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.