The inner life, what comes after death, and dying well

‘I say it is not faithless

to stand without faith, keeping open

vigil at the site.

(Geoffrey Hill: To William Cobbett: in absentia)

‘In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

Tomorrow or today…

O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you’ve missed.’

(WH Auden: As I walked out one evening)

One way of explaining the President Trump train-wreck is to see it as a failure of the inner life to contain its own processes. Instead of lying there at night with his thoughts, knowing they are just thoughts, Trump experiences his thoughts as tweets. He knows he has the means to visit ‘fire and fury, like the world has never seen’, on Kim Jong-un of North Korea and its unfortunate citizens. The problem, with respect to international diplomacy, is saying so.

What has worked for Trump in the past is the expectation that the world should not offer any resistance to his needs and desires, but he now finds this attitude is not working so well. Oddly, this was the Buddha’s own experience too, before he left home to become Enlightened. He lived in a world without resistance to his every whim. It’s like being a baby – you want milk, you get it. But at a certain point the baby learns, painfully, that the world is not built around her needs. The baby becomes aware that she has an inner life that will never quite adjust itself to the world that she has to adjust to anyway. She adapts herself publicly to the world as it is; but if she is true to herself she retains a self, an inner life, that does not adapt. So in a sense, the Buddha left behind the public experience of himself to enter into the private, internal, essentially incommunicable, or impenetrable experience of himself. And he gradually explored every dimension of it, extending it into every aspect of his life.  

An inner life - we all have one. It’s that bit of your life that no-one really notices but for which you have total responsibility.  It is that awareness of an interiority to your existence. At the most basic level it’s that awareness of comfort or discomfort, and everything that follows from this - that sort of conversation we have with ourselves so much of the time, going over things, fantasizing, remembering, reflecting, planning, dreaming, and the feelings and emotions, conflicts, visions and delusions, which go with them. It’s just you and, er, you, sorting stuff out between you.

The ability to communicate an inner life, with its essential opaque complexity, is what makes a good actor. A good novel gives you the sense of a real person rather than a cypher by suggesting some kind of inner life in a character, a sense that they are capable of surprising not just us, but themselves and even the author. A good portrait is usually not so much about accuracy as about indications of an inner life. A Rembrandt self-portrait, that cauliflower face, exposes an inner life so unguarded we almost hear it coming out of the dark corners of the painting. Shakespeare does not allow even his most evil characters to be objectified as such; he allows them their own voice. In fact, any good art, music, poetry does this.

There is no formula for this communication. It is not really about what the poem or picture might seem to be saying. There is something in the brushstrokes, in the colour or verbal relationships, in the phrasing or cadence, in the voice or tone of it, that has the ring of truth, that pulls off the trick of communicating a sense of something unseen and half-conscious. Why else are we so uninterested in a fake Monet? The whole point is that the work should be true to Monet’s interior life, not to his way of painting lilies.

I remember once seeing a photograph hanging up in my judo club of an old friend of mine Jinamitra (aka Nicolas Soames) taken by a famous photographer of the ‘60s-‘80’s, Terry Donovan. My friend was in his judo kit, black-belted, cauliflower-eared (the deformation my own work I’m afraid), gaze direct, unsmiling. However, I saw something in that cragged and seamed face I had never glimpsed before - a surprising vulnerability. What Donovan caught was the sense of an interior life, a life that runs parallel to our ‘real’ life, which interacts at times with it, that always informs it, but that seems to remain mysteriously removed from it.

I mention this friend of mine because I am at present on holiday with him in Italy. Quite the easy life? Well, not exactly. I had one day between the trip to Croatia and this trip and went to the eye hospital at Moorfields in East London to have my double vision checked out. The problem wasn’t anything to do with the minor eye operation I’d had. It’s damage to the nerves of the right eye that has happened independently. So this does not look good at all; it suggests that the cancer has spread to the nerves in the head. It looks like my situation could be deteriorating faster than I anticipated, the hormone therapy a failed experiment.

The upside of this – I know, seeing an upside to my already fairly ghastly situation worsening further may seem a bit over-imaginative, but it makes sense I think from a Buddhist perspective – the upside is that my present situation may well be as good as it gets, and if so, I need to drop my impatience with my slow recovery from the ulceration and the other mouth problems of taste buds and saliva and appetite. Adding to all this I can now see out of only one eye at a time (otherwise I have double vision). And who knows what’s next? But for now, at least I still have some vision, and my brain works and I can still move around without pain. So my present situation, by comparison with what may come next, and maybe imminently, is actually rather good. I need to enjoy it; and I also need to take responsibility for it, for my experiencing of it. One’s dying is after all, just as much part of one’s life as the rest of it.

On our first evening J and I sat at an outside table with our pasta at the edge of a typical Italian piazza in a fairly ordinary but charming town in Marche, Senigallia, and we talked about Buddhism, as we often do. Buddhists often imagine that they’ve got the question of death pretty much wrapped up; the long and the short of it is this: however we resist it, impermanence is our fundamental nature, and dying is where our true nature can no longer be resisted. However, my view is that Buddhism does not offer any real clarity to ordinary people about what comes after death. With result that a great many modern western Buddhists are openly agnostic on the subject.

However, now we are on the brink (and J has also developed cancer at the same time as me, though it looks like I will be going well before him) you find out what you really believe is coming next. J says, well, he’s lived a wonderfully rich life, and having lived life to the full he’s ready to go, and he’s not really concerned about anything after. I don’t feel quite so chipper about how I’ve lived my life. I don’t consider myself a good person, not as good as J certainly. I have harmed people, I have taken what is not mine to take, I have behaved badly in my relationships, I have been untruthful, I have deliberately surrendered my awareness. And as a supposedly practicing Buddhist, these failings are all the worse. I have known what I was doing.

So there you have two very different kinds of inner life with regard to ethics – and you wouldn’t necessarily guess which belonged to which of us, from knowing the two of us and how we appear to have behaved over the years. The point is that we all have an ethical dimension to our inner life, a private sense of ethical contentment balanced against ethical discomfort. And this is something no-one can read from the outside, not even from someone’s personal confessions.

I am fairly agnostic about what if anything comes after death; I just don’t know, and I’m not ruling anything out. My assumption is that whatever it is would be ethically determined – you somehow get your comeuppance, as a result of your ethics or lack of them. However, I find it helpful to take the suffering I am going through now as in some sense purificatory. This is in no way to suggest that suffering actually has a purifying or meaningful function in any objective sense. Just that if I can accept it in this spirit, I can get a tangible sense, in my own case, of something positive coming out of my pain, of having a reason not to complain about it.

We all want to ‘die well’. J says he wants to die in a cheerful, graceful spirit, ‘pour encourager les autres’, to communicate to his nearest and dearest that there is nothing to fear. Exemplification, in short. My own aim is maybe less altruistic. It is to be truthful and mindful. That is, if I feel fear, I will say so, but I would make sure that this fear does not overcome my mind in any way. Mindfulness is seeing your mental states as mental states. They come and they go. You don’t need to buy into them.

J’s image for the inner life is the coffee in the coffee cup. The cup is solidly there, but it is there to contain the experience of the coffee. However, the inner life is not literally inner in the sense of being somehow just mental as opposed to actual. It is an experience of ourselves, and it is a relationship we have with ourselves. It is also, more simply, an awareness of what is going on as something being experienced. That is, what is happening is also something being experienced. And we can profoundly modify how we experience what is happening.

This has various dimensions. I’ve already mentioned the aesthetic one. So for example, J has come to Marche to take in the Rossini opera festival in Pesaro, and he has very kindly invited me along (and this kindness is very typical of him). But his experience of ‘The Journey to Reims’, and ‘Torvaldo’, and my own experience of the same (excellent) productions, were necessarily very different.

The inner life involves a processing of emotional experience. There is also an interrogatory or cognitive aspect to it. So in writing about my life in this critical time I am interrogating my experience, trying to be as clear as I can be about it, working out its meaning. Above all, the inner life is the sense we have of knowing, of being conscious. However, it is in the most basic, even banal and gross features of this inner life, our experience of sensation, that the most mysterious aspect of the interior life emerges.

The central practice of mindfulness is what is usually called the bodyscan practice, in which we explore the inner world of sensation and feeling and perception. We are learning to treat interior events as objects of attention just as we regard external objects. Sensations and feelings happen in the world just like anything else. We are training the mind to take in details of its interior life, as ‘events’, and thus as being in some sense continuous with the events of the external world. They come and go. So it is with the experience of sensation, and the preconscious feeling and perception with which we engage with sensation, that we find the boundaries of the interior life starting to disappear, and the whole sense of an exterior life as in any way apart from it, starting to unravel. Nothing (and no-one) is truly ‘out there’.

We often lose sight of this inner life, this relationship we have with ourselves (often quite a lot of selves) as we negotiate the twists and turns of life, but we must keep returning to it as our real home.  And it can be as noisy and busy and disruptive and frankly dysfunctional as any home can be sometimes. No wonder we often want to leave such a home behind and get lost in distractions. And no wonder we come to see our interior life as a problem - of stress, anxiety, misery, ‘busy mind’, etc.

In the past, we would reconnect with our inner life whenever we had a break from engaging with external tasks and challenges, with anything demanding or exhausting. Walking, talking with friends, eating or drinking, reading books, or listening to music – rest and recreation used to naturally settle the mind into a more open and reflective quality of awareness. Today, when we have a break, and even when walking and talking, eating and drinking etc, people resort to social media. (Although, it was interesting to see the inhabitants of Senigallia sauntering through the streets on this warm summer evening, and not an Iphone to be seen.) But certainly in the UK the constant imaging of the self, and the management of online ‘profiles’, and the Internet ‘world’ generally, has rather swallowed up any sense of an inner life, a private sphere to our existence, at all. Our experience of ourselves has become almost entirely public.

The result is that mindfulness is being taken up as a medical ‘intervention’, a cure for living an uprooted life. However, medicalizing the inner life rather misses the point.  We forget that it is where we live. If we only take an interest in the inner life because we are stressed, we have already got the wrong end of the stick.

It’s like getting a dog as a cure for depression. Dogs have a mental age of about 3 and all the charm that goes with that sort of age, and you have to take them for walks, and they love you. But a dog is not a treatment. Similarly, it may be very good for your health to take up a sport. But sport is not a treatment. By the same token mindfulness is not a method for managing various mild to medium-grade mental problems like stress, anxiety, depression, or chronic physical pain. Mindfulness, Dharma practice, is an engagement with life as it really is.

Death, Endings and interruptions, and being mindfully judgmental

Vladimir: I don’t understand.

Estragon: Use your intelligence, can’t you?

Vladimir uses his intelligence.

Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.

(Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot)

‘Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the greatest educator; and it is by the love of those nearest to him that the incomplete human being is induced to respect the decrees of necessity… (Freud: Some Character Types met with in Psychoanalytic work)

We have a prime minister who is in common political parlance, a ‘dead woman walking’. In politics death is a metaphor for loss of power and position. Boris Johnson was ‘stabbed in the back’ by his friend Michael Gove after Cameron’s decision to ‘fall on his sword’ in 2016 after the referendum. The metaphor refers back to the time when political failure did indeed tend to have fatal consequences – as a lot of things did once – giving birth, horse riding, cold weather… death accompanied people all through their lives.

But not now. Death before the age of about 70 is regarded as an affront. It shouldn’t be happening. Death should meaningfully round off your life, when you no longer have any further use for your life. We are never really prepared for an ending that is almost always an interruption rather than a conclusion.

So finishing life with a heart attack is in many ways ideal. One moment you’re trying to get the mower going, or shouting at the television, the next – well, there isn’t a next. Or rather, what comes next is not your responsibility any more. Apart from that possibility, in almost everyone’s life, there comes a time when a realization sidles into consciousness that it’s curtains. For a few of us it may be a sudden perception of an imminent conclusion to one’s time here, on the occasion of a nasty accident, say, in the crush of an upside down car, or in a sense of complete numbness at the bottom of a mountain fall. In the films, it’s the moment when the guy looks down at where the bullet’s gone in, or when he looks up at where his fingers are losing their grip on the ledge. It’s all over. This is how it ends. But most of us have a bit more time to get the hang of the business. What it means or doesn’t. How we feel about it, what we need to do about it. How to relate to others, those closest to us. What we can do for them.

For me it started when Claudia found a little lump by my collarbone. This was mid-June. The ultrasound guy took a biopsy sample and said just by looking at it he could tell that it was cancerous. But of course if that’s all there is it can be removed, no worries. Then my cough was investigated, and a chest x-ray showed infection – so pneumonia, but what else? A blood test seems to have been definitive, but we weren’t told anything. The thoracic specialist was deliberately vague – and ordered a bronchoscopy. Then I had a Petscan, and the same day we went for a routine meeting with my oncologist. We wanted the meeting just so that we could get some more painkillers…

However, there was someone else in charge of the meeting; it’s funny how seniority is communicated, but you could somehow tell that she was a high-up. Very smoothly, and almost reassuringly, she told us that the game was up. The cancer had spread to liver, lung, and bones. It was incurable. I think she was not altogether impressed by the thoracic guy’s ducking out of giving us the bad news.

As we left, I said to Claudia, ‘I’m sorry, Clau’, and the senior nurse specialist, Sarah, hugged her. Like all men apparently, I was not overly fussed by the news. It wasn’t consciously expected, but it had been coming. I have just read a little piece in a magazine by a woman who was cured of breast cancer and yet felt very depressed since her recovery: ‘I am grieving for the person I was before I had cancer.’ In all areas of her life she ‘has been shaken to the core’ by the experience. Of course, she is a good bit younger than I am. She has young children, whereas my son is finishing his second degree. But it is interesting how differently we react to our very different situations. I’m disappointed to be missing the final agreeably uneventful (one hopes) act of my life, where one lets go of things. Apparently, one’s seventies are often the happiest decade of one’s life - I guess it is partly because you stop worrying about the future (because there isn’t one). And I haven’t even started to get my state pension, that agreeably free bit of money every week. But I don’t feel obviously upset – as yet anyway – by the prospect of a relatively imminent termination to this, my own personal experience of life.

So now we have a new oncologist, a young bloke. And after a couple of meetings he decided to go for hormone therapy rather than chemo. He thought that I had been through enough appalling side effects. The side effects with hormone therapy are to do with loss of testosterone – so my chest may get a bit breasty, I may become a bit more emotionally labile (Claudia says I’m moody enough as it is) – oh, and I’ll be impotent. Which sounds ok to me - well, you can’t have everything…

I say I wasn’t too fussed by the news, but obviously there is a fundamental change of outlook. All through the months of very painful recovery from the radiotherapy I was looking forward to a pain-free life ahead of me well into my seventies. I could make plans. Now, I am looking forward to the considerable pain of bone cancer and chemo at some point, and generally managing my end-game. Other people, especially friends and family, see my death as the really significant component of my situation. In particular, Claudia will be on her own; she will go from being very much a couple to the experience of an intimate absence at her side, in her home, in her life. But for me, at the moment anyway, it’s the short bit of life I have left that is my personal concern, more than its future absence (which by its nature is hard to envisage).

The practice of mindfulness is generally introduced as the practice of paying attention to non-cognitive experience, which for most people is a real challenge. Most people keep reverting to imagining that mindfulness involves changing how you think about things. Most people cannot imagine paying attention without thinking about what you are paying attention to. It is with regular meditation that this attitude starts to shift. And it is with meditation over some years that a truer sense of the nature of things, of the nature of the mind, develops. Mindfulness is being able to take in experience without that instinctive liking or disliking taking over, and the conceptualizing mind tightening up around that reaction.

And the interesting thing here is that as you do so, you start to become aware that your sensations and feeling are in fact much more interesting than your thoughts and emotions. That experience of your presence in the world becomes more real and rich than your piffling thoughts and feelings about it. Your

experiencing of the world does not, curiously, centre on you and your feelings.

As you get more experienced, you learn to live in a world that consists almost entirely of non-cognitive experience, mostly sensation and feeling, with emotions and also, of course, cognitions or thoughts being registered as coming and going like the froth on the surface of the sea. On this basis you can learn to be mindful of your thoughts and emotions as thoughts and emotions. In particular you learn to judge those thoughts and emotions.

Mindfulness is popularly characterized, following the great Jon Kabat-Zinn, as attention that is ‘non-judgmental’. But this non-judgmental attention is what enables the beginner to apply themselves to sensations as sensations, and feelings as feelings, without getting lost in our judgments about that experience. Eventually, though, you do want to be able to judge, not your experience, but how you go about reacting to your experience. Are your emotional responses helpful or unhelpful, are they what you would call ‘negative’ or are they ‘positive’?

Now most people imagine that being aware is not enough, that once you are aware of something you then need to act on that awareness. And generally this is the case – when you are aware that the cat has been sick on the floor, being aware isn’t enough; you need to get on with cleaning up the mess. However, in the case of internal experience, it’s different. Awareness of your own mental state is transformative in itself. If you recognize a negative mental state for what it is, something unhelpful, its hold on the mind is weakened; conversely, you recognize a positive mood or attitude as helpful, and that is enough to encourage it. You don’t need to berate yourself. So this is judgment as simply an aspect of awareness, an acknowledgment of the reality of our situation in terms of what we are bringing to this situation.

So in this respect, as a practitioner, I always have work to do, however difficult my life may become. In particular, I am aware that I need to be mindful of the states of mind I get into in response to what will be painful experience without the reassurance of some kind of recovery. I have noticed for example couples talking together at the Macmillan Cancer centre, and one of them (the one with cancer) will sometimes be speaking almost savagely to their partner. It is as if you feel that your partner is not carrying their fair share of this unbearable burden of slow and painful (and actually humiliating) death by cancer. There is an assumption that dying of cancer gives you a free pass in terms of being ratty and unpleasant. In fact, of course, your partner has their own unbearable burden to manage, the burden of love, of not being able to take away your pain, and of facing life without you.

My hearing has become very poor. And then there’s my right eye. I had an operation recently to help the eyelid to close, but it is still uncomfortable, and also I seem to have double vision. It’s as if I can’t focus. I still have some ulceration in the mouth, which makes eating and drinking intermittently painful. The salt in sea water also stings. I still have no saliva. So eating anything tends to feel too dry, and without having the saliva to prepare the food to swallow, it can be hard work getting things down. My taste buds still don’t operate quite as they used to, though there has been some improvement recently. It is as if the world of pleasure, of appetite, is closing its doors to me. That cry from the guts, ‘I want!’ is just not there.

I mention sea-water because we’re on holiday in Croatia. By the sea. You might think Croatia is a Mediterranean country. The coastline is very long and very beautiful. But cuisine-wise, the capital is Zagreb, and Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And after that it was part of the Soviet empire. Even the language has a bread-queue, cabbage soup, boot polish-adulterated coffee sound to it. Italy is only around the corner, a short boat trip away, so you might think Croatians would now be visiting Italy and getting a taste for precisely intense pasta dishes involving basil and pine nuts and all the rest of it. But no, the food here is heavy, meaty and tasteless. You can have ‘pasta with beef’; or ‘vegetarian pasta’ and er, that’s it.

However, in a place like this, because of the warmth – over 30 degrees - the pores are more open, the mind looser, more relaxed. Here you are, sitting on the beach, and everyone around you is also being stunned and seduced into silence and innocence by the same sensory combination. You have the whole busy world behind you, the endless ocean, with its unseen cool dark depths before you, the pebbles gently shifting beneath your weight through your towel, fragrant pines, bright green against the drenched blue of the sky, their branches scattering and softening the light, the sun’s warmth playing with the sweet breeze over the skin so that the skin feels like a single organ, the little waves endlessly reinventing themselves around the shoreline rocks, with that hypnotic rhythm taking the edge off the silence. And you feel the breath of the body as something intimate with this world. And then you step down into the turquoise water, you make that ancient elemental transition from air to water, to the body’s surprise and delight, in finding a new way of experiencing itself. And then when I come out of the water and stand with the sun warming my back, and Claudia there reading her book, I think, ‘Must I go so soon?’ But I am also grateful to the world that I can be so sorrowful to be leaving it.

I mean, being very ill does reconcile you to dying. Death is much less of a problem to you when your life is difficult and painful. But you can’t complain if you occasionally feel well enough to want to continue living.