from now) 20 B’ak’tun’s will have passed, and the Mayan calendar will go to the next Piktun.  Hopefully we will have reset our own calendar by then, and will have based our new calendar’s start date on something more hopeful than the supposed birth of a nice young man who got crucified for nothing more than speaking his mind.  Either way, you can discern, from these few simple facts, that the Mayans did not plan for the world to end this Friday.   This is not the end of the Mayan calendar, it is the end of one particular measurement tool within the Mayan calendar, and the beginning of another.  

       We have taken a tiny sliver of out-of-context information about an ancient Mesoamerican belief system and filtered it through our conditioned western lens.  As Sandra Noble, director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, stated: “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.”  That Dec., 21st, 2012, heralds a doomsday scenario or a cosmic shift, she calls, “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”  Unfortunately ideas have power, and our psychology as humans is not so impermeable as to be unaffected by these types of false beliefs.  

         These beliefs, which continue to bombard our consciousness with the idea that a deity is counting the days till “He” comes down and ends everything around us, and either punishes or rewards us individually, for eternity, depending (like Santa Clause) upon whether we’ve been naughty or nice, are not helping us create a better world.  Since our minds have been conditioned for centuries with this idea about the coming apocalypse, about the end times and a judgment day, the collective consciousness of the so called “civilized world” is littered with this thinking.  When another story comes along that fits nicely into this widespread narrative, it is very difficult for even “free thinkers” to tell the true from the false.   

           Every time one of us talks about the coming “cosmic shift,” or the “transformation,” or “the End of the World,” we are actually reinforcing a narrative, which paradoxically serves to prohibit the very “cosmic shift” or “transformation” that we are hoping for.  When we are dealing with an unsustainable economic system, climate change, deforestation, nuclear weapons, nationalism, religious divisions, and other perpetuated ways of thinking that create violence and oppression, it seems normal that humans would hope for a transformation of their thinking that would liberate them from this problematic reality.  But the belief in some external change-maker keeps us psychologically limited, whether consciously or unconsciously, from actually creating the change we hope for.  Will belief in an externally created utopia help motivate us to make real changes which might create a more utopian world?  Or if the end is coming, then what is the point in making the changes we see as necessary around us?  Beliefs in a coming end, or transformation, create a paralyzing layer in our consciousness hindering us from making changes that might help us begin to build a better world.  Next time somebody tells you the end is coming, try telling them that, no, it’s not.  Have a very Merry It’s Not the End of the World Party.

The Facts of Life

Seriously, isn't it about Tebow Time?

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Mitt Romney on Beliefs

A Dog Sand and Beach

Begining with a haiku? Sure.

Reflections on blue
Green water of Pacific
A dog, sand, and beach

Why start with a haiku? To calm the not calm maybe. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you are a nut. I just had another breakup, maybe the most abrupt and dramatic of my career. I'm left with questions about my sabatoging of my own relationships. The mind can be a terrible device for calamity creation. My own mind, which has its positive characteristics, seems a bit too good at picking out what is wrong with any given situation, and then focusing on it. This mental twist may be good for sociological study, but it is not beneficial for cultivating relationships. Aloha.

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More Perspective

Airport Update

Gracious me! It's been a long time brothers and sisters. I'm at the Denver Airport, sitting at the Woody Creek Bakery and Cafe, another seemingly Aspen Valley spun business expanding into the exosphere. I'm sweating profusely. Miles, a young Army reservist who was sitting on the plane next to me on the Aspen to Denver flight, was telling me how, because he only cares about enjoying life (we only have one after all), he likes to drink and smoke and get crazy, and I was saying, for the same, only one life, reason, I'm sober. He asked me if I drink coffee. I responded in the affirmative. He told me that he had me cold, I'm not sober. My sweat glands don't seem to think i'm sober either. Between my ADD medication and a serious caffein habit, young Miles may have my number. Relativity may be a flawed theory, but in this case, I'm going to plead it. At least i'm relatively sober. Compared to getting stoned from morning till night, and getting nearly drunk every day by sundown, this caffeination may be some sort of dangerous super sobriety. I'm agitatingly aware of my feelings of agitation. This is no drunkenness, but I'm still avoiding my study of the prophets with this blogpost. So ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters both Gonzo and greedhead, I wish you all safe travels. Aloha.

Goose Wrangler

Off Facebook

Wow, I just deactivated my Facebook account. What a trip. I've been on that damn site for what, going on 4 years now, 5, years, 6 years? I can't be sure. It was getting out of control. I needed a break. I have a strange feeling that I just unplugged, and while I've posted infrequently to good old Soft Landings and Sober Gonzo, I feel like I'd be better served putting my energies outside my Academic and theological endeavors into my own work. Facebook is like some kind of energy sucking vortex. I'm tired of telling 800 people what i'm doing all the time. At least nobody reads this blog. I'll start telling you folks what I'm doing all the time. Right now, I'm listening to Warren Zevon, "Empty Hearted Town," writing a paper for my Master of Divinity senior seminar. Life is strange my dear song-birds. I love you. The Grouse, the old love Jenn, her birthday passed a few days ago. It's a mystery. The universe unfolding as it does, infinitely blossoming like a flower that never dies; and here we are in the midst of it my dear friends. Conscious witnesses to the present moment. Creators of the future, prisoners of the past; at any moment we can break free. Our habitual thoughts are all that are holding us back. It's time to rocket ourselves into liberation. It's time to plant the seeds of a new reality for our descendants, for our human family here on earth. It's time to bury the lie that we are separate, and build something beautiful from the decaying nutriments. Imagine what our children are capable of if we stop teaching them that they are selfish, fallen creatures, and instead teach them that they are glorious creators, vessels of infinite consciousness, social creatures who care more about the greater good than they do about their individual selves. What messes have we been making as a result of the rotten messages we've been getting? New ideas. Freedom from the Known. What's possible? It's up to you.

Happy Birthday Bob Marley and Mr. Goose Wrangler

Groundhog Day

Well, it's Groundhog day, again.
Sludge.

Thousands of Years of a Perpetuated Lie

Seeing the stars' reflection on the lake by night,
The swan is disappointed,
mistaking them for lotus shoots.
So, even seeing a real lotus shoot by day,
he will not eat it.
When once deceived by a liar,
one will doubt even the truthful

-attributed to Nagarjuna by Tarthang Tulku