Limbic and other fundamentalisms

Bozeman, 6:00 A.m. Hint of rain in the smoky air. Respiratory system compromised. I keep thinking I have a cold, then allergies, then I realize once again that it's the fires north and west of here, which obscure the mountains in a haze so that the deeper the breath, the more smoke I breathe in. How I feel for those who must live here! So much easier to just be traveling through. Reminds me of 1988, the yellowstone fire year, when a feeling of claustrophic dread set in and caught us day and night, for months on end.

Last night's book event another totally new experience. My hostess, Helen, decided to hold it in the place she works as a nurse, in the conference room of a long-term care facility. So in order to reach the room where we were to talk of loss and grief and their gifts, we had to run the gauntlet of ghosts, thin, emaciated, hospital-gown-white clad men and women, sitting still and quiet here and there, in no seeming communication with each other or the world outside their own interiors. What are they thinking? Are they thinking? Are they afraid to die? Do they want to die?

Seven of us gathered under harsh fluorescent light, pulling cloth-upholstered aimchairs into a circle aside from the conference table. From talking with her beforehand, I discover that one of the participants is VERY experienced in the varieties of experience encountered as humans lay dying and their families, she tells me, are 98% of the time, not on the same page with them. This reminded me of what the hospice director in Jackson told me, that often families will try to keep their loved ones alive as long as possible, despite their own wishes, because to them, this is how they show their love.

Love, in other words, as attachment, and, if the Buddha is right, guaranteed to cause suffering.

The experienced woman from last night took care of her own parents as they were dying, and works with elderly now, both in hospice and otherwise. Her mentor, she tossed as an aside as she left (she had to go early), was Elizabeth Kubler Ross.

Decades ago, this woman had a near-death experience on the operating table, and ever since then she has been in an altered state, with a number of extrasensory capabilities. I urged her to tell us her story, but (and I am grateful now), she insisted that I talk about the book first. So I did, but I must say, I kept feeling myself under her watchful eye. As if she was assessing me, somehow.

In any case, once she started to tell her near-death story, which was amazingly detailed and descriptive, the evening took off in another direction.

To summarize: she spoke of being above the operating table, watching the doctors frantically trying to revive her while a translucent being of light showed her a big book, and kept turning the pages on the future—up to 2011.

Somewhere in her tale I began to feel uncomfortable. She began to speak of "God," and God's plans for the human race, and a war between angels and fallen angels, and the Rosicrutians and the great plan that is unfolding now, since 7/07/07, where people chose which side to be on, and cannot go back . . .

As she went on, bolstered, and in part contradicted, by another woman in the room who also has a sort of black-and-white, fundamentalist, born-again, absolutist view of the world, I felt my stomach turn, clench, tie in knots as some of the people in the group (six women, one man), started accosting, in a gentle way, but firmly and with certainty, each other with their beliefs.

How many times have I been privy to such conversations, which lead nowhere, and seem to cause only separation? The one new element last night, at least for me, was the man, who, despite being a conservative Christian, had an amazingly light and attentive attitude towards others and their beliefs. To my belief that "we need to get below our beliefs to what we all have in common, our experience of loss, and grief, which, if fully processed, releases into love," he asked, kindly, softly, wondering, as a real question, "but then how do we make sure that people do the right thing?" (I paraphrase.) In other words, he was concerned that without some kind of guiding principles (beliefs), chaos might ensue. I imagine that this IS the usual fear of those who feel that society needs rules to stave off a Hobbesian war of all against all.

Helen and I then expressed our common view, that people, when given enough love and left to their own devices, will naturally develop and express their own unique natures and harmonize with others. Our generation speaking. Or at least our generation as we were in our heyday, the '60s. This man too, Helen told me later, had done his share of acid, and had participated just as we had in that storied time, and she has long been impressed with his open-hearted approach to conversations about ultimate beliefs, despite his own conservative cast.

I contrast his soft, gentle, untroubled way with my own emotional embroilment as I detect even a whiff of fundamentalism. Much like the Dalai Lama, whom we all admire for his obvious compassion and light-hearted acceptance of even the greatest suffering and injustice, this man apparently does not attach himself to his beliefs, at least not to the extent that he becomes emotionally upset when others contradict him.

So I'm still a fundamentalist. A limbic fundamentalist. Attached to getting rid of fundamentalism. My instinctive revulsion for black and white thinking is itself a polarized reaction to it, and I thank both the woman who started the conversation, and the man who showed me that one could be in it and yet not of it, for their gift.

This journey is such a teacher! Over and over again, I discover another part of myself that feels rough, hard-edged, in need of gentle care. And it feels that this journey is guiding me to understand, little by little, more and more of why I have undertaken it.

My focus on grief and loss does lie beneath beliefs, and my way of working with these experiences and the feelings that they engender is not theoretical, not based on belief, but on an attunement with the body and its natural wisdom. If fundamentalism is the problem, then re-membering our connection with our bodies and through them, the earth of which they are made, is the solution. I aim for the spirit, by working with the flesh.