If I told you that I didn’t care if you lived or died, you would probably think me heartless. I am heartless, but my statement would probably be my one anomalic exception to the typical lump-of-coal-in-the-center-of-my-chest ways. You would probably think because I didn’t care about your physical body that I didn’t care about you. You’d be wrong. You’d probably think that because I walk around in public with my dick hanging out of my fly that this makes me a pervert. Alright, maybe you’d be right on that one.
Parakeet’s soulmate has cancer. Since Parakeet is a sister in a healing tradition and talks story with many people in the alternative health field, it seemed a no-brainer for her that her partner would consider alternative medicine to help himself come back into health. He didn’t. And besides a few “appease the wife” visits to well-respected healers she knew who told him that they could heal him, he chose the Western model of injecting poison into the system with the old adage “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” in mind. Unfortunately, chemotherapy kills you and it is anomalic when it doesn’t. [Editor’s Note: For homework use the made-up word “anomalic” with everyone you see this week!] Needless to say, this is hard on Parakeet, who just wants her man to say, “Polly want a cracker” and for her to respond lovingly, “Who is Polly and are you fucking her?”
Besides the obvious difference in philosophies, it is hard for Parakeet to see the one to which she is most bonded walk down an alley of muggers and murderers (“drugs” and “doctors”) and be forced to stand on the outside, hoping that he will survive the treachery and come back to share union with her in body and soul, not having to wait until they both cross over to the other side—where the rest of us can watch of their Heavenly re-Union by tuning in to “Crossing Over with John Edward,” that is if we can put up with having to sit through an hour of John fishing for suckers with, “Does anyone know someone who has crossed over with the first initial A? B? C through L? N through Z? N through Z, okay. N? O? P? P! Okay, P. Male? No. Female? Yes!”
All these healing “experts,” while not necessarily “muggers and murderers” of the body, often inadvertently slay the soul when they seek to impose the result they desire to see as a healer, while not acknowledging and respecting the soul with whom they are working as being on its own path to consciousness. This is like saying, “I’m not a racist. I don’t hate black people—just Chinks, Kikes and Wops.”
As a side note to keep the record straight: I hate black people. This is not because I consider you spearchuckers inferior in any way but solely because I am an equal-opportunity hater. For all you black dummies out there who are now planning to burn a cross on my lawn, I hate white people just as much as you darkies and if you fire a cross on my lawn I will dance in glee that a symbol of perhaps the most repressive religion on the planet is being destroyed in my presence, probably with the same joy that the German people felt when the Berlin Wall came down, which was only secondary to the feeling of elation they had after killing six million Jews. Oh, my bad, I forgot that I read on one of my conspiracy websites that The Holocaust was a myth.
We in the New-Age world seem to talk so hip about “chakras” and “different dimensions” and “If you tantra me in the ass, I’ll tantra you in the ass,” when push comes to shove, while we may wear different costumes on the outside (which seem to usually involve flowing robes and crystal necklaces) most of us haven’t fully donned our inner “muggers and murderers” yet, the only real useful purpose of all the ridiculous rituals in which we participate on a bi-weekly basis. I attend them not with any lofty spiritual goal in mind but just because I like dancing around in robes and crystals.
If the soul doesn’t die and, in effect, Who We Are can’t die, then in the word’s of the prophet Eric Cartman in the Newest Testament called “South Park: The Movie,” “What’s the big fuckin’ deal, bitch?” The “big fuckin’ deal” is that we are still human beings with human frailty and often our emotional sensitivities obstruct us from just letting go and letting God. And to clarify, by “letting God,” I don’t mean, “It’s in the hands of the Divine Creator now,” I mean living fully in our love and joy and creativity—whether with a partner or not. How can you do that if you are living in fear or are constantly trying to force an outcome? You can’t.
The well-meaning alternative healers are generally still “muggers and murderers” of the soul, looking at their mission as saving the body, albeit with food or herbs or healing energy, and the soul as a carry-on bag that the body is stoking overhead on it’s slow journey to the grave. For unless they replace their talk of “health” with talk of “wholeness,” they are still just quacks and hacks who have donned the white coat, poisons and instruments of death for a robe and plants and “tools” that some vender at the last New Life Expo suckered them into thinking was the cure for all the problems in the world, when the only real “tool” is them for shelling out hundreds of dollars for some piece of crap made out of cheap metal and crystals “infused” with healing energy of an ascended being who no one’s ever seen but the inventor of this crap.
I never understood why “good Christians,” if that isn’t the biggest oxymoron there is—well, second to “smart Italian,” I suppose—don’t rejoice when their infant child dies saying, “I am so happy, now he is with Jesus!” Instead they seem to be crying for the loss of life and besides their own view that the soul doesn’t die, you can’t really lose anything that is only a borrowed gift.
I think we should cry not for the child but for our own difficulties. “Jesus, because my vision is not fully opened, I cannot fully embrace the passing of my child without a heavy heart. Please help me to understand and accept, to remain full of love instead of full of anger, to praise God at every opportunity and not just when things seems to ‘work out’ for me. Amen.” This prayer provided to you from the sacrilegious jackass who has a First Class ticket and prime imaginary real estate right by the pool of fiery lava waiting for me in Hell.
If I were to talk to Parakeet’s soulmate, I would tell him flat out that I didn’t give a crap if he lived or died but rather his consciousness. I would challenge him to explore his deeper truths and challenges, and not just the shallow facts about “a physical body in difficulty and what is the most logical way to treat that body for its preservation.”
Perhaps I’d challenge him to explore his issue with trust and how that may be affecting not just his decisions to ignore the alternative medical doctors and healers who have tried and true track records of successful body healings but to think about how that may impact the way he sees the world—and the way he expresses love for his soulmate. I would ask him to think about how he wanted to live—or die—playing his piano joyfully for hours or having to stop after 20-minutes because the chemotherapy treatments are making his fingers numb, having more of an opportunity to share more natural foods and living with his love or spending that time lying in a hospital bed hooked up to a chemo drip?
And I wouldn’t hope for any specific decision to come from his mouth regarding treatments and modalities—only one that reflected consciousness and his connection to Inner Truth. If he told me that he knows that eating raw foods for two years would cure him of cancer but that he rather die than give up Big Macs, that would be a step closer to Truth and Self-Discovery than just poo-pooing this eating plan as “unhealthy.” Maybe then I’d challenge him to explore his attachment to Big Macs and ask him if his taste buds have more value to him than expressing and sharing his love and creativity and, if not, to stop bullshitting himself sitting on the sidelines and figure out how to get back into the game and do what he came here to do. If he answered “yes” to valuing Big Macs over life, I would ask him to explore how he can return to his heart and not his head and emotions and get better in touch with Inner Truth, as this is the same answer a crack whore gives who claims to “know” herself and states that she values crack more than love. (In my defense, I only fucked her because I had overdone a Taoist “don’t blow your load” sexual practice and had a serious case of blue balls.)
I don’t envy Parakeet or her soulmate for the great difficulty they must be going through, as while we can all bullshit as much as we want about “God this” and “eternal soul” that, when it comes right down to it, most of us are pretty scared of the unknown and have a tremendous difficulty in accepting and residing in this space of “Letting go and letting God.” It’s the very basis of all the childish afterlife stories we hear involving playing the harp or unlimited virgins in Heaven. When we finally realize that there is no AFTER life, that we were never born and will never die and that life will always BE, then we will stop spending our time trying to “fix” the body…and spend our time living the soul.
A man with a fatal disease was brought to a sacred healing space. The shaman came and shook his rattle and invoked his chants to Spirit. The whole community gathered around the sick man and showered him with their love through song and dance and drumming nonstop for three straight days and nights. And after the three days, the man died.
A top Western medical doctor met with the shaman and said, “You see, your feather-waving medicine didn’t work.”
The shaman looked at the Western doctor and said, “We are concerned about the man’s soul and not his body. The dis-ease, the dis-comfort, lied in his soul and we provided a safe space for his soul to come back to comfort—which, in this case, involved dropping the body. When your medicine starts to treat the soul, you will see that you will no longer need all your chemicals. And when you see that each being is a soul, you will no longer fear death, but embrace it. You will not mourn the death of the body…but celebrate the life of the soul.”