Memento Mori
To contemplate our death everyday
As a way to live to the fullest
Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand – and melting like a snowflake.
Remember death
That’s the meaning of memento mori,
The stoics were famous for practicing this,
For keeping death in front of everyday
Every moment.
To zero in on the ultimate expression for their lives,
For the use of the their time,
Which always exists in the moment called now.
Eventually, and it could be sooner than we think,
Now, will look very different indeed.
Now will be no more,
Or someplace else we can’t yet perceive.
Time is a strange partner in crime,
The illusion we live our lives out of,
Or run away from ourselves within.
It’s never anytime but now.
And yet most of us are forever caught in the past and the future
Hardly touching presence at all.
To even arrive at the present moment
Is an intricate hill to climb,
And a practice we must embark on,
Which requires forgiveness and repentance and a building up of the power of awareness like a muscle we must daily work out.
Most don’t believe presence as a sustained place to live our lives out of is even really possible.
They’ve called their illusion reality for so long
That anyone suggesting that they perhaps have it upside down
Strikes them as a lunatic on some kind of holy roller trip.
It’s no secret that speaking basic facts about reality on the whole is fools errand.
Or if you do it well enough could get you killed
(Look what they did to Jesus)
People will go to great lengths to protect their illusions.
Attacking someone’s illusions is like attacking a family they break bread with from within.
The whole gang clamors around inside of them, making noise and arguments about how it’s ok to remain in the past and the future.
After all everyone else does.
Holding anger and an unwillingness to forgive is indeed the status quo.
But there is only hatred and love
Good and evil from which we are coming
People put softer words around these emotional polarities,
Or states of being,
As a way to blind themselves from the reality of the state they are in,
Or even what is possible.
The words that dance around hatred
Are anger
Frustration
Resentment
Depression
Fear
Envy,
But these are all just different permeations, blooming like black flowers from the soil of hatred.
If people allowed themselves to call hatred, hatred, and evil, evil
Perhaps they wouldn’t give it as much room to breathe?
To fester and to destroy what they ultimately want their lives to become?
Loves soft words
Are acceptance
Forgiveness
Presence
Joy
Bliss
Peace,
All of those states emanate from ocean called love
(And of course there are many other words for either of these polarities, but in this case simplifying into extremes is helpful as nuance here leads to confusion and an inroad for evil)
Hatred is the destroyer of all things
It murders people from within
Some don’t like to think of Satan or believe he is real at all
But hatred and the soft words that oscillate around it, like a baby’s carousel are his oxygen, his mission and his language
We allow for them to linger and fester within the illusion, that we have endless time to deal with them in a future that never arrives.
As they burn down our relationships
And our dreams
Our motivation and our will or connection to God
Or to love.
We justify by saying to ourselves (and maybe others seeking validation)
“Everyone else is like this,
Everyone feels these things
It’s normal!”
And it is normal,
It is hardly an unusual state,
Locked down in a whirlwind of negative emotions,
But that doesn’t make it right.
2
Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment.
I got news yesterday that a dear friend had passed away.
He was mid thirties
And I haven’t gotten clarification on how it happened
Hatred in all its forms, perhaps winning the battle of his life here?
Self hatred is the foundation of all hatred,
Anger at others is ultimately nothing more than externalized anger at ourself.
“If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you” (Mt 6:14). Peter asked Jesus how often it is necessary to forgive, and Jesus replied, “Seventy-seven times” (Mt 18:22), a number to be taken symbolically, not literally, for the never-ending way that we ought to forgive.
To avoid forgiveness,
To hold onto resentments, is to poison yourself from within,
Or to give the devil the key to your internal kingdom,
Where he allows his looters of emotion,
To destroy the furniture and graffiti the walls, with reminders of past harms,
And the primary reality of trauma.
To make our old stories into idols that we bow down in front of with prayers of justification for the reasons that we can’t allow love in,
Or why we can’t really allow ourselves to thrive.
But rarely do we tell ourselves the truth about it.
Mostly we soft sell these states of being by putting the softer words around them.
We don’t tell ourselves that we are enraged,
We say we are “frustrated”
And in so doing we invite these negative states to linger,
As they quietly destroy us and everyone who enters too deeply into our realm.
My friend who passed always talked about his passion project,
He had a successful business, so money or the lack of it wasn’t any kind of limitation,
But we would hang out all the time at a kava bar
Escaping in soft addiction,
Another waiting room really between where we were and where we wanted to go.
And of course it wasn’t all negative,
Good friendships were made there,
Even connections and creative conversation.
Many of us were former addicts deluding ourselves that we weren’t current addicts because of the supposed softness of the substance we were imbibing.
I don’t think anyone’s od’d on kava?
At worst you hurl in a dark corner of the street
And feel right as rain directly after,
But we would often talk about how we needed to ditch this habit and work on our “passion projects”
He would bring up his passion project everyday,
And I would always jump into that conversation,
For I too knew there was many dreams I had as of yet locked inside.
I encouraged him and we would make a mutual goal to knock this habit on it’s head
Only to laugh the next day when we would both show up there again,
Pretending we had endless time to get to it eventually.
He kept his passion project a secret and
I never found out what it was.
He would just say…
I’ll tell you when it’s almost ready
And I understood the need and logic of this,
And had no need for greater detail.
As we all have these passion projects,
This wealth of potential as of yet untapped,
Something we plan on getting to in the future.
When I got news of his death,
His secret passion project was the first thing I thought of.
A stark reminder of the illusion we allow ourselves to live out of.
The illusion of time,
And thinking that we have more of it than we really do.
3
Memento mori – remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?
Lives typically aren’t destroyed in explosions
Or a blaze of hedonistic glory,
(Though they often are)
Typically lives get whittled down by allowing negative emotions to fester
As the external world
Or the fallen world
Bends over backwards to help us justify it.
In fact, to move in the opposite direction of all that, is to be an outlier.
To really operate out of peace and love as a foundation
Is perceived by most to be a hippy delusion,
Or the lie of a madman.
Most never even really believing in the possibility of such a state as a prolonged reality.
They’ve made a home in hatred
And the soft words that surround it for so long,
That they will defend it even if you attempt to liberate them from it.
“Your comfort zone will kill you”
Takes on a different tone when you expose it to clarity.
Most people won’t admit to themselves that hatred is their comfort zone,
Because that clarity itself would make operating
Out of that state impossible to justify.
Imagine a party conversation where someone asks
How ya been doing?
If that person responded with
“Ah not so good I’m allowing hatred to fester in my insides”
They would indeed be met with a strange look.
But if they respond with I’m depressed
Or I’m frustrated lately
Or I’m dealing with anxiety
Or I think I’m still angry at so and so
The other person would most likely jump in with compete understanding
And what’s known as “compassion”
But what is actually an invitation to continue to stay there.
Rooted in hatred (self or otherwise)
Their response would most likely be a suggestion of medication or therapy.
(And when I say rooted in hatred I don’t mean it to sound harsh or accusatory, though I’m sure it does. It’s simply meant to jolt as a wake up call that all negative states no matter how soft the words are we typically put around them have their roots in hatred or evil, we’ve all been there and most stay there, that’s just the sad fact. To overcome these states is hardly supported by the world we populate)
Rarely if ever would somebody say something as confrontational as
“Why don’t you try forgiving
Yourself and everyone else”
And if they did suggest that,
They would be met with the other person’s internal army of defenders,
To justify staying rooted exactly where they are,
Pointing out that everybody else does.
Which is true. Everybody else mostly does stay rooted there.
4
For our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12
When people perceive their battle to be against flesh and blood,
They help the devastation of their own lives.
When they think that their problems are external,
Or in a drama with another,
They help themselves stay wrapped in a negative landscape.
The ego thrives in states of conflict, so will provoke conflict at every turn.
The ego is empowered by judgment and condemnation and wraps itself in those cloaks feeling powerful and dominate,
Perceiving itself to have God like qualities.
To arrive at a place where life is actually rooted out of love and peace, is to allow the ego to die
In the unifying light of God’s will and blessing.
To allow the ego to see its own delusion
Is akin to asking it to kill itself.
To confront it,
To sit across a bargaining table with it,
Under a single lightbulb interrogation room,
To see its operation and destructive behavior in our lives for what it is,
Is a heavy thing and the jumping off point in our journey towards forgiveness and entering presence,
The kingdom of heaven,
Christ consciousness,
The power of now,
Or whatever name you want to give it.
To really be alive rather than just conceptually alive,
With “real life” being something that we will get to when we are ready, is hardly common, though it should and can be.
The ego developed through inevitably traumatic childhoods,
And was necessary to help us survive our parent’s inability to give us everything we needed,
As they themselves didn’t have everything they needed. (This cycle is hardwired into the human condition, no one escapes it.)
To let that go, is the crux of the heroes journey, we are all embarking on, by virtue of the fact that we are alive at all.
Momento Mori or the contemplation of death,
Then becomes helpful because we stop perceiving our time here to be limitless,
And we can only justify a life unlived within the illusion that we will live forever, or that death is a long way off,
Or that we have plenty of time.
We do not have plenty of time.
Even if we live to a ripe old age
And die of natural causes,
It will all have been a flash of light within a dream.
My friend was as full of life as anyone I’ve ever known.
He lit up the room and made everyone feel welcome,
We all clamored around him like moths to a light
And I’m not just saying this because he’s gone,
It’s how it was.
I’m six five and in decent shape,
He was short and over weight, but could beat me in basketball and often did.
He had a huge spirit and what we call real star power,
On the otherside of his limited self perception, was a life full of outrageous blessings that are now dead with him,
And his passion project will remain a secret that only the grave knows.
We don’t have time to waste here,
We just delude ourselves into believing that we do.
To allow our limitations to fester,
And to justify hatred as our baseline with its soft word illusions,
Is to revoke our potential here,
And to become beggars for the demons we allow to destroy.
Our birthright of light and love
And the fruition of our passion projects,
Isn’t found on a therapists couch,
Or in the pills they offer,
Or through friends who help you justify your negative state and your right to remain there.
Salvation only has one path,
Forgiveness and the self forgiveness that comes from repentance.
There’s no other way to the light
Or to the fulfillment of our destiny
And there is no time to forgive but right now
Because now is all there is.
5
As sad as death of a loved one or a close friend is,
And as much as we would never wish for it to occur,
There is one benefit.
I suppose we could even look at it as a parting gift,
A blessing they give through there lives and death for those of us left behind.
Momento Mori
The reminder that our life is limited and in that limitation, the most precious of gifts,
To be honored,
Worked on,
Looked after and celebrated.
And to appreciate all those who populate our lives all the more for it,
The loved ones and friends still living.
For they too will pass if we don’t pass before them.
When death comes close, he reminds us
The grandeur of every breath.
I suppose the stoics understood this,
And perhaps gave birth to the philosophy of Momento mori out of occasions such as these.
Our time is limited,
Our time is precious,
Our time doesn’t exist at all, save for the moment we are in, which seems to extend for as long as it does and then extinguishes as one would wake up from a dream.
So Momento mori is nothing more than keeping death close and the vitality of spirit which that realization provokes in us.
A loved one’s death does that automatically.
I suppose the trick then is to remember it
When you are at the party with disco lights flashing
Or in kava bar
Talking about your secret passion project.
