Birthday Reflections

 

 

I. 

 

February 13th is a day of quiet reflection for me now: the day I was born (1963) and the day my mother died (2023).

 

In the Bhagavad Gita it is written: Learned is he to whom the mystery of birth and death is revealed. [1]

 

But I'm not a Hindu and don't particularly wish to be learned in the religious sense indicated here. For I remain sceptical of the idea that there is a mystery to be revealed. And even if there is, I prefer that Isis remain veiled and keep her secrets. 

 

 

II. 

 

Not that the idea of reincarnation is much of a mystery any longer. For it's common knowledge that Hindus believe that the salvational goal is to fully realise the self as some kind of pure, unchanging spiritual essence following a series of material and transient incarnations.

 

Birth and death are facts of little real importance, according to Hindu teaching. What matters is liberating the soul from this cycle so that it may achieve lasting perfection in the great sea of Being that lies beyond life and death.   

 

Thus we can say of the great Hindu gurus what Lawrence says of Buddha, Plato, and Jesus; namely, that these grand idealists were utter pessimists, teaching that Truth lay in "abstracting oneself from the daily, yearly, seasonal life of birth and death and fruition, and in living in the 'immutable' or eternal spirit" [2]. 

 

Personally, I don't want to move from the known world to the unknown world; from the visible to the invisible; from the seen to the unseen. I know, as Lawrence knew, that such abstraction brings "neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity" [3].

 

I'm happy to live and die and be endlessly reincarnated in the flesh like a karma chameleon forever changing colour, shape, form, etc., and I don't want to lose myself in the infinite completeness of the Whole thank you very much. 

 

If that means never being free from desire, pain, anxiety, and delusion - never obtaining supreme wisdom or eternal peace - well, again, that's fine with me. 

 

When holy fools tell me I must learn not to identify with the objects of the world I immediately wish to bring one of these objects crashing down on their heads; when they tell me not to become attached to my body I want to give them a kick up the arse. 

To conclude, if I may, with another quotation from Lawrence: 

 

"For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh." [4] 

Notes 

 

[1] The Bhagavad Gita ('Song of God') is a 700-verse Hindu scripture, which forms chapters 23-40 of Book 6 of the epic Mahabharata called the Bhishma Parva. The work is dated to the second half of the first millennium BC.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', published together with Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 330.

 

[3] Ibid., p. 331.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 149. 

 

 

This post is for all those who were born (like me and Kim Novak) or who died (like my mother and Richard Wagner) on this day.