By Jay Cradeur

November 6, 2006

Two months ago, I swung by my favorite coffee stop, The Pony Espresso.  It is located next to Bill’s Market on the way from Sebastopol to the beach.  As I now look back, this was about one month before The Bridge event in early October.  During that time, I was sharing with a few random people some of the details of the event, specifically the nature of the burial ritual.  I found it useful and very interesting to see and hear the reactions to the concept of the burial ritual.  Some folks dropped their jaw, while others got it and asked many questions about the ritual and the after effects.

While I was waiting for my 12 ounce mocha, extra hot, extra whip, I was speaking with a lovely young woman named Emily while she prepared my drink.  She works the weekends on occasion.  I told her about the burial ritual and she immediately suggested a book for me to read.  The book she recommended is White Noise by Don Delillo.

Since I rarely take utterances such as this for granted, I returned home and got on the internet to do some research.  After doing a Google search, and after listening to many samples of the sound of white noise, I went to amazon.com and placed my order for the book.  Over the last month, I have read the book, finding it infinitely engaging, clever, and well worth my time.

When I read a book, I need two things handy.  First, of course, are my reading glasses, else I won’t get far as my arms are no longer long enough.  Second is my trusty Mont Blanc pen, with medium black ink, which has been my constant companion since 1989.  When I read, and when I am struck by any single sentence, a turn of a phrase, or a whole brilliant paragraph, I mark it up and make comments.  As I was reading this book, I made quite a few marks.  Turns out this book, while telling the story of the main character, Jack, a college professor who teaches about Hitler, it is also quite a treatise about death and its impact on our lives.  I have culled out several of my favorite excerpts to share here.

“Tibetans try to see death for what it is.  It is the end of attachment to things.  This simple truth is hard to fathom.  But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it.  We can do so with clear vision, without awe or terror.  We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death for that matter.  We simply walk toward the sliding doors.  Waves and radiation.  Look how well-lighted everything is.  The place is sealed off, self-contained.  It is timeless.  Another reason why I think of Tibet.  Dying is an art in Tibet.  A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed.  Doors, windows sealed.  He has serious business to see to.  Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations.  Here we don’t die, we shop.  But the difference is less marked than you think.”

White Noise by Don Delillo

I wrote in a past article entitled Grail Gleanings 2006 that a very dear friend referred to me as an Angel of Death.  Why am I an Angel of Death?  It seems to me that death and the study of death, is the most direct route to enlightenment and freedom from the suffering that is all around us.  When we take an honest look at death, and put ourselves in situations, most often quite fearful situations, situations which create a death experience, something clicks within us, something which pulls us toward a greater awakening, a greater sense of self (or lack thereof!), and a great knowing of the nature of this reality.  When you begin to get a handle on death, all the other stuff (women, work, children, etc.) seems to fall into place.

“Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood.  You spot something out of the corner of your eye.  Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference.  A flaw in the world picture.  Either it shouldn’t be here or you shouldn’t.  Now the thing comes into full view.  It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs.  Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild.  The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self-the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation.  You see yourself in a new and intense way.  You rediscover yourself.  You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment.  The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surrounding, alone, distinct, whole.  The name we give to this complicated process is fear.”

White Noise by Don Delillo

I owe a great outpouring of gratitude for the book, White Noise.  It has put into words an answer to a few questions I have been asking for a long time.  Why am I the way I am? And… Why do I do what I do?  I mean, my greatest passion is working with men, supporting them to experience death.  For God’s sake, I bury men in the ground!  As far as I have been able to research, I and the other men who deliver The Bridge, are the only group in the United States that offer such a service.  It is weird.  It is extreme. It is intense.  And yet through all of this, it is the most beautiful space to share with my fellow brother man.  Men who have the courage to step into the abyss, they all experience a bliss and freedom and intimacy that is rare in our society among men.

“Because death is in the air…It is liberating, suppressed material.  It is getting us closer to things we haven’t learned about ourselves.  Most of us have probably seen our own death but haven’t known how to make the material surface.  Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is ‘I know this feeling.  I was here before.’”

“Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.”

“That’s right Jack.”

“And death?”  I said.

“Self, self, self.  If death can be seen as less strange and unreferenced, your sense of self in relation to death will diminish and so will your fear.”

“What do I do to make death less strange?  How do I go about it?”

White Noise by Don Delillo

This journey is a solitary venture.  And in the end we die just as we were born, as individuals.  While many people, perhaps most, couple up, have children, work with partners, it is still just you and your projections marching through time.  There is great fear in recognizing this.  So we pull together into groups, close our eyes, cover our ears, and chant “Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, Naaa, Naaa” to keep out the sound of our impending death.

“Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying.  To become a crowd is to keep out death.  To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone.  Crowds came for this reason above all others.  They were there to be a crowd.”

White Noise by Don Delillo

At some point in our lives, we come to realize there is no crowd.  This stark reality most notably slaps us in the face at the time of our death.  “I am alone.”  Yet, as this excerpt from the Tibetan Book of the Dead points out, just on the other side is a glorious merging, a blending, a unifying of all, of every thing,  that is sublime and peaceful, and most importantly, available here and now.

“Not only is the bardo experience after death alone, but also during our lifetime, similar experience occur constantly.  When a person is dwelling on that kind of union with the cosmos – everything is beautiful and peaceful and loving – there is the possibility of some other element coming in, exactly the same as the vision of the peaceful divinities.  You discover that there is a possibility of losing your ground, losing the whole union completely, losing your identity as yourself, and dissolving into an utterly and completely harmonious situation, which is, of course, the experience of the luminosity.  This state of absolute peacefulness seems to be extremely frightening, and there is often the possibility that one’s faith might be shaken by such a sudden glimpse of another dimension, where even the concept of union is not applicable any more.”

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Francesca Fremantel and Chogyam Trungpa

I don’t claim to be enlightened.  I don’t claim ultimate freedom from suffering.  I don’t claim to be a master of the universe.  I do recognize some things that feel very important to me.  I do realize that I have walked far down a path of which most don’t even pause to glance.  And most of all, I have repeatedly felt that sacred space that is created when death is near.  It is holy.  It is trans-dimensional.  It is mind blowing.  It is slow and quick at the same time.  It is my home.

“I know how you feel.  But the tough part is yet to come.  You’ve said good-bye to everyone but yourself.  How does a person say good-bye to himself?  It’s a juicy existential dilemma…. That’s what is all comes down to in the end,” he said.  “A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people.   How does he say good-bye to himself?”

White Noise by Don Delillo

So in the end, I suppose my answer to “Why am I the way I am?” is this:  I help people to say good bye to themselves!   It is a beautiful and honorable service to provide.  Few will cross my path, for fear is the mighty beast.  But for those that do, we will dance, dance, dance.

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