I remember when I first learned that everyone dies.

My political philosophy is directly tied to this revelation. I've been a liberal ever since this day.

I was eight years old. I had already lost a Grandfather, and thought that the only way that people died was if they were in a war, had cancer, or died in a car accident.

My mom worked in a nursing home. I used to play checkers with some of the patients. One guy had only one leg. This old man asked me what I liked to do when I was not visiting the nursing home. I replied that I liked to play baseball and ride my bike.

The old man told me that when he was my age, he love to ride his bike. I asked him how he rode with one leg. He told me that when he was my age, he had both his legs. He told me that he had both his legs when he was my mom's age, and that he didn't lose his leg until he was older then my grandmother.

It hit me like a bolt of lightning. Everyone is born, grows up, gets old, and dies. I fully understood that my grandmom was once my moms age, and my mom was once my age. I would grow up, grow old, then die.

I was able to keep from crying at the nursing home. I cried my eyes out the instant that we left.

A couple days later, a lady at the nursing home died. She didn't have cancer, she wasn't in a car accident, and she wasn't killed in a war. She died of old age.

I then realized that the only thing of value in this life was compassion and empathy. I quickly became a liberal in my political philosophy, and I tried very hard to treat all people the same way that I wished to be treated.

Do you remember when this "FACT OF LIFE" entered in to your consciousness? Did it play a significant part of your become a political liberal? I wonder if this is a universal experience for liberals.

when I was very young...and it was then that I developed my strategy:

I plan on keeping my brain alive in a tank hooked directly up to the internet.
Quantities of angiogenic stem cells will be pumped through the vasculature of the brain
to keep renewing aging blood vessels. The brain will be frequently subject to various scans
for a variety of cancers...

But all of this is a stopgap until I can upload the contents of my consciousness to a computer.

i don't know if I would want to be there for eternity.

until someone I was becoming close friends with was killed in a firey car crash just after he received his Graduate degree, driving home to visit his parents. My future wife and I were watching his apartment for him the day after he died, without even knowing it. It had a profound impact on me... from which I have never recovered. Someone hydroplaned, flipped over the highway median and slammed into his car. And his life was over, just like that. The person in the other car survived.

I was a liberal before this incident, but it surely reinforced all of my political and spiritual ideologies.

I have never been the same though. Both the strength and the fragility of life are astounding to me.

awful,..

When I realized that this world was the one worth fixing, and that some perfect world was not a certainty, i realized that my part in the world was to make it better, not to bide my time until I made it to heaven.

I had a post on this in my blog called Original Sin.

K&R, btw.

peace and low stress. thanks for the r. :~)

Humans create their values and morals. We are capable of great things just by virtue of being human and we collectively choose how we will live. There are no hidden forces at work that control and manipulate us (which is why I hate the whole idea of the unseen hand economic bullshit. The hand is all around us if we would just open our eyes, and we can choose how that hand deals the cards if we really wanted to).

We only get one spin on this ride, so you'd better make it count. And the only thing that matters is how we treat eachother - not how we serve some big daddy in the sky, etc.

only thing I'd change with what you said is instead of big daddy in the sky, I'd say sky creatures, I always love to say that, people look real strange when you say sky creatures LOL!

:patriot:

But I do remember the sadness and fear that sunk into my bones when I realized that Mommy & Daddy might someday be gone. And that is still in me. It is the ultimate elephant in everyone's room. We can't ever really forget it, or ignore it. We can decorate around it, train plants to trail about it's ears, hang shelves, and garlands and beautiful things on it.... until we are strong enough to face it, we learn to live with it.

And when my children cried in their realization that someday, I would be gone, I shared this secret with them.

since I was pretty small and don't remember coming to the realization that people die as a whole episode... so it must not have been traumatic for me.

I will say that trying to understand Death, thinking about and working with its constant presence in Life has been a big part of my spiritual growth.

me. That there were people who did things differently from how people around me did them. That people can come from other countries and that's not wrong or bad. That people being different from me was okay. I was about 7 or 8 when I realized this.

young - it made me a bit depressed to think about all of this going on without me (I suspect I was 3 or 4 years old!). However, my parents raised me to value intellect and learning, be open minded, question things (including authority!). I've really never been afraid of things. I think that, as well as using reason and thinking rather than blind faith, contributed to my liberal views (oh yes, and my big bleeding heart!).

"bleeding heart liberal:" Better a bleeding heart than no heart at all!

I know when my oldest son learned, my youngest always seemed to understand since we kept pet rats and they don't live too long so it was something that came up often enough. The oldest I had to explain it to though, he was pretty shook up at first till I explained that with luck he'd be very old, tired, with a full life behind him and more ready for it. Still took him some getting used to though, but that seemed to help.

I don't remember learning it myself, must have sunk in either young or slow enough that it wasn't a revelation as such. My political philosophy is based more on practical matters than on ideals. When you keep kicking someone you just make them more resistant and mean, increase the problems. Seems it might be an idea to quit doing that so much, others don't react any better to it than we do or than we did when we got kicked hard on 9-11. History just shows poor results for hard ass attitudes and better ones for a more reasoned approach. I'm not above doing what needs to be done if someone is a threat though, but it does have to be a matter of need.

and it was basically Mom and me and then one day hospice showed up and helped her and me through he last days, most of them were pretty liberal people and unbelievably compassionate and caring and without them i don't know if i would have made it through my mothers death. the death of my mother and the people from hospice definitely shaped my life, people did care, they weren't all cold assholes. I think that experience and having a child moved into the left column.

that everyone and everything lives a life and then dies.

"Everyone is born, grows up, gets old, and dies."

and empire, civilizations, economic and political theories, stars in the galaxy.

"I then realized that the only thing of value in this life was compassion and empathy."

I'm sure everyone comes to this point, but some go this way, others go for the cash.

because I've never been religious and have never believed in an afterlife, I've always realized we have to do the best we can with whatever short time we have on Earth and we should strive to make it better for people and animals.

I remember visiting my great uncle Joe in a nursing home on a beautiful street in New Orleans at six or seven. The disconnect between the tree-lined exterior and the foul-smelling interior hit me as soon as we entered. He lay in his bed, in his pajamas, and I remember thinking how awful it must be to live like that. Even as he smiled at my sister and I, I was repelled by his sores and his situation. I don't remember my exact thoughts, but I remember telling my mother that I thought he was going to die soon.

As a young teen I read Arnold's Light of Asia, and part of the story is very similar to yours. The passage that struck me most, and caused me to think about the value of life and the inevitability of its end was the one where the emaciated fakir (sp?) saw a mother lion and her cubs starving in the distance, and decided to walk over and lie down in front of them so that they could feed. That image and unimaginable sacrifice stayed with me for years.

Have you read Becker's Denial of Death? In it Becker attempts to describe how all of our actions and social conventions are designed to shield us from the inevitability of our own death. Brilliantly written for a general audience. I haven't read it in years, but you've inspired me to find it this evening and reread it.

But I did hear that story about the lion. This is how I head this story.

Once the Buddha gained enlightenment, he left the cave to return to society. On his way down the mountain, he encountered a lion that was dying of starvation. Upon closer inspection, the Buddha noticed that the dying lion was nursing seven cubs. The Buddha cut his hand, and allowed the lion to drink his blood. Eventually the lion became strong enough. The Buddha allowed the lion to eat him. The lion became strong, and nursed her cubs back to health. Because these cubs survived based upon the infinite compassion of the Buddha, they all obtained enlightenment when they died. They were reborn as the Buddha's first students.

Thank you for the post and the names of those books. I will definitely seek them out. :toast:

Caring for animals, helping them birth, seeing them in pain and such and they loved you no matter what. Also I grew up in a rural area and we were very close to nature--not only for playing, hiking, camping, fishing, etc., but for growing a garden which we used to help feed ourselves and being responsible for the care and growth of it. I felt very spiritual as a child. It helps also, I think, to have had parents and grandparents who went out of their way to help someone else and were compassionate and caring and set good examples. Really, I think it goes back to who our first teachers were, our parents.

On edit: One of my favorite cartoons was Underdog!

I started learning about how all of the history of western civilization is a story of how over and over again the powerful elite did horrible things to people who didn't deserve it.

If you vow not to keep repeating this cycle then you are a liberal. This is what democracy, separation of church and state, the bill of rights and many other things are supposed to protect us from. You think this can't keep happening again and again, but it does.

If your looking out for the little guy then you are a liberal. So it does all boil down to empathy like you said.

Is the idea of being born twice really any more outrageous than being born once?

There's also a great book called Unweaving the Rainbow that talks about how we know we'll die--and that makes us the lucky ones, because that means we were born. I also remember a great line from "The World According to Garp" (movie version), where Glenn Close is asked by her grandson if she'll die. She says Yes, one day, and so will you, when you're an old man. Then she tells him, But the exciting thing is that we get to live first! So that's what I try to focus on. Making sure I live first.

As for my political philosophy, it took me years to develop. My parents were not very political, or if they were, they didn't discuss it with me. What they did instill in me is a sense of compassion and empathy for all creatures. My dad is an especially gentle person, and he had great influence over me. But I have to credit my political awakening to my SO. When we met, I told him I was a "middle-of-the-road conservative." He's a California bleeding heart liberal, and a stealthy one at that. Instead of barraging me with information, he'd look for opportunities to discuss issues with me, then point out how our opinions were the same. He made me think about things more than anyone ever had, and I realized I'd been a flaming, bleeding heart liberal my whole life but never knew it. He gave me a couple of books to read, and that sealed it. I've been proudly Progressive ever since.

This is a very though-provoking and interesting post! Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

Peace,

RV

There was a time where I considered myself a somewhat moderate conservative also, I still don't feel I changed so much as the way I looked at things did, we had more options than it seemed at first. A lot of the people out there who are "conservative" share many of the same values that we do but just don't know that yet. The media sure doesn't help. With a lot of them it isn't so much a matter of they don't want the same things that we do, it's more that they don't agree on how to get there. I figured it out on my own based on looking at things that happened to me over the years and how I reacted, what might have changed things, but it sure wouldn't hurt to talk to the ones who aren't already figuring it out for themselves. The other side is reaching out to people, we need to also.

RV- I never read that book, but will look for it.

Asgaya, I know a liberal that was once a social darwin conservative. He was very proud of his 'survival of the fittest' mentality. Then he became ill. He was very wealthy, but had no health insurance. $650,000.oo later, he is a healthy liberal. He used to always say, "FDR minus polio equals Nixon." Pain and empathy are strong lessons.

I believe that bush and the neo-cons actually want what is best for the country. They are just misguided. We need to reach out to them.

There is such a thing in the world as pure self centered greed, evil if that's what people want to call it, and there's a certain element of it in power these days. Many of his followers are misguided rather than that bad though. They get some wrong ideas in their heads about what patriotism means and that isn't helped by some religious leaders, and it takes some effort to get them to even look at the other side.

I try to draw a line between them myself, not blame the misguided for the people doing the guiding. The leaders have the info to know better even if the people they lead don't.

is my Joementum. I like Joe Leiberman. This was one Joe's lines during the primary (that Bush was a good guy, trying to do what is right for all).

:)

Hindu believe in an indestructible soul, the Atman, that is reborn relative to your Karma... the Sadu/ Guru tradition seems to be a process of creating a karmic Back loop in order to be reborn in a higher class.

the Buddhists see it as a Mind Stream that gets polluted with bad karma/negativity/ignorance and the Stains on the mind stream effect your rebirth.. the mind stream can be cleansed, nothing inherently exists, so karma can be eliminated. the chains that tie one in samsara, the world of cyclical suffering, are created by our misconception of the self.. the self does not exist as we feel we see it, it actually does not exist at all only in the conventional mind. when we realize that there is actually no difference between subject and object and everything is a result of cause and effect, we become 'Awakened..' Buddha means 'one who is Awake' in sanskrit.

him from all the bad things in life, he had a child and wife, and he was a prince accustomed to only the finest things in life, never seeing illness or anyone old, never seeing suffering... what a shock. ..he soon left on his path to saving his family and all mankind from the suffering of cyclical rebirth, old age, sickness and death.

your story is fascinating,.. you got the same realization as the Buddha without any of that annoying meditation..

my first memory in life is my father beating the hell out of me, i had been viciously beaten and was on the floor, i remember seeing the heals of his shoes walking away on the wooden floor and he was complaining how bad his hand hurt.. i remember thinking how stupid that sounded..

life was such a daily trauma death just got lost among all the things i had no control over.. i remember squatting and looking at a dead bird and the ants were eating it.. i am autistic and perceive visually, i dont connect emotions to pictures,, life has just been one long bad movie and i just have to sit there and take it.

I enjoyed reading this and all of your posts. Peace and low stress

and all the bad shit you do is coming back on you, like a white supremacist will be born a boor black in prison with a life term for looking in the direction of a black woman..

the Republicans will be born a homosexual losing their home because of the property laws and inheritance.. or just homeless in china working them selves to death and watching there family starve to death while dying of chemical poisining..for 17 cents an hour.

and being reborn into a dark hopeless world they despoiled in the previous life..

Buddhists and hindus were the first Environmentalists.. they want to leave a decent world to be reborn into.

when you die, you realize that the self is an illusion, and that you and divinity are one. Those that can recognize this reach Nirvana, and are liberated from rebirth or can choose a favorable rebirth (in fact, they can choose to be reborn as a hungry ghost, they can choose to enter hell, and pray for sinners, they can do what they want) if they want.

So Hitler dies, he goes to heaven. He is presented with the knowledge of ground luminosity. He can accept it or refuse it, pretty much based on his karma.
Hitler realizes that aryans and jews are one. Nazis and commies are one. God cherishes the ugly Gypsies as much as he does the healthy uberman.
Hitler can embrace this divinity, and receive a positive rebirth (or liberation), or he can refuse this reality, and receive a negative rebirth.

I think that Hitler would be reborn as a progressive liberal, fighting hard for the equality of all. S/he would not understand that in a past life, s/he was Hitler. Karma and understanding ground luminosity would determine whether this is a positive or negative rebirth.

This didn't come out as clearly as I would have liked it to, but I will post it anyway.

Love the quote..

Life is one long bad movie and I have to sit through it.

So true!!

Death as inevitability came crystal clear to me when my father beat me up and choked me until I nearly passed out.I realized right than I was in danger of death.I felt my brain going out.
I was young than like 4 or something.

I was reading a book on the human body. I knew people died because I spent a lot of time around a friend's funeral home. I just thought it was other people dying, I never put it together that someday it will be me in the pretty box.

They say that kids do not have the ability to see into the future. They cannot understand the long range consequences of their actions. There might be a evolutionary reason for this. Many of us would never join the military, get married, have kids. Young and dumb is important to the survival of our species.

Not a very cheerful thought, but it's true.

I don;t know if that had anything to do with my politicl views personally. I remember about that age, tryiong to think of tyhe idea of infinity, endless time...eternal heaven (being brought up as a Christian). I couldn't fathom that, so maybe that means I had already recogniozewd that life is finite.

I think smog and sprawl did it for me. I remember from a very erly age being pissed off at the development of beautiful spaces, and the grey smog on bad days.

Other major turning point was reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X....Looking back, I'm much more moderte than he was. But it was the first tie I realized there is more to life than the official story.

Ive never read the malcom x auto... sounds interesting.

Peace and low stress...

Up in the hills, on the rifle range, near El Toro MCAS (Marine Corps Air Station).

We had to "qualify" every 6 months with our rifles.

One of those really beautiful October mornings in Southern California. Golden, cool, clear, with a gentle breeze. I was sipping very hot coffee from a canteen cup and just enjoying the sound of mockingbirds and the quiet before the shooting started. We had already finished a couple of rounds of banging away and were waiting for the man-shaped targets to pop up so we could prove our prowess.

For some reason the thought occurred to me that I was being trained to kill people. People that I didn't know, didn't have a grudge against, might even like if I did know them, and were probably a lot like me. Kill them for no other reason than the bosses wanted me to. Snuff out their lives with a well aimed shot.

Then and there, on that cool golden morning, I decided not to.

When they asked me to extend my enlistment, a few months later, to go to Vietnam and kill people, I refused.

One of the things in my life I'm most proud of.

I'm in awe. And yet I share the same feeling. What a world it could be.

We were just starting dinner when my dad broke the news that the man up the road had died. I remember asking him what happened to John and dad said he had taken some pills and had gone to sleep. I asked why and he said that he said that John left a note saying he didn't feel like living any more. My dad was clearly very upset at the loss of this kind friend and neighbor but he did the best he could to explain it to myself and my younger siblings (we were 5, 3 and 1.5, respectively). I had a huge lump in my throat and couldn't finish dinner, that was the day I realized that life isn't always roses and that bad things happen to good people.

and I became obsessed with the idea of heaven. It was a great comfort to me.

I guess I have always been fairly liberal. No earthshaking moments.

everyday. I firmly believe that the promise of everlasting life makes people turn bad.

K&R.

There is only one certainty in life - that you die.

You have no idea when this will happen, so... experience every breath and every moment as though it were your last.

Once you get your brain around that - a lot of 'huge' issues in your life suddenly become very small, and a lot of small things become very important.

It's the same thing as my life.

It may be my first memory . I have no idea how old I was. It was devastating to my young mind and I remember crying myself to sleep for what seemed like weeks.

I remember my Mom soothing me one night , explaining that it was a natural part of life and all I could think of was her and my Father and the fact that they were going to die. It really was a part of my earlier youth that sticks out in my memory.
That phase came with a series of nightmares . My dreams were full of ropes and people hanging from them like puppets, weird .

I dont know if that made me a Liberal thinker . Maybe it was.

I wish.................

that would be nice for sure

I do remember that when I was around 5, I went through a morbid stage. I became afraid people I loved were going to die, and I started to realize that I, too, would one day die. It was scary, but I don't recall what it was that set it off.

When I was 7, my father died in a car accident. That was shocking, and I never really dealt with it - I became jaded in a way. Then, when I was 8, my great-uncle and grandmother (who I lived with) died within days of each other. My uncle was quite old and ill, and while it saddened me it didn't profoundly affect me. But my grandmother was in her 50's and died slowly and painfully from cancer - it was very devastating to me and my entire family. None of us have ever recovered. I don't know that it made me a liberal, but it certainly made me support euthanasia and made me very secure in my beliefs with things like that. I do think that it contributed to my overall empathy, as over the next several years a few other family members passed away.

With my children, they both went through a morbid realization at around 5/6. I tend to think that seems to be around the age that children start to understand mortality, and it can be an overwhelming and very scary realization. I still have a hard time accepting that I too will die, as will everyone I love. And, God willing, my children will outlive me, but thinking of them passing even after I'm gone frightens me. I remember a few days after my oldest son was born, and while holding his perfect little body admiring his perfect little hands, the thought came into my head that one day he will die and I bawled and bawled. Knowing our own mortality is a tricky thing, a questionable gift. Plus I can be quite morbid to this day.

until my dad received a terminal diagnosis a few years ago. My unspoken reaction: "This must mean that someday I'm going to get sick and die, too. Shit!" Sometimes I still envy the cat for being able to lay around all day with an utter lack of awareness that at some point he'll have taken his last nap and eaten his last bowl of kibble.

However I did have a pivotal moment that helped solidify my political beliefs. I was in the mega-mart for an unavoidable late-Saturday-night grocery shopping. A time when the mixture of people at the store is bound to have a high proportion of the strange, the afflicted, and the frightening. And as I walked around the store I went from being vaguely depressed to having this overwhelming feeling of love for every last weirdo in the store. (I cringe at how corny it sounds, especially since I don't even like people lots of the time.) It was an otherworldly experience, one that was not brought about by drugs or alcohol, even though I felt altered. I'm not religious but it felt like a spiritual experience. I knew on a deep level that we all come from the same place and we're all going to the same place. And that when it's all over the most important thing will have been that while we were here we did our best to treat others with decency, integrity and kindness.

I was skipping down the street where I lived when I realized that one day I was going to die. I shook my head, I tried to remove the thought, but it didn't leave, would't leave and hasn't left. I think about it everyday. I shake my head but it's still there. Overwhelming anxiety hits me. I am like a deer caught in headlights. The only thing that will stop my anxiety is to repeat several times "I am not going to die." Then, my mind drifts to the remains of whatever day I'm in.

Then, a couple of months ago I was diagnosed with coronary artery disease and I woke up in the middle of the night terrified. My death appeared imminent (it's not) and since that moment I think about dying virtually 90% of the time. It is always there.

I read the Denial of Death many years ago. I took meditation courses. I bought a book about meditation and death and went through the entire book and every meditation until the last one and couldn't face it. Finally, I worked up the courage to talk with a good friend about my fear of dying. I figured she was an expert because her daughter died suddenly a few years ago. So I told her of my plight and she responded "You know, I'm not afraid at all. I'm just curious about it. I figure I just have to live each moment to the fullest. I'm just curious. You lose your fear of dying when your child dies. I'm just curious."

I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.

when most of the people in her life had passed on. Her parents, many of her friends, her husband, one daughter. As more loved ones left her, she said she was lonely for them and would be ready to join them when her time came. Her time came when she was 93 and by then, all of her contemporaries were gone. She went peacefully in her sleep.

Odd that you should mention that.

From '89 - '95, I worked at an outpatient Oncology clinic (cancer center). Fundamentally, it was coming in contact with people whom I could look at and (usually correctly) think, "You have less than two weeks to live among us" that slowly began to turn me from my previously Republican ideologies to the progressive we've all come to know and love today.

there is a chance in 70-80 years this will go away from me. I remember thinking it was far away and I didn't understand it but I knew the sky would go away. Whenever anyone dies now, I think about missing the blue summer sky. My mom's best friend died today and now she's in the big mystery. She will never see the blue sky but then, given her health, she hadn't seen it in a long time. I don't fear death. I do hate the idea of leaving loved ones behind. And the blue sky. But going to the great next step, I am not very terribly afraid.

my prayers are with you, your mom, and her friend.

:hug:

realization. I was washing my hands before dinner. It was in the fall, around Halloween. The soap made my hands slick and I could feel the ridges in the bones of my knuckles. I remember thinking that I had "felt" my skeleton. Then, immediately, I became nauseated. It was as if I had touched death--my own.

I understood this at that age, but I didn't rally process the meaning, and the fact that it REALLY applied to ME and everyone else I knew until I was well into my 20s. I do believe it has something to do with my being a leftist (not a liberal) and the fact that I find the likelihood of an afterlife very doubtful makes compassion and quality of life in the here and now all that much more important.

But I guess I'm still at a rather immature stage, since I still resent the finite nature of life, its brevity, and the cruelty with which our youth, vigor and beauty are snatched away from us. And I do think that the conservative mind is typified by its owner's inability to ever truly see himself in another's shoes. That lack of empathy is the root of so much misery in our society. But to be fair, I do think there are some "liberals", especially well-to-do ones, who aren't all that empathetic, but just vote and volunteer, etc. to assuage a guilty conscience. Of course this is better than the right-winger's outright greed and callousness, but it's still self-serving and done only when it doesn't cause too much inconvenience.

But I'm getting off the point. Your anecdote is a good one, and probably fairly commonplace among people of conscience.

I was in the orphanage and the owner of the orphanage (He was like Father to me), died of heart attack.
I was playing on the stairway when he walked passed me with two babies in his arms. I was so excited to see him and try to give him a hug, but he didn't acknowledge me and walked right passed me fast. I then realized, there was something very wrong with him, so I followed him to his place. He went into his bedroom and put down the babies on the bed and he laid next to them and he died. I shook him and asked him to get up, get up!, but he didn't responds. Lady at the house came in the room and took me away and try to calm me down. At the funeral, I was screaming wanting to be buried with him and I remembered, I could not stand to live in this world with out him and just want to die with him. This was my first experience of death. Since I was raised in orphanage, I always believed in helping others is the reason, I am liberal today.

The first death that I remember was my grandfather. I was 5, and I adored him. I seem to remember understanding death. I remember being angry because I didn't get to go to the funeral. They thought I was "too young." I remember how quiet and lonely the place was without him, and how I knew it would never be the same again.

I don't remember when I discovered death as a concept. I think I grew up to be a political liberal because of my mom. Partly because she is/was a liberal, and partly because watching her life, and living the effects, brought all of the more liberal issues into the foreground for me. She was a single, poor working class mom.

and I agree with you. We all will die. Our choices are to embrace life and others or it is to attempt to control and dominate because of our ultimate fear of death.

I always found that to be an inherent inconsistency with Christians about this issue. Most tend to be filled with such fear, I have always wondered if their religion really helps them.

Yes, i "thought" about death and the transitory nature of life
as a kid, but the thoughts did not register quite like an experience
on LSD back at college, where i consciously left my body and was looking
down at it. I realized that there are profound awakenesses in life,
and that "knowledge" must be awakeness.

I became a student of various traditions of meditation, amongst them swami
muktananda, Rama - Dr. Lenz, Da Free John - called "Adida" today.
And profound meditation is like death, an erasure of the physical consciousness
and its history and concepts of self, and a re-forming of those after the
meditation.

But i dislike using the word meditation as it has been burdened in the west with
"doing" meanings, like sitting, and repeating words or something, whereas i
equate meditation as profound stopping. And after every stop, life is
poignantly the same, poignantly different, death in every step and breathing.

Death today, death tommorrow, lovers meet, lovers part. The ineffable spirit
of life glistening radiant in every single moment.

peace,

:hi: Thank you for all of your posts, sweetheart. I enjoy reading your posts. Peace!

Sometimes i can be a threadkiller, kick to this thoughtful thread.

Likewise mdmc, i can count on your posts having heart and soul,
its lovely to read. :hi:

only the death of those close to me

for not letting sweetheart be the last poster. :toast:

I knew about death already. My dad died when I was in the womb, and I knew that. My grandpa died when I was 3, and I knew that. But knowing about death, and truly experiencing it, are two different things.

I only got to see my big brother every couple or few weeks, when I was visiting my Grandma and he happened to be there. He loved me, I think, more than what's "normal" for siblings; because we shared a father that was lost to us. He shared everything with me, and genuinely loved it when I was around. I looked up to him in a major way. I idolized him.

Well, to make a long story short he was into drugs and drinking and his mom didn't really give two shits about him. He was partying hard one night, and got into a car. And drove head on into something. From what I'm told he died instantly. I sure hope I was told the truth, but you never know.

I would say that yes, it had a significant part in me becoming so liberal. Because from then on out, I began dealing with depression, random bouts of insomnia, and serious anxiety issues. As a young teen I began drinking and became a goth/rebel in school, and of course quickly became a social outcast. I learned how it felt to always be in the minority. To be the person that everyone hates.

That had a huge impact on me. Also, being relatively poor, having gay friends, among many many other things.

Are you still into goth at all?

Sometimes I like to dress up still, but really I'm more grunge than anything. :D Flannel, tshirt, jeans.

(I can still see her in her coffin wearing a blue dress with an angora collar.) My brother was different. He's 4 years younger and the most standout memory of that time for me (1958) is him. One night after supper we went with my father to the cemetery - my poor father was beside himself. My brother and I were waiting in the car and my brother asked when mommy was coming home. I was a brat, no compassion, and told him she was never coming home because she was dead. The concept clicked and he went nuts, crying and screaming. I'll never forget it. My poor, little brother.

planet. Siblings:hug::)
thanks for posting.

Most things of this basic nature have many layers of realization, and many stages of experience, and the thing that really--really--not only taught me that every single person dies but made me face it, was not an early experience of it, but later, when my Mom died. This was the first time it really touched home, the first time I "prayed" (or thought I was praying), "Please make her be okay; please don't let her die," the first time I was really afraid that it would happen. I was taking care of her, and learned multitudes of things about life and the meaning of things, just from daily living--how she kept her grace, humor, friendliness and politeness toward other people, and all the while must have been so afraid, especially when the last medical diagnosis let us all know that she was not going to survive. This was a heroic death, too--just to try to remain calm and be good to people and animals, when it was now impending.

I feared going home from the hospital, worrying myself over the thought of anyone abusing her when she now could not fight back, and I learned that most people there were good, and that she was popular with them, and so they liked caring for her. I learned how to let go this way, of several things. A few unpleasant experiences with stupid, clueless teenagers working on the hospital floor, though, enraged me and taught me the difference between good and bad care, and how the patients need someone fighting for them. I became aware of the prospect of death as things went on with her case, and I couldn't just run away and hide--it was going to happen. Everything I heard became altered by the new awareness: if families came in and argued with the patient when they were there, like any old ordinary day, rather than trying to make things happy, and open up a little emotionally for the time you had left, then I just got so angry and hated what these people were doing to some of these older people's last days. It shifted my focus so completely to what was good for her, not me, that it gave my whole perspective on life an added depth, and patience. After a lifetime of interests, and riding my bike, and talking politics, and sports, movies and all the rest, now suddenly exposed, lurking behind all the fun and popcorn of everyday life, was this horrible, tragic specter of death, and now here it was.

I was always left-wing, etc., but the experience of taking care of, then losing, my beloved Mom, gave me deeper concern for others and their real suffering, and made it more real. One time, when I was visiting her, she mentioned that she was so lucky, for several things, one of which was that she had both Social Security and my late Dad's pension and benefits; that it was a lot of fear she didn't have to suffer, and that she felt so sorry for these older women who only have a couple hundred dollars a month Social Security and nothing else. I was always aware of how everything is affected by whether or not you are covered--if insurance covered it, you are okay and it was one less dread; if not, then the world caves in on you at the most horrific time, when you are already at wits' end, all for the most phony, corporate reasons. If I didn't support universal health coverage before--(and I did)--then I did now, because I learned the meaning of life. I don't care so much about the "niceties" of life; now it only matters if someone loves you, and if you both are good to each other. When the world gets reduced to "the place where they aren't, anymore," and your big hope is that they will come to you in dreams, then the extraneous is pushed aside and the important things are all you relate to anymore. You realize that you can get though these things not because you are some "hard-assed independant pioneer," stupid phony shit, but because of a social safety net that civilized societies protect their members with, making the end a little easier.

As several more years have gone by, there is another level of horror to the loss of a loved parent, and that is that you find more and more of that great (Depression/New Deal/World War II) generation dying, then finally the whole era is dying, receding further back, less and less remembered, until finally there starts to seem to be no trace whatsoever of the whole era, that it ever existed. Every trace of every generation will evntually be completely exterminated. That is an unfolding horror all its own--and you can't make it come back.

I sometimes still worry about death, and sometimes do not anymore, but the biggest change is that I am totally sick of hypocrites and phonies, game-playing and manipulativeness; because the experience of being so close to the death of a loved-one, is the most sincere and real thing there is. You are not going to make it go away.

(By the way, to "sweetheart" on this thread: everybody has killed threads. Some of the best posts I ever wrote, where I was just so excited, waiting for a reply, were never answered and the thread died. I used to be mortified by it, like "everybody hates me," but after a while you don't pay so much attention. Sometimes it has more to do with the subject of a thread, or just that readers got tired of it just at the same time you posted; they might not have even read your post. Even the most popular posters on this website have all occasionally posted threads that get 6 or 7 replies--all of them have had it happen.)

1-thank you for posting. I really enjoyed reading your story.
2-have you considered creating a journal here at DU? It is pretty easy to set up and I encourage you to explore the idea.
3-sweetheart always kills my threads. :~)

peace and low stress!

When my father died.

Peace and low stress. :~)

:hug:

Geesh...

a santa claus

Geesh...

My grandfather, my buddy, had just passed away. I asked why. I wanted to know why. They told me that old people die. They didn't tell me that kids die, that everyone dies, whether they were old or not. A couple of years later, my uncle died. He seemed old to me. He died of lung cancer. I always remembered him smoking Merits. Everyone in my family smoked. My mom, dad, aunts, uncles. I didn't know that it would kill them. I just knew I didn't like being around them when they were doing it. Anyway, as I grew up, people around me passed away. It was part of my life. I knew it was a part of life from that young age. I didn't understand why, still really don't, but I just remember my mom falling apart and wondering why, if it is a part of life, why do people let it destroy them? When I was a sophomore in high school, my cousin, who was a year younger than me, committed suicide. I grew up sheltered, and when this happened, I really just didn't understand it. He wasn't murdered, which I understood. He did it to himself? I had heard of people killing themselves, but most of the people I had heard about were troubled, mentally ill. They weren't Freshmen in high school with promising futures.
My life since that moment has been full of tragedy and death. I'm terrified of dying violently. I'm terrified that I'm going to die young, like my sister did at 29. I know it's irrational and illogical, but I'm terrified. That's why I'm covered by so much life insurance. If I die young, I want my husband to be taken care of. I want him to have the things he might have if I live and we had had the time to save. I try to make sure I tell everyone every day I love them just so no one is wondering about that if I die. I knew my father loved me, but I really hope that he knows how much I love him. I was a stupid brat when I was a kid and said hurtful things and didn't say I love you too when he told me every day that he loved me. God I wish I had. I just really hope there's an afterlife so I can tell him how very sorry I am and how much I wish I could have known him as an adult, because what I hear he was even more awesome as a dad when I got to be an adult.
I'm sorry i went off on a tangent, but this is one of those subjects that just causes me to pour my heart out.
Duckie

about death,

. Is there food there?
. How will I find you?
. Where will my toys be?

finally he decided he doesn't want to go there unless
I'm there. I told him he won't have to go there until he's
110. He's at the 1 million question age - actually been asking
questions for years..he's sooooo cute, :)

I've seen plenty of death, but I've also seen that life, barring sudden illness or accident, can be very, very long, particularly if you're stuck in a desperate situation. Weeks drag on into months, months into years when you don't have enough food, a decent job or even something so basic as hope that things will get better. That's what makes me a liberal: to ensure that those living can have the basics required to live a life of dignity. For so many in this world, death is a release from desperate situations. I find that completely intolerable.

I realized it's never what they tell you it is. Whatever someone tells you it is, it will not be that. Guaranteed.

Chance favors the prepared mind. ;)

thanks for posting!

NT!

They proceed to do nasty things to ruin other peoples' lives.

more like a fear of livin...