Rebirth | Contemplative Inquiry

September 29, 2024

NEWS OF A DEATH

When is ‘suicide’ something else? At the age of 80 Satish Kumar’s mother decided that her life was over and her duty done. She began a fast that lasted for five weeks before she died. Although suicide is stigmatised in most cultures, this was an honourable death in her Jain community in Rajasthan, India. Kumar, then already living in England, quotes the letter that gave him the news.

“At the age of eighty your mother felt that she had served the family and fulfilled all her duties and that now it was time for her to meet death. She decided to separate herself from her worn-out body by fasting. She believed that only death could bring new life and that she must die to live again. She went round the town, to family and friends, saying goodbye and asking forgiveness for any wrong she may have done. From the next day’s sunrise she took no more food or drink except a little boiled water. The news of your mother’s fast unto death spread by word of mouth. Monks came to bless her and be blessed, since it is considered to be brave and holy to die in this way – to embrace death rather than let it capture you unaware. Hundreds of people came to have her last darshan and to ask for forgiveness. She didn’t talk much but by her look acknowledged the receiving and giving of forgiveness. People sat outside singing songs and praying. After thirty-five days of fasting, your mother died.” (1)

I have written before about Jain ethics, in a review of Philip Carr-Gomm’s Seek Teachings from Everywhere (2). Both he and his Druid mentor Ross Nicholls had an interest in the Jain path with its values of ahimsa (non-violence/harm), aparigraha (non-attachment/possessiveness/acquisition) and anekant (non-absolutism/many-sidedness/multiple viewpoints). From a Jain perspective, Satish Kumar’s mother was in conformity with these principles when she chose death, with fasting (already a familiar practice) as her method. I value her story for its distinctive lens on a contentious subject. The depth of community support she received is for me the most moving aspect of this voluntary death. It became almost a celebration, and a kind of karmic harvesting for someone who believed that she “must die to live again”.

(1) Satish Kumar No Destination: Autobiography of a Pilgrim Cambridge: Green Books, 2014 (extended 4th edition – first edition 1992)

(2) See: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2019/10/02/book-review-seek-teachings-everywhere/

NOTE: “Satish Kumar (born 9 August 1936)^[1] is an Indian British activist and speaker. He has been a Jain monk, nuclear disarmament advocate and pacifist.^[3]Now living in England, Kumar is founder and Director of Programmes of the Schumacher College international center for ecological studies, and is Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. His most notable accomplishment is the completion, together with a companion, E. P. Menon, of a peace walk of over 8,000 miles in June 1962 for two and a half years, from New Delhi to Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C., the capitals of the world’s earliest nuclear-armed countries.^[4][5] He insists that reverence for nature should be at the heart of every political and social debate.” (Wikipedia)

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February 6, 2022

CHANGING PERSPECTIVES

I have been walking among buildings, before being drawn something different – at first, a fleeting impression to my right. I turn to face it. I walk forwards a few yards, as the new vision clarifies, and feel moved to take this picture. I am still aware of buildings, but boats and water now dominate. There are trees and moving clouds in the distance. The world lights up. It feels like a perceptual rebirth. I find myself in a new and different world.

I continue walking, towards the water. Then I turn left, I look left, I and both see and feel the energy of water and clouds. They invite me to follow them out of the city. I take the picture below, and register the prospect of another canal walk, quite different from the one I knew in Stroud.

In this time of changed perspectives, I notice a shift in my sense of contemplation and inquiry. I feel strongly anchored in this life and world, the place where experiences happen. The numinous is embedded in the everyday, and gifts me with a fruitful ground for continuing exploration.

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April 16, 2020

LUNAR WISDOM

” The moon was the image in the sky that was always changing yet always the same. What endured was the cycle, whose totality could never be seen at any one moment. All that was visible was the constant interplay between light and dark in an ever recurring sequence. Implicitly however, the early people must have come to see every part of the cycle from the perspective of the whole. The individual phases could not be named, nor the relations between them expressed, without assuming the presence of the whole cycle. The whole was invisible, an enduring and unchanging circle, yet it contained the visible phases. Symbolically, it was as if the visible ‘came from’ and ‘returned to’ the invisible – like being born and dying, and being born again.

“The great myth of the bronze age is structured on the distinction between the ‘whole’, personified as the Great Mother Goddess, and the ‘part’, personified as her son-lover or her daughter. She gives birth to her son as the new moon, marries him as the full moon, loses him to the darkness as the waning moon, goes in search of him as the dark moon, and rescues him as the returning crescent. In the Greek myth, in which the daughter plays the role of ‘the part’, the cycle is the same, but the marriage is between the daughter and a god who personifies the dark phase of the moon. The daughter, like the son, is rescued by the mother. In both variations of the myth, The Goddess may be understood as the eternal cycle s a whole: the unity of life and death as a single process. The young goddess or god is her mortal form in time, which, as manifested life, whether plant, animal or human being – is subject to a cyclical process of birth, flowering, decay, death and rebirth.

“The essential distinction between the whole and the part was later formulated in the Greek language by the two different Greek words for life, zoe and bios, as the embodiment of two dimensions co-existing in life. Zoe is infinite, eternal life; bios is finite and individual life. Zoe is infinite ‘being’; bios is the living and dying manifestation of this eternal world in time.”

(1) Anne Baring Anne and Jules Cashford The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image London: Penguin, Arkana Books, 1993

INQUIRY NOTE: For me this modern interpretation of Bronze Age myth offers a good Pagan way of talking about ‘non-duality’, a strong thread in my inquiry in recent years. In its Sanskrit origin, advaita simply means ‘not two’. It speaks of a unity that is not exactly oneness in the sense of complete assimilation. It points to the sense that we are bios in our transient personal lives yet also zoe the life eternal, both the wave and the ocean. In Western theistic culture this view seems consistent with either pantheism or panentheism. It also fits modern understandings of animism and biocentrism. While I find it useful to know about these models and frameworks, I avoid strong identification with them. There remains an underlying mystery, which is where myth and imagination come into their own.

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