Terminal Lucidity Quotes

WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and outlive it. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow–acting suicide–murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful: Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe–inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half–aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder - you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination - and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertige of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.

He treasured his last visit with her, when, in a moment of lucidity, she’d recognized her only son, reminding him of Gideon’s mission in Judges. “You’ve always been one of the few, James. Keep watching the horizon.

mind and breath (or life energy) are closely connected. Influencing the one means influencing the other. When we are upset, we breathe faster. When we are calm, our breathing slows down. Yogins understood this early on and invented a battery of techniques for controlling the breath in order to control the mind. These techniques are called prānāyāma, which is widely translated as “breath control.” The literal meaning of this Sanskrit term is “lengthening of the life energy.” This is accomplished through breathing rhythmically and slowly and through the special yogic practice of prolonged retention of the breath, either before or after inhalation. In Patanjali’s eightfold path, breath control constitutes the fourth limb. He did not describe or prescribe any specific technique, and elaboration was left to the adepts of Hatha-Yoga many centuries later. They, like most other Tantric adepts, were eager to explore the prāna-maya-kosha, or the “etheric body,” and its subtle energetic environment. By contrast, most contemporary schools of Hatha-Yoga ignore prāna and prānāyāma, just as they ignore the mental disciplines and spiritual goals, and instead promote a plethora of physical postures (āsana). This emphasis is problematical, as it has led to an unfortunate reductionism and distortion of the traditional yogic heritage. The gradual re-inclusion of prānāyāma into contemporary Hatha-Yoga, however, is very promising, because this practice sooner or later leads to an experiential encounter with prāna, which is distinct from mere oxygen. According to Yoga, we are meant to live a full 120 years. Since we take 21,600 breaths every day, the total number of breath in our lifetime will be 946,080,000 breaths. This may seem like a lot, but we also know that life goes by very quickly. Therefore it makes sense to want our every breath count, and Yoga makes this possible. 53 Cultivating Wisdom WISDOM ARISES IN US whenever the quality of sattva grows stronger in the mind. Sattva, which literally means “being-ness,” is one of three primary qualities (guna) of creation. The other two qualities are rajas (the dynamic principle) and tamas (the principle of inertia). These primary qualities underlie absolutely everything that is other than the superconscious Spirit, which is pure Awareness. According to Yoga and Sāmkhya, they are the behavioral modes of prakriti, often translated as “Nature” but standing for the universe in all its dimensions. Together, in various mixtures, they shape all forms at whatever level of existence, material and mental. Only at the transcendental level of prakriti—which is called prakriti-pradhāna or “creatrix foundation”—do the three qualities exist in perfect balance. As soon as this primordial balance is disturbed, the process of creation sets in, beginning with the most subtle (mental) manifestations and terminating with the material realm. Sattva represents the principle of lucidity or transparency, as it manifests in and through wisdom. Just as the moon, which has no atmosphere, oceans, or vegetation, reflects the light of the sun, so sattva reflects the super-conscious Spirit

History is liminal, the threshold between what we know and can't know; land and sky a single coordinate plane in the mist. The one who rescues the rescuer. Terminal lucidity. The few kilometres, a turn of the head, between surplus and famine. Surgery by the light of a car battery. Stars invisible in daylight.

Sometimes I think of my death,’ wrote Kurosawa, ‘I think of ceasing to be... and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.’ The story of a man diagnosed with stomach cancer, Kurosawa’s film is a serious contemplation of the nature of existence and the question of how we find meaning in our lives. Opening with a shot of an x-ray, showing the main character’s stomach, Ikiru, tells the tale of a dedicated, downtrodden civil servant who, diagnosed with a fatal cancer, learns to change his dull, unfulfilled existence, and suddenly discovers a zest for life. Plunging first into self-pity, then a bout of hedonistic pleasure-seeking on the frentic streets of post-war Tokyo, Watanabe - the film’s hero, finally finds satisfaction through building a children’s playground. In this, the role of his career, Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, a senior civil servant sunk in ossified routine - a man who, as the dispassionate narrator tells us, has lived like a corpse for twenty-five years. Confronted with the news that he has terminal cancer with only months to live, he finds himself driven to give some meaning to his life. This was one of Kurosawa’s own favourites among his films. It grew, he said, out of a sense of his own mortality. Although he was only 42 and had yet to make most of his finest films, he was tormented with doubts about what his own life would be worth, saying, ‘I keep feeling I have lived so little. My heart aches with this feeling.’ From this angle, the film can be seen as a form of therapy, Kurosawa reassuring himself, and us, that life *can* be made to have meaning, even under the shadow of imminent death. As the critic Richard Brown wrote, Ikiru ‘consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when all’s said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task which is meaningful *to him*. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.

Even the most convinced skeptic is tripped up by the simple universality of the recalled experience of death. We have interviewed people who entered the grey zone on a rural road in Iran, a busy street in London, a market town in Mexico, or a farm in the American Midwest. They have had these experiences at four years old, twenty-two years old, forty-eight years old, and seventy-five years old. Some died years before social media and the internet. Some are young people who live “terminally online” today. Some are devout, some agnostic, some atheist. No matter what their background, these vastly disparate individuals describe the same experiences, in similar terms, and using almost identical vocabulary. If a recalled experience of death is simply a “long, strange trip” or a dream, then how is it that a young student in the Middle East in the 1970s might dream the same dream as a world-renowned surgeon in America ten years ago? Or a child comes to share the same experience as a grandmother?