Words at the Threshold

Started reading WORDS AT THE THRESHOLD by Lisa Smartt. This is a book about what people say at the end of their life. It spawned the database www.finalwordsproject.org.

I see this type of reading as facing death. What the charnel grounds meditation did for people with that option, the literature on death does that for the cerebral readers of the west. The Denial of Death has been a seminal text for me, and I wish not to defensively avert my gaze, but to see it as the larger tapestry of impermanence, conditioned coproduction. Our world is sanitized. It's hard to get close to death. There are no charnel grounds to go meditate at.

When Smartt used the phrase "word salad", it was to disparage the concept as someone who doesn't understand. She reports the metaphors of dying can elude us, but can make sense often.

Reading this book I wrote relatives and asked about last words in the family. I thought about what I'd like my ending to be like. Taking a look at it, I decided some CDs I want to listen to: Bud Powell,  Grant Green, Lester Young, Billie Holliday, La Traviata, La Bohem, Hydrogen Jukebox and Satyagraha. The books I want read to me. I'd like the satipatthana sutta read to me, the diamond sutra and other perfection of wisdom texts, the precious garland, the bodhicaryavatara, songs of Milarepa, the Lotus Sutra, the sutra of the golden light, the lankavatara sutra and the pure land sutras, a survey of Buddhism.

Sangharakshita wrote about the 6 element practice, which he learned from Yogi Chen, and how it's another way to look at dismantling, seeing that there is no essential self. Sangharakshita suggests you only really do that one on retreat, in an environment where deep practice is supported. I kept doing it after one retreat because I had a white light experience, and I started to feel like I was dying. That's the whole point, a spiritual death, to be reborn, but it calls for supportive conditions and the workaday life is not supportive. I do it a few times when I build up my practice, but I also let it fall down to rebuild again. Or rather it falls down despite my best efforts at vigilance. You can listen to a version of the meditation on the Insight Timer, lead by Bodhipoksa. Here is the free buddhist audio search. Do this practice within the community, don't do it without connecting to a tradition of your own choosing.

Then there is volunteering at a Hospice, like Norman Fisher discusses in one of his essays. I'm considering that.

May you be happy, may you be well.

chapter 5

Alan Watts' book Psychotherapy East and West, treats Buddhist liberation as another boondoggle by civilization to tame humans. So you can imagine his last chapter is going to be a bit of a letdown. His suggestion is to dance with life, a full eroticism with all of life and not just the genitals.

He is as usual eminently quotable: "The type of human being who submits to this culture is, almost literally, a zombie." He is talking about the human who submits to technology. At times like these he doesn't nail down his insight cleanly, he is more like a continental philosopher who uses philosophy more like an art, than a logic inquiry. His statements are suggestively artistic.

In another place he quotes a 6000 year old Egyptian he quote from a Fromm book: "Our earth is degenerate...Children no longer obey their parents." Boy, wish everyone heard this. I hear this kind of statement all the time. It comes from nostalgia for a past that didn't exist, like the mother who tells her children she would never do this or that as a child, but really she did.

In the end this book is impressionistic. I can't help but think how Watts ended his life divorced from his wife, fired from his job, living like a total genital hedonist. What he actually did with his ideas does not seem to be where I want to end. His rhetoric can have a liberative feel to it, but it's target is vague and unclear, and does disentangle the bewilderment and confusion, the fog we all walk through in the world we find ourselves in. It does encourage one to believe in themselves and be bold, which might be useful to the insecure. In the end it is an interesting meditation on psychotherapy and the guru relationship, even if it fizzles out, after it gains some momentum.

Chapter 4 Psychotherapy East and West

This book seems to get better going forward. The Countergame chapter is an intense critique of psychotherapy, and presents it as similar to the guru relationship. That psychotherapy comes crashing down, implies also that Vajrayana Buddhism comes crashing down. I felt it was a strong critique of both.

On the psychotherapy front, he wonders if we can truly free associate, and if we could, why would we do that with a stranger? In the end we have conflict between society and our impulses. The therapist can be anti-society, or he can buy into "symptoms" and "mental illness". The way to get over mental illness is to accept your feelings, and when you screw up, you are not accepting them. It's hard not to get past a game of one-up-manship.

The discussion of games, made me think about Games People Play, a book that is 60+ years old, and that I read as a teenager, and found it quite bewildering. I hadn't really been that aware of social activity, but on some level the games seemed authoritative the way the writer wrote about them. I think today we would perhaps not put women into such a negative light, for some of the games, it feels dated in my memory, me reading the book 30+ years ago.

I also think of Knots by RD Laing, a very different kind of book, and kind of poetic book about his therapeutic experiences, and the knots people tie them selves up in.

The Countergame chapter is bigger, more of a critique of the knots and games people play in psychotherapy. He bases the chapter on a paper by J. Hailey. When you google that name you can come up with Jay Hailey, a family therapist. A little more looking and indeed his is the author of the essay that Watts quotes in the book, and is collected in a book of collected essays.

Not sure if he is the same one because they don't list publications, only books. He seems family therapy royalty sitting next to Minnuchin. Strategic family therapy sounds like the way child welfare is done today:

A therapist employing strategic therapy must:
Identify solvable problems.
Set goals.
Design interventions to achieve those goals.
Examine the responses.
Examine the outcome of the therapy.

This also seems like a forerunner to the short techniques of cognitive behavioralism. Insurance companies love brief therapy and there's something to be said for a non-endless therapy.

Anyway, I found this chapter interesting, might have to reread this chapter again in the future.