Near Death Experiences
Sharky and the Glass Caterpillar discuss near-death experiences and past lives
“Death is on my mind”
Glass Caterpillar (Exile) : Sharky, how are we going to become more radical? The Dune parts are more radical than we are. We need to get more radical!
Sharky (Firefighter): Well, you can’t just will it. You have to embody it. It’s a somatic thing. We have to bring our worlds together. That requires working with them. Which we haven’t been doing much of lately.
Glass caterpillar (GC): Do you think we’ll die?
Sharky (Firefighter): Dang, this got metaphysical extremely fast. Um. No. I don’t think we’ll die. I mean, maybe eventually we’ll die, and certainly we’re all mortal and one day we will, indeed, transfer to a different dimension, but I don’t feel that’s imminent.
GC: Death is on my mind, Sharky.
What the other side is like
Sharky (Firefighter): Let’s discuss.
GC (Exile): Well, I died.
Sharky: True.
GC: How do I feel about it?
Sharky: Don’t ask me! I don’t know how you felt about dying.
GC: Dying is friendly. When you go over to the other side, it’s nice over there. The darkness is like the inside of a magnet and the lights start to come over to you, and you know the lights are the people you belong with. It’s a deep sense of peace and belonging. At least right at that moment. I only ventured into that territory for a little distance.
Sharky: Maybe 30 seconds or a minute at the most.
GC: I guess I can’t say what’s beyond that threshold. I just know the beginning. It’s not bad at all. It’s not scary.
Sharky: No matter how you die, the minute you cross over, it appears to be a-okay.
GC: That’s comforting for thinking about anyone you know who dies. They go over and it’s okay once you’re over.
Exile and firefighter see near death experiences differently
Sharky: (Firefighter): What’s it like to remember your near death experiences?
GC (Exile): It’s nice on the other side, but when I came back…it’s scary to think of losing everything here and going over there forever.
Sharky: True, but the roll of the dice is, we died, and we came back. That’s facts.
GC: But how do I feel about having not one, not two, but THREE near death experiences?
Sharky: Fuck all if I know! That’s your business.
GC: How do you feel?
Sharky: I feel grateful, I feel gratitude to be alive, and I also feel fascinated to have gone to the other side and to FEEL it and KNOW it. It’s a privilege.
GC: Hmm. It’s a privilege. Yeah. But it’s also MEAN. It’s not nice to almost lose your entire life already. That’s a lot to lose.
Sharky: Well, this is a glass-half-empty, glass-half-full kind of issue. You can look at it as a lot to lose. I look at it as a lot to gain! We got our ENTIRE life back. Epic.
Firefighter catches a sneaky ‘you’ statement
GC (Exile): You’re incorrigibly not upset.
Sharky (Firefighter): No, I’m not incorrigible just because I’m not upset. Don’t judge me. Give me a fish. What kind of sneak-in-a-’you-statement’ crap are you trying to pull on me? I see EXACTLY what kind of crap that is.
GC: Oh darn, Sharky, I’m sorry, you are RIGHT and I am WRONG. Here is a fish.
Sharky: I’ll take that fish. Don’t use me as your projection board or whatever. If you’re upset, be upset and explore being upset. Don’t rope me into it.
Mortality is hard
GC (Exile): I roped you into my psychodrama. I apologize.
Sharky (Firefighter): I appreciate your renewed adherence to reason and the use of “I” statements.
GC (Exile): MMmm-kay. So, but, I’m upset already. I don’t like having my life taken from me. I don’t like when the universe goes “snatch” and takes life away. I have difficulty.
Sharky: What’s your SPECIFIC difficulty? Mortality is hard. Let’s go the mall! (laughing)
GC: Ha, ha. Well, mortality really is hard though. I hate that when we lose people we love, we get a stab in the heart or a stab in the back. It’s a big stab. How do I even, handle this stab situation?
The solution is love
Sharky (Firefighter): We have to love. Love is attachment. When we lose who we love, it’s the cut of the attachment which feels like a stab — a knife cutting the cord of attachment. (Shrugging). I don’t think there’s any way around it. You have to love, and then you have to grieve if you lose who you love, and we’re all vulnerable to loss at any moment on this planet.
So we may as well love fiercely, and love the best we can. The opposite solution — not to love — is well articulated in the very stupid story of the jackass in the novella “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James. Now, that guy always thought something amazing was going to happen, so he was always ‘waiting’ for it, but he never gave in to the love that was right in front of his face-hole. You can’t hold back from life or love just because of death. You have to do the opposite.
So, be excellent at grieving
GC (Exile): You gotta love. Even if death. Because in fact— because death.
Sharky (Firefighter): Well said.
GC: So then if you gotta love, and there’s death, then…what next?
Sharky: Then you just have to be excellent at grieving, that’s what’s next!
GC: So, I got grief that I died. Even though I got to see the other side, and I do like to see the other side, ‘cuz it’s a fun peek, I won’t lie. It’s nice and friendly and peaceful and numinous and a lot of adjectives. I got ‘em in me. I got to see the lights coming over three times. The first time was the longest…they were strong and coming over and close and large. The second time they were in the distance. The third time I didn’t do so much work on. I think it was pretty fast.
Sharky: Well, that was drowning, and I assume we were resuscitated pretty fast.
GC: Yeah, that was a quick one. Barely a peep into the other side, then back.
Sharky: I have no problems with that.
GC: Me neither. Let’s stay on this side!
Sharky: Amen.
Being pushed over the line
GC (Exile): But I got grief! I’m so mad I almost fell over into the other side.
Sharky (Firefighter): (scratching neck thoughtfully, then shrugging) I got nothing on that, GC. I don’t feel mad. I feel grateful.
GC: I was pushed! Pushed over the line! That’s why I’m mad. That’s not nice. That’s someone else pushing me over. Taking my life and throwing it over the line!
Sharky: Okay, work with that.
GC: But if someone like Nick goes up on the roof, out of curiosity and wants to get up higher to see the view, and they fall in the chimney, it feels like God is taking a big finger and pushing them over the line too.
Sharky: Maybe, but Nick’s firefighters are the ones who went up on the roof because he had a manager deficiency. We didn’t die because of a manager deficiency in us, we died because of a manager or Self deficiency in someone else. More like a pedestrian accident where someone was speeding and hit us. We looked it up today. About 5,000 people die a year, just crossing the street. We had no agency in the matter.
GC: It’s God’s fault!
Sharky: That’s one way to look at it.
GC: Why’s God makin’ us then takin’ us? What’s up with this push you here, push you there!
Here to learn
Sharky (Firefighter): I don’t see it that way.
GC (Exile): Why do I even talk to you? You disagree with me up and down.
Sharky: You do you. You can talk to A if you want.
GC: No, I’ll pull up my big girl britches and get some tolerance for cultural differences. How do you see it?
Sharky: Don’t be rude when I answer you.
GC: (soberly) No.
Sharky: Okay, well, I believe that thing about sacred contracts Carolyn Myss talks about. I think we choose to come to this wacko planet to have our crazed adventures here. So I don’t think we’re being ‘pushed here;’ I think we choose to come. I like the sense of agency it gives me, that I’m here of my own volition to learn the shit I want to learn.
GC: We’re learners. We’ll learn. Hmm. I like to learn with you, that’s why I talk to you, so I can learn. I do like a good learning.
Sharky: (laughing, with a ‘hands in the air’ gesture)
Death = A good stopping point
GC (Exile): So we’re here to learn and we’ll just learn what we gotta learn until our learning is at a good stopping point?
Sharky (Firefighter): I think that’s an extremely good way to put it.
GC: We got so many past lives, I’d be dumb not to understand that a little.
Sharky: Well, that’s one of the top things you can learn from studying your past lives, that’s for sure.
GC: Sometimes in a life you come to a stopping point in your learning for that life. I did learn that. That’s not complicated. Even a six year old can understand that pretty clearly.
Sharky: Exactly.
GC: What lives do you think clearly illustrate that?
Sharky: Are you purposely asking me, a firefighter, to answer that question because the ones that stand out are jackass firefighter lives?
GC: No!
Sharky: Okay. I believe you. But, the ones that stand out are Louis the Scottish knight and Matt from the Vietnam War.
GC: They died in war zones or battle situations. They got to the end of what they were learning in their lives and then they used the situations to leave. They basically set up their own deaths because they were ready to go after some very overwhelming events. Those were pretty intentional. But other deaths seem so hard to accept. Like Louise. Her life was perfect and awesome and amazing! Cholera is crap.
Sharky: Yeah, and maybe though, she set up this completely incredible life and learned what she needed to learn from it and didn’t need to spend thirty more years enjoying her perfect family.
GC: Well, she worked hard to steal that guy and build an amazing farm and family and I think she deserved to enjoy all her hard work and everyone being wiped out by cholera from the well is downright crap if you ask me, what a massacre, twelve people!! Her, her husband and TEN KIDS! Geez.
Sharky: That’s totally above my pay grade. All I can say is, we learned a lot from her life.
GC: We learned, keep your water clean, that’s for sure!
Sharky: I think what we learned is that losing what is beautiful hurts as much as being hurt by atrocity. We learned that in this world, you can’t say someone who has a horrific past suffers more than someone with a beautiful past, because the pain of terrible things is EQUAL to the pain of LOSING amazing things.
It all happens, on this planet
GC (Exile): Well, that’s true. Louise suffered so much! That was grief.
Sharky (Firefighter): Working with past lives, and grieving those lives, and particularly those deaths, teaches how to be excellent at grieving.
GC: We’re pretty excellent at grieving.
Sharky: True.
GC: So if we have all the skills, how can the skills help me? I’m mad! I got pushed over the edge into death. I’m not mad about visiting the other side, because it’s always a nice visit. It’s a cliche but near-death experiences are numinous and enjoyable in their own way once you’re on the other side. I’m just mad about the ACT of BEING PUSHED. I don’t like it. I deserve a fish. It’s rude and violent to push someone over into death. I’m mad like I’d be mad at someone if they hit us with a car or pushed us and we fell over and hit a wall and blacked out and almost died. Not that those things happened — we can’t say the exact way we died on Substack — but it’s like that. I’m mad about it. Because look, I was murdered. That’s the fact.
Sharky: That’s the fact. Lots of people are accidentally or less accidentally murdered. It happens. Accidents, murder, cholera wiping out entire families, war, helicopter crashes, people falling down chimneys…it happens on this planet. It all happens.
Being in alignment with reality
GC (Exile): But how do you STAND it, Sharky?!
Sharky (Firefighter): How do you stand gravity? How do you stand that we have to sleep at night? How do you stand anything? It’s reality. I want to be in alignment with reality. Immutable facts: mortality, human violence, disease, accidents, weather, the conditions of this extremely heavy planet full of very solid and some toxic metals. Iron. Mercury. It’s the planet we’re here to experience. Being at war with the reality of the planet isn’t a useful basis for interacting with it.
GC: I can’t get there! I mad at Mr. and Mrs. Planet. It has mean people doing mean things, pushing other people over the edge into death. Not that death is bad, don’t get me wrong — I know it’s not — but it’s not right that some people push other people.
Sharky: Hurt people hurt people. Most of the people who are pushers, were once pushed a lot themselves. Even someone who runs over a kid while speeding is someone who 1) had a deficiency of Self-energy and presence that is a sad condition to go around in and 2) has to live with that pain and burden ever afterwards. What would it be like if you could be adjusted to the fact that people do, in fact, kill other people out of all kinds of causes, from distraction to anger to revenge to psychopathy? That’s a fact of this planet.
GC: I can’t even, buzz.
Sharky: Well, there you have it. That’s your mission, should you choose to accept it: to move through the grief process of denial/ bargaining/ anger/ and grief to acceptance that on this planet, people ARE pushed over into death for all kinds of reasons, and YOU can tolerate it and you CAN accept it. Because you can grieve, and you can grieve your own death and get to a state of accepting it.
GC: That’s a lot of ‘you’ statements.
Sharky: They’re not disparaging, they’re encouraging. That’s the difference. I have confidence YOU CAN DO IT.
GC: You can swim in the ocean.
Sharky: (laughing) I appreciate your effort to restrain yourself from saying something more aggressive.
GC: Thank you, it was an effort. But it’s so, so hard to die! I don’t like it already. I don’t mind the other side, I just mind someone having power over me, power of life or death, and being powerless and having them treat me like I don’t matter. I do matter!
Sharky: Well, people treat other people like they don’t matter all day long. When you call the bank you’re treated like dog shit, spun around in circles pushing buttons with robots mocking you in a Kafka landscape straight from eighth circle of hell.
GC: Yeah and that makes me mad too!
Sharky: That’s my point. If we could get to the absolute bottom of this experience of not feeling seen, of feeling like we don’t matter on the deepest existential level, then maybe we wouldn’t get so mad about the Kafka-esque bank robots.
GC: I think even the Buddha would lose his cool if he had to call Citibank. But, maybe we could be a little less aggravated than we currently are. I may not be okay with being pushed over the edge to the other side, but, I do see more clearly it’s about powerlessness and feeling like I didn’t matter. That’s a more specific understanding than I started out with. That’s progress. We can keep working on it. But not tonight!
Sharky: (yawning) Nice progress, GC.
GC: Thanks Sharky. Thanks for learning with me!