May 04th, 2024

                                  Ensoulment: The Blessed Dead and Those Ensnared by Life
Like a lot of people, I’ve tried meditating in order to reduce stress, calm my PTSD, and generally make myself healthier. Those who’ve done some meditation may have smiled wryly just reading that first sentence, because it contains at least a couple things wrong with it. A large body of the literature on meditation says that, when done correctly, there is no “trying.” Meditation is simply tuning into a process which is constantly running in the background for us (like a computer program.) The act of meditation merely involves rediscovering what is already there. If one allows themselves to breathe simply and naturally—through the belly as a baby, rather than through the chest, like a stressed adult—meditation happens. Or rather, it just is, waiting for you to enter it, like a river—or waiting for you to ride it, like an electrical current. Close your eyes, breathe, and start singing the body electric.
Also, meditating for some reason, some goal—as if the universe were some partner in a deal from which a quid pro quo might be wrested—is fallacious. Done correctly (according to most modalities) there is no trying, there is just being, and in some cases, nonbeing. There are of course health benefits to meditation, of both mind and body, demonstrably proven in clinical studies. More than likely you’ll also observe positive changes in your life anecdotally if you do it and take it seriously. But in order for these benefits to be found they must not be sought. And since I’m starting to sound like a wannabe monk in his sand garden, dispensing paradoxical koans, I’ll stop.
The point is that I’ve at least researched the subject (as much as any time-pressed, ADHD-addled Westerner might.) And I’ve tried (without trying to try too hard or too consciously) to meditate. And, as with learning to write or any other endeavor I’ve undertaken in earnest, I kept what worked, discarded what didn’t, and added some things.
My technique at this point is about as syncretic as it gets, and is subject to further shifts, changes, additions and removals of certain aspects at any given time. “You never step into the same river twice,” and no meditation session is exactly the same as the last. That said, there is a throughline that seems to be beginning to appear in my work with the body and mind.
For instance, I like to imagine that I’m dead. This sounds a little morbid at first, but it’s frankly the only way I can succumb to the present moment, to let go of unpleasant memory and future-related worry. I tell myself that I have died, that there is nothing to worry about, no light I accidentally left on in the house, no unpaid bill, no ringing phone. It’s the only way I can really get myself to unclench.
I go through the entire cycle of death and decomposition while lying there, finding it soothing, at times even sublime. Usually it works better when I go outside to do it.
I imagine my body not as some ghoulish skeletal vestige, but as a sort of compost heap where the animals can play and get use from me. I had “dominion over the Earth” for years, eating animals while feeling only the most modest pangs of conscience. Now, after adding my own carboniferous and microplastic detritus to Gaia’s clogged arteries, it’s payback time. Or at least back to the bottom of the food chain, with one less person contributing to the catastrophe of the Anthropocene.
Despite being “dead,” I still breathe, and still have the basic use of my sensorium, which, in my faux death, has ironically grown stronger.
I listen to the chirp of birds around me, the scrape of the squirrels clawing their way along the points of the picket fence. I imagine them coming closer than they actually do, taking tentative steps toward me, sniffing. Scurrying away and returning and repeating the skittish ritual before finally working up the nerve to land on my body and stay there. And, once that bold first bird or squirrel lands, proves this behemoth isn’t sleeping but is actually dead, the rest of the Lilliputians move in, en masse.
Eventually the larger buzzards swoop down, peck out the morsel-like eye meat, strip the skin from my face, spear my soft belly with their sharp beaks. Then they return to the trees, or take to the skies with rashers of peeled flesh in tow. At that point, it’s as nature poet Robinson Jeffers put it: I ride along, enjoying my own “enskyment” (sic) as some piece of myself soars through the clouds.
I’ll spare you the rest of my imaginings, as it only gets more macabre.
Not every session is successful (again, that quid pro quo thinking), but sometimes the experience can be truly transcendent, liberating and seemingly without limits. Especially when the sun is shining but it’s not too hot, the birds are singing but the dogs in the neighboring yards aren’t barking their heads off.
I imagine my soul leaving my body, the real “me” that is the actually me and not this husk with its face and its ego and its petty postmodern neuroses. Whatever was there before I was even a child, before I even was. It’s my return to some larger whole, an entity without number, a kind of giant glowing blue-hot ball of fire, a bug-zapper where the bugs willingly fly to escape being.
I imagine it looking a bit like something I saw in one of those Pixar cartoons while hanging out with my neighbors and their kids. The movie was called “Soul” and (very briefly) dealt with a jazz musician who dies and must reckon with deep spiritual matters. Upon dying, the musician (played by Jamie Foxx) finds himself in a netherworld, a liminal kind of spiritual airport, a limbo between two worlds. It’s not as bureaucratic as the one in “Beetlejuice,” but in some ways it’s more disconcerting. There is a conveyor belt, almost like a cattle chute, which is leading the dead upward into a ball of what looks like blue ionized plasma.
Most of those slated for reintegration into the big blue ball don’t fight it. And upon making contact with its corona, they seemed to evaporate, like bugs hitting a zapper. But the jazz musician fears that ultimate transmigration, thinking it might mean annihilation, an end of everything rather than the beginning of something new, a revelation and rebirth.
This flight from the inevitable rejoining of the oneness, I think, is what accounts for so much restlessness during meditation.
 Eknath Easwaran described the mind as being a bit like an unruly, poorly-trained dog that can’t keep its eyes on the path before it where it’s walking. It wants to light after butterflies, sniff the butts of fellow dogs, chase that soaring Frisbee being tossed by frat boys on the greensward.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live, to break from discipline and run free, but there’s a time and a place. And that’s most times and most places. This half-hour or hour of meditation is a gift you give to yourself, a reminder that needn’t be a memento mori, but usually is in my case.
Sometimes while sitting there I wonder where we come from. “From an egg and a sperm” is the obvious scientific answer, which then becomes a zygote. We might trace our origins even further back, though, into the seminiferous tubules in our father’s testicles (which, believe it or not, include about two miles of plumbing.)
All good and well, but how did we get there, into those gamete precursor germ cells, before even becoming tadpoles? And before that?
You can do this forever, going back in an infinite regress, a why that leads back to another why until you have to concede, “I don’t know.” Science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon (who gave the world the phrase “Live Long and Prosper”) used to sign his letters and autograph with a strangely curlicued Q. It meant “Ask the next question,” and the one after that.
Sturgeon was dealing more with challenging normative assumptions rather than questions of original generation, abiogenesis or the primordial soup where life first began, but his idea still holds. Follow the line of questioning back far enough, and the why can only be answered honestly by “I don’t know.”
Even the hard science scribe Arthur C. Clarke conceded as much, with his quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Start with a deist conceit that we’re all part of a clockwork mechanism created by God (or the Gods) and you get the same problem.
The ancients believed in spontaneous generation, that maggots actually were born of rotten meat, rather than tiny eggs invisible til the microscope started revealing “animalcules.” They thought substances like wood contained “phlogiston,” which was released when subjected to fire, because they didn’t know about oxygen.
The moderns laughed at this quaintness, until they tried to figure out how complex molecules and proteins were created from the “primordial soup.” Scientists conducted experiments to figure out how a world made of mostly ammonia and hydrogen eventually started to result in life. They managed, in lab conditions, to show how simple molecular structures gave rise to more complex ones, but these were only the “building blocks of life,” not life.
We were suddenly back to the world of phlogiston and spontaneous generation, hypothesizing that maybe lightning struck the whole mess right and “something happened.” The spark was suggested to be an electrostatic charge, but it might as well have been a divine one.
Most adults have experienced this humbling moment when a child, merely by posing one question after another, finally reveals this initial and ultimate unknowable Ursprung. The unanswerable “how” (forget the “why”) of getting from nothing to something, nowhere to somewhere. Comedian Louis C.K. even had a bit about it, back before he got really famous.
The ancient Greeks had a concept for this appearing here, in this world, from the aether. They called it “ensoulment,” the moment where one is caught, or snatched from nonbeing (that big blue electric ball, if you will) and brought here.
We tend to think of the one tadpole that reaches the egg out of the millions as the lucky one, the “lottery winner.” It’s the one that—through pluck, luck, or pure statistical mechanical law (something to do with tail length and motility) reaches the fertile soil of the womb. There, in the words of the Greeks (and in some Christian concepts) it begins to “quicken.”
“Quickening,” is a bit like what happens to batter when it is stirred until it congeals, gains greater substance, becomes colloidal like mayonnaise, sort of existing in two states. Soon, though it goes from mostly liquid to mostly solid, though that baby will need water every day of its life and its blood is mostly saltwater.
But this process of becoming, this “winning” doesn’t feel like winning when I’m lying there for twenty minutes, or thirty minutes, or an hour. When the simulated death starts to feel like real peace.
Life and living and breathing and being start to feel like something else entirely. They start to feel like a snare that has caught my foot.
Death doesn’t seem so bad when I reach this state. At least not my own death. If someone (a family member) or something (like my dog) dies and I’m still here, death will hurt like a bastard. But it will hurt me a hell of a lot more than it will hurt them, I think.
Life and ensoulment and quickening, having a self, all seem like burdens in such moments. They all seem like temporal prisons, traps to ultimately escape. Looking at things this way definitely makes it easier to cope with the entropy my already half-broken body is enduring now: the pain in my shoulder; the arthritis; the waning sex drive and greying hair. I turned forty-two last month and “forty is ten years older than thirty-nine,” as Frank Irving Cobb once quipped.
I’m not suggesting, however, that we all commit suicide in order to escape this world, or that we all become worshippers of Thanatos, God of Death.
There are lessons to be learned from the agony of being, of desire. There are even lessons to be learned from self-inflicted suffering, drug addiction, gambling, sexual desire, which are really only attempts—at their most self-destructive levels—to reach nonbeing. To get that feeling of being loved not just by someone (pleasant) but by everyone who is also loving each other in some unseparated whole (euphoric.)
Nor is life just a nihilistic and pyrrhic attempt to gain joy which cannot be gained. There is happiness to be had here, and victories, even though “[these] too will pass.”
But honestly, for all I know there is no Big Blue Ball, and nonbeing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Maybe Joker’s right, that the dead only know one thing, that it is better to be alive.
 












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