Musings on life/death and living/dying (and organ donation)

They shoot horses, don’t they?

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn . . ..”Jack Kerouack,”On The Road”.

Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin , 1969

I don’t want to start a debate on organ donation policy and legislation, nor one on euthanasia (assisted suicide, mercy killing, “good death”), but it’s all about not dying isn’t it? And how is that positive living? It irks me every time we are forced to think about not dying - even before we understand good living and the meaning of death. If it comes to an organ donation act that makes organ harvesting compulsory unless you opt out, this type of thinking will become the norm.

Perhaps, ethics may save the day yet, for it is near impossible to argue that you voluntarily want to participate in something compulsory, so even they who would want to donate might find this imperative one step too far. Making your body a free for all, somehow changes the entire climate around medical ethics. Personally, I think the only way forward will be direct, selective and personal bequeathing of organic tissue. I have an esoteric motivation for this and no way is any society ready to approach this sensitively, yet, so I shall not go into this here.

What about some living?

Music, places, people: life’s a ball if only you know it. Steemit as a celebration of life! A primrose here, some cat’s whiskers there, steaming tea everywhere.

Dead Stuff

Life in the 21st century is almost entirely about death. All stuff, every thought, all minerals -and plastics even more- are dead. Life-supplements.

Only that which is continuously is of the present and living.
Even to be alive is nothing but a non-dead state. Think how hard it can be to tell if a plant is really dead or not. A leafless bulb or a bare tree isn’t necessarily dead; a bulb or a tree rotting from the inside out may already be dead before all its leaves know it (then again, trees make a bad example, as I have often shown in my posts, as some of the oldest life-forms on Earth and often living in clone-colonies where they live on even as stumps).

Now, I’ve said “stuff” is dead, I’d like to contrast it to a stuffed toy. It is cuddled into a living being. May this illustrate how a living imagination is the actual wave our life must ride to mean anything of lasting importance.

Maxime doesn't consider him stuffed, but cuddly

Funny Calculations

Vegetating is to be alive. Even vegetables in your fridge are still "alive" - until they lose that aliveness and decompose.
Why do we want more of life, in years? We are shocked to discover we must die at 62. We are outraged by the death of children. From a spiritual perspective this makes sense, but from a rational one not. The shorter you have lived the less you have to lose...

Waiting to die or not wanting to live are not the same. The choice to be dead is seldom if ever made. Also dying is muffled away as a necessary step we ought to take lightly, swiftly, in passing. We tend to be fed up with life, out of that force that makes us living.

People may no longer like their life, or refuse to face a dramatic change (from bearable to unbearable suffering). Again, we are not rational beings in this either. Take it from the martyrs on the pyre if you cannot stand it anymore you are mercifully released and die. Until then, it will always be about finding new ways to cope. When your life gets too heavy for you to bear (upright) you can lay down and die, or think about it, or have a nap or listen to Rachmaninov... choices galore still. For some this challenge of bearing life that consciously (hyper awareness through your sense of life) only begins at 73 with cancer, for others at 13 with suicidal tendencies. For a quester of the truth it comes as an awakening.

Then begins the path to the end of all suffering.

It is a very quiet and still and silent one. Nothing much happens. Nothing much, at all, can be said, anymore.

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We don’t think about dying much. Only, really, when our health is threatened or at impending loss of someone we need or love. When the people in the papers die their dreadful deaths we empathise half to indulge our own panic.

What troubles us more? To be faced with death (the unknown)? Or the process of loss and bearing the body towards this final curtain. Suffering by yourself – in the middle of the night, surrounded by the ghosts of your darkest fears – is always seemingly unbearable; yet, you wake to another morning: so bear it you did.

If the pain continues unrelentlessly the torture of it gets to you next. The impotence is the worst, the impossibility to fight anything, to change anything. There is nothing you can do. Isn’t life about doing? You can only be as patient as possible. Doing illness. It’s life too. Life is undergone. Life is suffering, the enlightened one already saw.

They say, as long as you have your health….

Nothing makes you appreciate freedom better than illness. No matter how tiny your cell might be, you can be free in it if you have your health (and stay calm and preserve your sanity!).

We make ourselves hostages to suffering. In the vice of disease, the life is crushed out of you.
It belongs to our baleful age of technology, that we undergo suffering with greater desire for perfect health. Our lives are designed to promote this. Medieval man didn't even own a toothbrush.

We expect to cure disease and eradicate threats to health (epidemics, genetic anomalies). But we are blinded by the spot lights of medical wonders and would pay an arm and a leg to experience relief from suffering; even more to prevent it. Only a higher consciousness can switch off disease. We need to see our true (soulful) colours again against a backdrop of eternal life (which does not come with the preclusion that this is necessarily a good thing -see post "Musings on the After-life").

The theme of organ donation, in this regard, is a lesson in prioritisation and integration, begging us to take up motives such as spirit/matter incarnation/excarnation back into consideration. Our psychology tries to circumnavigate the larger perspective with the different emotions we experience and validate in their own right. Life makes us desire and despair. But why.....? Buddhists say: don't. Christians say: suffer the passion. Rationalists call a shrink.

Once you get that, you don’t really have the need to join in and make organ donation a critical issue. It's only more life and death. Let's move on to living and dying, instead.

It is Freedom we value over life

In his “The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation” Chögyam Tungpa warns us not to mistake freedom for something more libertine like doing what you want to do, or chasing your dreams. Freedom lies in determining your attitude. In principle, one doesn’t need to set conditions for that - like health and well-being….

Now granted, I have never been very good at life. I love nature, I love art, divine and human creativity is quite my thing. But just life an sich? Nah. Not terribly much a fan of it. Possibly too Gnostic at heart.

Life is smelly and messy and a recurring drag. It lacks flow and dance and lyrical beauty. All that can be balanced upon it, but life itself, plain, hold the cream and sugar, is rather boring. And when it smacks you in the face, there go all your teeth.

Again, the freer you are the more fun it gets, but this fun will also prove snakey or cementy once you arrive at the unexpected and totally inevitable down-sides, scares, shake-ups, devestations of life. The resilient get back up, dust themselves down and carry on with a fresh smile on their face. But what to do with the rest of us?

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Give and Take as spiritual negotiations

Back to the questions of life and death from above. I have already established for myself a debate is pointless, for it tends to go in only one of two directions: pro/contra. We all know – or think we know - what we would do when it came down to it: the orthodox say no, the progressive say yes. Some use “must”, others prefer “please”. Those who hate change most order a fresh kidney from Fiji and go off to Switzerland to die in peace. So many hearts, so many opinions.

As for myself, I have learned we know nothing until we have done what we did.

I am much of a borrower (library books) and would be a lender – if anybody shared my likes – but I am neither intending to take nor give organs away. I believe I’d be doing a dis-service if I did. If it would be too pretentious to say that I value dying over surviving or death, then there is another consideration, namely, my own dying which I don’t feel is done and dusted at the point of flat-lining.

I am very sensitive to the possibility that there are three subsequent days required for the etheric body to extract itself fully out of all the organs. I’d only be able to say at the time, therefore, if my kidney, cornea or heart would be ready (b.t.w. the eyes will be useless by then!). There is absolutely no point in transferring my ether into your body! And what would I have to go on if I don’t milk every organ for its last drop?

My arguments against are not just floaty; but seeing as I am not interested in debate, I prefer them. Religious freedom is a privilige I wish I could appeal to more often.

There is the matter of how I don’t believe in organ donation, quite literally I don’t see how I can make myself believe in another heart; which means I’d be provoking the rejection reaction all the more! I would feel miserable for the mediction, the artificiality of this heart. Elements that would not be relevant to many people, I am well aware. But many also do not realise that an organ transplant does not get you your life “back”. Everything will be different. You are merely buying time, and it’s a lottery when it comes to the quality of that time.

Time can be valuable and essential to the quality of life of others: maybe it would be my duty to take those extra 6 months a new liver offers, to be able to organise the rest of my son’s life.

Still, I would struggle with the option to give him a kidney of mine. Again, I’m not the best manager of my own body, so there goes the indestructible mother (which is my USP with him) if I’m laid up after surgery. And how independent and happy can his life be - considering his special needs - without me or an identical replacement; or how can he cope with my organ inside him? It can freak some people out, even if they thought they wanted the operation. Besides, sometimes you have to have a “ticket out”. I don’t doubt, however, that my maternal instinct will be less rational should it ever come to anything like this.

It's all up to you

I don’t think God decides how long we live, and gives us heart failure to knock us out. I don’t believe there is a fail-proof diet or life-style to longevity. I DO think we need to learn more about the value of our kidneys: they aren’t machines. They are also satellite dishes of a more subtle nature. I DO hope we stop feeding our loved ones (and animals) rubbish. I DO think we need to improve the air-quality and stop producing toxic fumes from the stuff we make but do not need. A stop on materialism will hardly curb our creative freedom but it will make us wonder how to employ ourselves next, and so we don't want to set a limit really, - not ever really enough….

Urgent appeal

I DO believe, with all I can fathom, that we need to reprioritise our freedom, after understanding what it is not, and that we need to redefine quality of life. Quite urgently.