Plan like you will live forever, live like you will die tomorrow.
Journal Entry: Monday, August 1, 2022
This is a journal entry so it is just my raw personal rambling to add pages to my journal for the day but I thought it had some interesting things in it that you might enjoy.
Journal Entry: Monday, August 1, 2022
Today I made one collage so far (FS4084CT22 above). That is a new intention, to make one collage first thing in the morning daily maybe for the rest of the year. It is time for some new studies for larger paintings so this will be the new reserve I will be working from. While working, I was listening to an audio book I found on youtube.com of Marcus Aurelius: The Meditations. I made it through about book 7. There were occasionally some interesting thoughts. I guess being an artist is more or less a form of stoic philosophy and practice.
One thing I thought was especially interesting was his idea that at the time of physical death you are only really loosing the life you are now living (whenever that happens to be) You have already died to all the other moments of your life as they pass into the past and everything in the future is still only potentiality and does not yet exist, hence no loss there either. You are only losing the present life at that moment. An interesting thought.
So far in the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius seems to be spending quite a bit of time talking about death as if he is trying to get used to the idea, but I am sure he was well acquainted with death when he was writing the Meditations while out on various military campaigns on the edges of the empire.
My younger brother died in an accidental fall when I was 13 and he was about 9 years old. It was in fact Friday, June the 13th, 1969. I had just graduated from the 8th grade at Saints John and James Catholic grade school in Ferguson, Mo and that weekend there was the carnival with Ferris wheel and all the other rides and game stands, etc. set up on the lower parking lot and baseball/soccer field.
My brother’s death woke me up as from a dream and made me think very deeply on the subject of death. I can say that internally, death became a major subject of personal contemplation ever since that time. The experience began a long period of questioning the point of what one should be doing in life and what one should believe in when, in the end, you are going to die.
I asked questions of the parish priest and other adults I assumed would be in the know on the subject of death. I was sadly disappointed at their lack of knowledge on the subject. I walked around my world over the next year watching people living their lives, taking care of their homes, mowing their yards, having bar-b-ques, going to the parks, having picnics. ‘For what?’ I wondered; they are all dying.
After having a kind of gray cloud of existential crisis over me for nearly a year, I had a strange and wonderful mystical experience which I won’t talk about here but when it was over it was like the sun had returned and my heart was clear and bright and the emotional weight lifted.
Still, I have continued to think about the brevity of life and eventually I came up with my own strategy:
Plan like you will live forever, live like you will die tomorrow.
My conclusion was that you can’t live your life in a hopeless, listless way knowing of your inevitable death. That’s a waste. Life is short and death is inevitable. So, what are you going to do? We’re not dead yet. I decided I was going to project out my future as if I was going to live forever. Probably we do in a spiritual sense but we are definitely not taking our physical body and possessions with us thank goodness. But knowing with confidence that this physical life is temporary, how are you going to build a life when it will soon be over, and you will have to leave it?
Let’s say both ideas are true: endless spiritual life and limited physical life. Then what can you do in this life that you can continue to work on across multiple lifetimes, perhaps infinite lifetimes without taking anything with you? That is something interesting to consider: to plan beyond your current lifetime. Maybe then, this isn’t our first lifetime, maybe we are in the middle of these infinite numbers of lifetimes. What have we been building so far? That has become an interesting thing to contemplate.
Maybe we are all various instances of one being like leaves on a tree. Maybe the tree is the person, and we are all appendages, leaves on that tree that live for a season then die and fall away and return to dirt and nutrients that feed the tree. Maybe the tree is a rhizome like a forest of aspen trees or bamboo.
For me at least that gives an interesting approach for living and being fully committed. But it does change how you think about your life and what is important in it.
If the approach is: you are going to live forever and yet death is around the corner, what one might think of as urgent or important? That question would, of necessity, shift one’s priorities.
There is the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus where he says:
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21)
If we have a life and a distinct character or maybe a life trajectory when we die maybe our approach to getting clarity on our spiritual identity is what we take with us when we leave this physical world. Maybe we are building an identity pod that carries us to the next realm that is furnished by character traits we improve upon and strengthen or deepen as a pattern.
One problem for me, however, is that I have no recollection of these possible previous lives and hence cannot say for sure what my multi lifetime plan is that I might be working on. But maybe that is a good thing. It might be a burden to remember all of that stuff. Every minute that you are remembering something from the past is a minute that you are not paying attention to the present. We all know that the present is all there ever is so, like Ram Das used to say: ‘Be here now.’
On the other hand, there is Krishna in Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 11
Sañjaya said: O King, having spoken thus, the Supreme Lord of all mystic power, the Personality of Godhead, displayed His universal form to Arjuna.
Arjuna saw in that universal form unlimited mouths, unlimited eyes, unlimited wonderful visions. The form was decorated with many celestial ornaments and bore many divine upraised weapons. He wore celestial garlands and garments, and many divine scents were smeared over His body. All was wondrous, brilliant, unlimited, all-expanding.
If hundreds of thousands of suns were to rise at once into the sky, their radiance might resemble the effulgence of the Supreme Person in that universal form.
At that time Arjuna could see in the universal form of the Lord the unlimited expansions of the universe situated in one place although divided into many, many thousands.
The Personality of Godhead… perhaps we are all part of that. Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu the Preserver. Maybe we are all some dreaming version of that being and not really our own individual self at all, just figments of the Universal Being’s imagination.
The mind is the surface of the heart and the heart, the depth of the mind.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Considering the deficit of memory, I decided that if we have a spiritual life then we should be able, through inner quietude and equanimity, to gain all the knowledge we need at any given moment through our intuition. As an artist, access to one’s intuition is probably the greatest tool to develop in life. In such a case you don’t have to remember too much. You just learn to develop knowingness. This led to my post-dogmatist saying:
‘One only need know what one need know when one need know it.’
Quietude is needed to still the mind so that it can become calm enough to be mirror-like in order to reflect the heart, the seat of intuition and possibly even limited access to omniscience. Equanimity is important so that your intuition is not bent toward personal attraction or aversion which can distort or obscure the experience of your intuitive knowing.
TAKE A MOMENT: Pay attention to your breath.
My secret plan is to eventually make the posts in the Touchonian a book about the Creative Lifestyle for Artists. You, my favorite readers, are privy to the book in it’s formation. I would really appreciate your help by making comments, asking questions and suggesting topics I should explore and write about. It is hard for me to dream up what artists need and want to know to keep going and keep creating. I have fifty years of figuring out all of the details I needed to keep going and become self-sustaining as an artist and want to share enough insight to smooth the path for others facing this complicated, daunting task of being a self-sustaining artist. I know from experience it can feel overwhelming, unreachable and even depressing. So feel free to say or ask something! Thanks in advance.
Great post! A take-away for me, a 80 year old artist, is to put something back for your "eternity home" every day. If we believe Oppenheimer's explanation to his wife about what is quantum mechanics, we are not solid, that's an illusion; rather we are atoms moving rapidly, in many directions, in space. If this is true, then, at death, do we lose our solid appearance and return to the atoms hurling around in space? Sounds weird to me! 🏋️♂️
Funny you quote Marcus Aurelius as he was quoted in another newsletter today. I hear Thich Nhat Hahn’s words on our finite nature daily. As I’ve reached 82, and grateful for that, I am enjoying every day’s offerings. And I’m enjoying your writings.