Have a little faith

For some reason I have had several discussions and/or thoughts about spiritual things in the last few days. It started with Spalding Grey. I was reading his book, Morning Noon and Night (best described, I think, as a lyrical little glimpse into the life of a self-obsessed family man who later, although not over the course of the book, kills himself off the side of a bridge), and he was talking about death.

"Then just the other day I had a hopeful fantasy. What if, when we are dying, instead of our breath stopping, it instead shifts from us into the breath of the Universe. Yes, I suddenly had a peaceful sense that the whole universe was actually breathing and that at our last breath we can, if we choose, breath into it and become one with the great swelling and retracting breath of the universe. I felt almost hopeful...Then in no time I thought, who really wants to become part of an eternal egoless universal energy field? It feels too much like spiritual communism. I couldn't lay that on my son..."

Irony aside, I am actually quite taken with this idea. Being a hindu when it suits me, I very much subscribe to the idea of reincarnation. It's been a long time since I took my degree in Religious Studies, so I won't pretend to know what other people mean by that multi-syllabic concept, but to me it means something to do with the way energy moves around. It just makes sense that when the flesh stops being something viable, the energy that made it move, moves on. Out through the mouth and into the wind.

And anyway, it makes for a good excuse to go out with some heavy breathing...