The study of religion begins with death.

I learned this maxim when I chose Comparative Religion as my main course of study at Rutgers in the early ‘90s. There is much truth in it, and while the sentiment sounds morbid, in practice it is anything but. Thing is, the actual practice is life, and we don’t necessarily have much time for dress rehearsal. We’re thrown into the experience from day one.

Philosophy is almost the easy part. Gripping with reality, another story.

One of my favorite passages, from the Bhagavad Gita, has Krishna instructing Arjuna that the divine puts on and takes off bodies like humans change clothing. A few millennia later, we find Jung saying the same thing about archetypes; his student, James Hillman, followed that brilliantly.
Socrates had his two drachma to throw in: “No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest of blessings for a human being; and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that it is the greatest of evils.” Much different sentiment than that to-be-Christianized heaven, but similar in intent: a verbal balm for the weary soul.

Seneca thought similarly: “Unlike life, death cannot be taken away from man, and therefore we may consider it as the gift of God.”

Ananda Coomaraswamy symbolized Buddhist rebirth as billiard balls, with each in its continual movement projecting karma forward. Perhaps this is how Gandhi’s words continue to influence us today; the flesh dies, the spirit lives on, for better or worse. A higher vibration of karma would help evolve humanity; lower vibrations keep us stuck in the past, looking only to the future, as the present is unbearably dull or painful. This is the foundation of samsara, and why Buddhists cultivate presence and awareness.

James Baldwin, an astute observer of society, got metaphysical: “No one in the whole wide world knows more about time than this: it is carrying you through an element you do not understand into an element you will not remember.” Tibetans might argue that last point, though majority vote usually wins out.

So many ideas about death, yet again, the playing field and not the computer screen or printed book is what matters. When two weeks ago I got a text from one of my best friend’s wife that he was rushed into emergency surgery, it was hard to think about changing clothing. A nail-biting two days until it became certain all the colon cancer was removed (along with five inches of his intestines), and now a new life path has unfolded for him: chemotherapy, but life, and an early enough detection so that it only has an 8% chance of returning.

Still, a lot of things run through a person’s mind when you don’t know the fate of loved ones. While I was visiting said friend this week, I received an email from a fellow journalist that a colleague of ours, Robert Hilferty (pictured above, in Fes), had killed himself a few days earlier. I had spent over a week in Morocco scouring the medina and drinking tea with Robert last June, and had talked to him just three weeks prior about helping him build his website.

He was an emotional character in many ways, boisterous and funny and very demanding of reality. Yet no matter how much he got worked up, there seemed to be a breaking point inside of him that always resulted in a smile. He inherently understood that certain facets of life would not bend to his favor; he carried a Sisyphian weight upon him, yet danced it off like no other. David Adler, who was in Morocco with us, captured this video of him. It was shot the day after I left North Africa; Robert came out to one of my DJ gigs with GlobeSonic last year, and I’ve rarely seen a man sweat so much making the dance floor come alive. In yoga, the practice of tapas is a “burning away” of karma—I think dancing is this for many of us, certain it was for my friend.

Sartre said we can never firmly grasp death because we are always outside of it; we only talk about the death of others, not ourselves. In his book Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman wrote, “we are more often lived by than live our myth.” (Myth meaning mythology, not falsehood.) In the introduction to this work, Thomas Szasz notes that suicide changes death from a matter of chance to one of choice. Hillman later states that death too is a transformation, one displayed in the psyche—the psyche being an energetic force (like these thoughts from my mind arriving into yours), it is indestructible, as compared to the easily destructed body. Rather than a human committing suicide, suicide commits humans. It is the mythology of a choice, and lives itself out in full, albeit along a different path than other causes of death. (Cigarettes and alcohol abuse can be considered longer and more painful forms of suicide.)

Nice philosophy, but the reality is: one week, one friend transformed, another transformed another way. Religion (or as Hillman states, philosophy) begins with death to teach us how to live life. Whatever Robert’s mythology was, I hope he fulfilled his journey. It is not for me to judge whether he did or not. As for Fabian, his myth has taken another turn, and I wish him the best in transforming it into something beautiful.