Part 1 – yogi meets Baptist
I recently went to visit my 90 year old uncle, who is dying of cancer. He’s near the end, in hospice and treatment efforts have stopped. This isn’t a horribly sad story, he’s led a long full life, is well cared for and surrounded by family. The pain and awkwardness of daily life are inevitable, but he and his family seem to be handling it gracefully.
I hoped this was an opportunity for finding some common ground between us. I’ve long felt estranged from this side of the family. We’ve seemed so different in culture and religion. My father was a doctor as is my uncle, but I grew up in the Northeast USA and they are all in the Southeast, the Bible Belt. They are committed and serious Baptists, while my parents went to a much more liberal church. I turned atheist and ran away from church and god when I was 8, and my uncle always made sure that God and Jesus were an integral part of everyday life. I spent years as an anarchist, a pot farmer, an altogether sinful faithless heathen from what I perceived as his point of view. This seemed like an insurmountable obstacle between us. How can the atheist and the Baptist come together?
But now he is so close to the end of life, and I’m newly full of an all-pervading sense of that which they call God. I knew I had to see him, and I was so intensely curious about his state of mind. How does he see life now? What is it like to look back on a completed life? What is it like to see death so close in front of you? How does one reconcile their actual life path with what they see and feel at the end? Are the teachings of yoga compatible with the teachings of the Baptist church?
The more I thought about it the more curious I was: can we find common ground on the meaning and purpose of life? The deeper truths of the nature of life shown to me through yoga — will they be closer to his point of view, especially at this time of his life?
So I dropped everything when I heard he was in hospice and traveled to Virginia to see what I could see.
I had the opportunity for some serious conversation, once the welcoming pleasantries and following nap were over. So I pulled up a chair and sat down when I saw he was lucid and calm. He shifted a bit and grimaced in pain. I said “The body hurts. Charles, you’re not the body, that body is not you. You know that, right?” His eyes focused clearly on me and he laughed. “Oh I know I’m not the body. The body is dying, but I know where I’m going.”
We both knew right away this was going to be a fabulous conversation.
We talked about how people seem to lead their lives, how so many of our struggles are self-inflicted. What can we do with the little clarity we have to help others? His answer is so fast and clear: “Oh you can’t make people change. You can only give them the means and space to allow themselves to change.”
I asked him what he saw looking backwards on life now that he’s lived all the way through it. He thinks for a moment and says “If we knew at the beginning what we learn at the end, we might conduct ourselves better.” Then another laugh. “Of course, that’s not how it’s supposed to work, is it?”
We go on to find common ground on a number of topics, including:
- The supremacy of Love
- The nature of sacrifice and how the ego misleads us
- Our true nature as spiritual beings having a human experience
- Our over-reliance on drugs to treat symptoms of how we respond and react to the world.
Quietly I chant the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra as he falls asleep again while holding my hand tightly.
He’s in peace. I’m in peace.
Part 2 – Is there a lesson here?
I returned home full of love and happiness, and tried to tell this story to my daughter. She listened carefully, but stopped me before the end. “Dad, you’re telling this story wrong. You’re saying that you and Charles had one way of thinking and looking at the world, and then all the rest of us have another way. It’s not like that. We’re all the same.”
I’m puzzled at first. I know she’s correcting me and it’s an important lesson, but I don’t get it yet. So she continues:
“You’re talking about Good and Bad, the Right Way and the Wrong Way, the High Path and the Low Path. It’s not like that. I try and separate everything into 3 categories: Good, Bad, and Neutral. And almost everything is Neutral, neither Good nor Bad. Including you and Charles.”
I’m speechless, dumbstruck. She’s trying to find her own way into life at the tender age of 19, uncertain of what to do with her life and how to find peace and happiness. And she’s correcting us?
But she’s right.
Sure, Charles and I were talking about profound truths of the nature of human existence. But we’re still people, still unevolved human beings, still largely under the influence of our bodies and minds and emotions. We’re still under the influence of fear, greed, anger and base emotions. We can talk of the highest spiritual truths, but we will spend much of our time engaged in meaningless matters of the ego.
Let’s not forget the extent to which we’re mostly acting like talking monkeys. Mostly we’re not living in the higher consciousness that is possible for us. Including uncle Charles and I, we’re mostly just guys with a hungry stomach and a full bladder and a fear of whether everything will be OK and stable tomorrow.
And we can never tell other people how the world works and have that be a solid part of their reality. We all have to come to accept this through our own individual experience. The best we can do for each other is to serve as an example and a guidepost. I asked Charles about the quote shown below, and he was clear on this.
