Better Than Dead

I know it’s not hip in some circles to believe in hell, and I don’t believe in the classic hell of Christian mythology, but I do believe that when we die, we are forced to go through a complete life review with no filters, no rationalizations, and face up to who we have truly been. Our sins, if you will.*

That in itself would be truly hellish, having to face up to things, to uncork all the muck of our shadow selves. We’re all in store for it, I believe, to a greater or lesser degree. Perhaps children are exempt since they have so little life to review. I read a book by a mystic/psychic** who said that was how he perceived of hell, and it really resonated with me. He also said that the worse our misdeeds the more darkness we face in the afterlife, and it was only as we came to terms with what we had done and who we had been, own up to it, that we were able to move closer to the light. Someone like Hitler, he said, would be alone in complete cold and darkness until he came to terms with what he had done.

He didn’t believe in eternal damnation, just damnation that lasted as long as we clung to our old worldview. I don’t believe in eternal damnation, either. I think the Universe is more nuanced than that, that the worst hell is the one we impose upon ourselves, here and hereafter. I know this won’t be popular with those who want everlasting retribution against people they hate but think about how awful it would be to be stuck in the cold and dark, screaming alone in a void until you acknowledge the wrong you’ve done. Far worse than fire in my opinion. The agony of that fire would give you little time to think on and acknowledge the wrong you have done. It makes no sense.

Of course, there ain’t no guarantee that the mystical side of the universe makes any sense, but I do take comfort from the notion.

I guess I do believe in karma, but definitely not the way the New Age defines it: if you do something heinous in one life you’ll be born into horrible circumstances in your next life. This is essentially victim-blaming, and I reject it utterly. The Eastern concept of karma is more nuanced (and if I’ve gotten what follows wrong, I’d be very happy if someone corrected me): if you do something heinous in one life, you have the opportunity to make amends and change your ways in the same life, but if you don’t you will be born over and over again into the same circumstances, living out the same patterns until you learn to break free of them. That’s somewhat more palatable, but it doesn’t have enough retribution for my liking. (So, I will probably have to mend my ways and get rid of my need for retribution along the line somewhere.)

All this is just my own eccentric take on things, borrowed here and there from various mystical and religious texts. My own personal gnosis, if you will. It may not be pagan enough for someone who calls herself a pagan, but there it is.

I’ve been trying to do some of that reconciliation work on this side of the divide, acknowledging my past misdeeds, stripping away as much rationalization and excuses as possible. You know, dealing with my shadow side here rather than there. It isn’t easy and it’s very uncomfortable sometimes but when I do accomplish it, it’s quite liberating. I feel myself inching microscopically closer to the light.

*What is sin? I don’t think it’s about having sex outside “permitted” channels, or self-identity, or sloth, or any of the other minor venalities of conventional hell and brimstone religions. To me, sin is about doing physical, mental, or emotional harm to fellow creatures and the planet.

**I want to say it was George Anderson’s Lessons from the Light but it was a long time ago and I can’t be sure. I downloaded a Kindle sample and read the start of the book and it seems like the one but, as I say, it was a long time ago.

Random quote of the day:

“Work is a bleak redeemer, but it does redeem; it tires the flesh so that can’t tease the spirit.”

—Emily Dickinson, letter to Mary (Mrs. Samuel) Bowles, January 1878

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Every Messiah fails the moment he tries to redeem himself.”

—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

This one is a bit of a cheat. Yes, I will be presenting you with a mystery here, but I will also be reviewing the documentary film Resurrect Dead, which sums up and explores the mystery of the Toynbee tiles far better than I ever could. The film is available on Video On Demand (at least until the end of November on my cable carrier) and iTunes. I highly recommend it.

But what are the Toynbee tiles? you ask.

Sometime in the early to mid-1980s handcrafted linoleum tiles began appearing in the streets of major American cities. Mostly Philadelphia at first, the tiles have in subsequent years appeared in two dozen American cities as well as four in South America. The tile pictured above was found in downtown Washington, D.C. They mostly bear some variation on the same message:

Toynbee is thought to refer to the historian, Arnold J. Toynbee, whom Stanley Kubrick consulted with when preparing for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Toynbee once wrote in his book Experiences:

Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into ‘soul’ and ‘body’ is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body… Someone who accepts—as I myself do, taking it on trust—the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more ‘scientifically’ if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.

And if you’ve ever seen the film 2001, you know there’s some weird mamajama stuff going on at the end of it, once the surviving astronaut reaches Jupiter. The tilemaker seems to have combined these ideas—and probably some others—into a belief system which includes some kind of resurrection of the dead. This resurrection seems to depend on human beings believing it’s possible for their spirits to live on, so it’s vital to the tilemaker to get the word out: As you believe, so shall it be. His (for lack of a confirmed gender) belief is so ardent that he’s trying to spread the word through this remarkable means, mostly because he doesn’t believe he can get the message out any other way. Often his messages contain elements of conspiracy theory with a profound distrust of mainstream media, especially John Knight Ridder of Knight-Ridder. There’s also a strong element of anti-Semitism in the tilemaker’s beliefs/tiles.

The film, Resurrect Dead, is a great whodunit. It follows Justin Duerr, artist and man obsessed with the identity of the tilemaker, as he and his fellow investigators painstaking seek out clues. The director, Jon Foy, paces the film impeccably, keeping the excitement of the hunt at a steady drumbeat, even though it takes years of poking, prodding, and searching to yield answers. This is a fascinating exploration of obsession—of the filmmakers as well as the Toynbee tilemaker. There is a kind of redemption at the end, though I’m not sure I quite buy the final “confrontation.” It’s difficult sometimes to know what is fact and what is merely the will to believe. But then, that’s what the Toynbee tiles are all about, isn’t it? And Resurrect Dead is also about the longing after mysteries, about that special electric intensity they cause in human minds, and how sometimes the very best mysteries are the ones that are never completely solved.

Websites you may wish to peruse:

http://www.resurrectdead.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toynbee_tiles

The Mysterious Toynbee Tiles