Albert Kreinheder, Body and Soul The Other Side of Illness
And After That the Dark
Then up ahead among the things to come is death.
D.E.A.T.H.
One of the serious conditions that older people often have is death anxiety.
This is a real killer, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Paradoxically those who want to live well have to learn to die well.
You have to know that when the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
When the saints coming marching in, they are calling us to death, even though they also bring a richer life.
One of the most jovial, most humorous, outgoing and buoyant personalities I have ever encountered is Joe Wheelwright, a Jungian analyst from San Francisco who studied under Jung.
He told me that ever since he was 35 years old not a day has gone by that he hasn’t thought of his own death.
Some time ago I had a dream that I was required to dig my own grave, but for some reason I kept putting it off.
Obviously it was important for me to give more thought to my death and to become more ready for the final days.
Being somewhat of a practical mind, I got in touch with a lawyer and drew up a living trust, and I also tried harder than ever to get my soul in order.
Once a person becomes 65 or 70, if not before, there is considerable interest in longevity.
We never seem to be quite ready to die. Maybe later but not yet please.
It’s hard to imagine not being around anymore.
How could there even be a world if I weren’t here to see it? I didn’t exist before, that is true, but now that I am, how can I ever not be?
This whole question of being, of body-hood and soul-hood, is a tremendous unsolvable mystery.
Yet the thought of death and the preparation for death are very important because they put our lives in truer perspective.
Our little time within this body is soon over, but life in its larger sense goes on.
The knowledge of our rapidly approaching death makes us more aware of that other realm where dwell the saints and the archetypes.
When we are no longer afraid of death, we also are unafraid of the archetypes, and their power comes marching into our lives.
If the miracle of healing I’ve been talking about really worked, shouldn’t we keep on healing ourselves and live forever?
Not really.
The person who resists death when it is time for death is not healing himself.
He’s making himself more
neurotic and is making for himself a very unpleasant agonizing death.
There is a way to die.
It doesn’t matter when you die so much as how you die.
Not by what means, but whether or not you are altogether in one piece, psychologically speaking.
I remember frequently those words of Kieffer:
“The object of healing is not to stay alive. The object of healing is to become more whole. Death is the final healing.”
Now that I have become an advocate of healing, I’m inclined to feel like a fraud as my body ages.
They’re going to look at me and they’re going to say, “Heal yourself Old Man.
If your teachings are so great, why aren’t you out there climbing trees or something?”
In my weaker moments I worry about this.
But it is the ego that worries, with its concern for image and reputation, with its ambition and greed for things of the world.
It is not shameful to be failing in health.
The only real cause for shame is in losing touch with the soul-self.
The body ages.
The immune system is not what it used to be. Let us acknowledge the truth of what we are.
But let us be sensitive, very sensitive to the movements of the soul.
Stay with the story, so that even in our infirmity we are living what we are.
We are fully in the story.
We are blessed and happy because in our soul we are healed.
Joseph Campbell advises that we seek our bliss.
It is blissful to live our fate.
And although it is hard for many to imagine, when we have achieved the amor fati and we know that the power is with us, dying is not the worst thing in the world.
The time comes for God to swallow us up.
We surrender the last ounce of our personal power, and we accept the embrace of the Lady of the Lake.
The dream told me that, like mostly everyone else, I put off the fact of death.
I do not prepare for it.
In my zeal for health and for healing I overlook that non-reversible fact.
I am growing older.
We cannot go just with those parts of the story that are pleasing to us.
However, just because we feel a little tinge of death, there is no point either to start thinking, “Oh, oh, here it comes. It’s all over now.”
Part of us may want to let go and just give up.
But there is still life energy, and perhaps the closeness of death may even give that remaining life energy a very special quality.
At any rate I personally am resolving not to die before my time.
I will stay with that life that is in me, and I will live it out.
B ut when it is time to die, then I shall die willingly.
I have watched movies of a tiger stalking a herd of deer, then singling one out and moving in on it for the kill.
The deer uses all its strength and speed to stay alive.
But when it is finally overpowered and the teeth sink into its throat, the deer yields, almost blissfully it seems, as it embraces death.
The more we are with soul, the less identified we are with the ego.
We know our center then to be a larger stream of life transcending ego and going on beyond our death.
The soul is somehow in union with this larger being.
And as I align myself more with soul and less with ego, the soul’s story becomes my story.
Then I cannot grieve unduly for the ego.
It is like a candle that has had its hour and now must flicker and go out.
Yet now that I have so convincingly taken all the sting out of death, I must come back again to the truth, the whole truth.
Inevitably there is a sadness that goes with the awareness of death’s approach.
It is the sadness of parting. It is also the sadness of not having lived enough.
If parting is such sweet sorrow, death is the most sorrowful of all but possibly also the sweetest of all. It is not just the goodbyes to spouse and lover and friends, but going away from everything, all the things we loved to do, but can do no more, all the things we wanted to do but never got around to.
It would be a false bravado to deny the great sorrow of death.
From the side of the ego, which is about to be extinguished, death is sad, is eerie, is terrifying.
It is nevertheless an adventure, an adventure we fear to face, but the contemplation of which can lift our lives to greater levels of meaning.
Yet, even if I can be truly composed and fully ready for this great transition, there is a sadness for those who love me, and I grieve for their grieving. I am deeply pained by the pain they shall feel. The broken bonds.
What once was, no longer isthe touch, the looks, the goings in and out together.
Meaningful things done habitually, without a thought of their doing, are now gone forever and deeply missed.
As death approaches and the ego weakens, the unconscious leaks through and before long we are almost immersed in the divine.
God, as Meister Eckhart envisioned Him, is “a great underground river,” and as we are gently, gradually borne upon its waters, we are supremely content and fully healed. ~Albert Kreinheder, Body and Soul The Other Side of Illness, Pages 107- 110
