by Lei Wang
If there’s ever an apocalypse, I’ve told my friends, please sacrifice me for your continued survival. Eat me early on, while I still have viable meat. Don’t be shy. I’m not offering out of selflessness; I’d just rather not suffer. I am afraid something might be wrong with the survival part of my brain. After all, just as there is attachment to existence, there is attachment too to non-existence. I am scared of many things, but death itself is not one of them. I fear living more.
I am afraid of injury, of poverty, of failure to meet my own potential—that yawning maw between who I am and who I imagine I could be—most of all of lovelessness, perhaps the root of all fears. Because I guess I still don’t get it. I don’t get how we’re supposed to only love certain people, the ones we know, and not others, though I am as guilty of this as anyone, if not more. How even then, unless you are given permission or related by blood or unless they really need your help in some unequivocal way, you are still supposed to hide your love for the ones you know, lest you overwhelm them. I don’t know why we can love someone and then stop. Or why I’m still trying to make noises of love to people who aren’t making noises of love back. I don’t understand hunger when there is such abundance, when love is free.
To love is to take someone else as part of you, the spiritual teacher Teal Swan says: a form of returning to the wholeness. When you love someone, you are no longer separately acting out of your own self-interests, or your self-interest naturally expands to include those you love. But where is the line between that and codependency, a lack of boundaries?
Mostly, I still don’t get why we can’t just hang out with the people we like, all the time, and preferably somewhere in Italy. Why do we live in different cities? Why is there such a thing as work? Why all these walls? Or space-time at all? These are rather childish questions, I know.
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I just want to be part of the cosmic soup again: what I imagine happens when our consciousnesses leave the containers of our bodies is that they become uncontained, returned to the oneness. As the poet Gregory Orr said, “To be alive: not just the carcass. But the spark.” Somehow I think we will retain the sparks after we lose the carcasses.
This perception of death, which is really a disguise of everlasting life, which may very well be a delusion, is extremely appealing. I guess it’s also the classic division between spiritual and non-spiritual points of view. Every religious origin story seems to imply there was some kind of primordial wholeness—a paradise, a perfection—and then a brokenness, a separation, a human forgetting. The fall. We have lost the naturalness of the Tao. We are living in a time of disillusionment. It is our job to to repair. Tikkun olam. Enlightenment is a kind of recognition, a remembering.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston writes of a Zulu origin myth in which humans at the beginning were huge brilliant beings who glittered and shone, but the angels were jealous and smashed us into pieces, but still the pieces glittered and shone, so they covered each of the pieces in mud. Thus we are now sparks covered in carcasses of mud trying to find the sparks in each other again.
This myth is a bit misanthropic, of course. The word carcass. The word mud. The sense that who we truly are is so much better than who we have ended up being, through no faults of our own. But the spirituality I am drawn to doesn’t shame humanness either. In Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch proposes the idea of souls getting together in-between lives on Earth to pre-determine how they’re going to interact. “I want to learn forgiveness in the next life,” a soul might say at an interdimensional conference, and another soul then volunteers to wrong them. Liz Gilbert has a similar concept she calls the Cosmic Boardroom, which she introduces in her recent memoir, All the Way to the River, about losing the love of her life to drug addiction and cancer.
The Cosmic Boardroom is where we check in, after our lives are over, with other souls that were on our journey: even the ones who did us wrong did it for our growth. A time to laugh and forgive everything that happened for your evolution from a higher perspective. Gilbert believes Earth is in fact a very special school for souls looking to learn particularly hard lessons, which makes me feel special indeed. Those of us who believe in the existence of Earth School believe that existence is easier outside of it. Death could in fact be a reprieve. And yet we shouldn’t drop out of school.
How nice, for now, to not be seen right away for who we truly are, to have outsides and insides. How nice to have a little separation between self and other, how nice to have secrets. Perhaps the most precious thing of all is to remember when we are alive that we are the ocean and still enjoy being a single drop in it, a single wave. We are both a thing in the soup and the soup. Maybe all greed is a greed for oneness, misappropriated. Maybe to be famous is just to be, in some convoluted way, more true to who we really are: lots of people can see you are a spark, but it gets lonely unless you can see their sparks, too.
But how do I know there is even a soup to return to? Isn’t it just a nice consolation?
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Maybe I especially want to choose my own delusions since a friend’s mother died this week. She was (is) my favorite painter in the world. We have not really been in touch for a dozen years now, but we always ask about each other through her son. (At one point, I considered marrying her son to be closer to her.) Even up to the end—she had cancer—she was not scared because she had lived a good life, raised good sons, painted good paintings, and because she was Christian and believed she was returning to her maker. I don’t know where she is now, but I don’t think she is in a Heaven unopen to heathens, as if different religions were exclusive clubs (even if paradise means “walled garden”); we are then just reinforcing the separation hierarchies of Earth. Her son, who is Buddhist, says that wherever she is, she is unencumbered now.
Mourning her, yet believing she is freer now than she was, I wasn’t quite sure what I was even mourning. We weren’t in touch, did not live near each other, did not otherwise see or hear or touch or share meals with each other—the perks of being embodied. For years, she existed to me as memories, as spirit, as essence, and so she continues to exist to me—and yet nevertheless something is gone. Perhaps even the potentiality of a hug is gone. I feel connected to her, because I once did, and the connection remains alive to me. It makes me think of all the other connections I don’t keep in touch with, because we simply don’t. I could feel, too, as I cried for her, this sadness waiting in the wings for a legitimate outlet to come out: not just for her, but for all connections lost. Maybe everyone not in our immediate vicinity or contact is dead to us in a way. One death feels more final, important, mournable, but no death is frivolous: even the death of a fling. But the limits of time and space and energy are different from the limits of the heart.
I keep a list of names of over 700 people that I know, have known, who have touched me in some way. Only a handful of them are people I share space-times materiality with, or at least phone-time materiality, but to all of them I send unconditional positive regard. I say “unconditional positive regard,” but I really mean love. I go down the list sometimes methodically, with efficient prayers, and sometimes nostalgically, remembering their essences. My college acquaintances, my high school English and biology teachers, first crush, last kiss, a 33-hour French train boyfriend from Beijing to Ulanbataar—who knows why they each hold a place in my heart and I choose to remember them this way? Who knows if they think of me at all? There are some people on my love list I have only ever met on Zoom. Not even on the list, but there was that one IRS customer service agent whose name I don’t know who was truly lovely and I still think about and wish well from time to time.
My stickiness index is high; I can hold people in my heart for a really long time. But maybe I am just preparing for the cosmic soup: the ultimate cuddle puddle, even if the sense of touch is obscured or replaced with the sense of infusion. Who needs Italy when space is the ultimate commune? My therapist has reminded her clients: “Everyone you ever love will leave you.” And it’s true. But I guess I like to believe everyone you ever love will also be back together again.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut has a different way of rendering the cosmic soup: through time, not space. He does it through describing aliens called the Tralfamadorians, who perceive in four dimensions: “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”
We, unlike the Tralfamadorians, don’t naturally perceive in this way, but even to imagine that the past is not necessarily gone, only in a different location, is to feel a sense of everlasting; simply because we have existed, we will continue to in some way, versus nonexistence altogether. Still, this may be a callous way to think of death. Would a massacre feel as morally weighty to the Tralfamadorians? For Earth School devotees, are we to forgive all oppressors, believing they have volunteered at the soul conference for difficult jobs? I’m sure there are theological arguments to be made here, which are outside the scope of this column.
A friend of mine doesn’t like the thought of cosmic soup. She doesn’t want to love her husband AS the oneness loving itself; she wants to love him as her, a being separate from him. Perhaps this is the best part of Earth School: forgetting we are one, and then remembering through the amnesia and all the barriers of embodiment, through love. After all: no disillusionment, no enlightenment. A guru on his deathbed (perhaps Sri Ramakrishna?) said of his Earthly life, “How nice, to have had just enough separation for friends to remain friends.”
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