My dear Chance,

Very moving story. And I am sure we all love this friend, who lived the way he felt is right. And that is a great achievement. Most know that which is right, but it is always difficult, impractical & sometimes downright imprudent. But then there are these few geniuses who have this immense capability to know what is right and then just do it without any effort. Indeed, only those who can do that which is right effortlessly, end up doing it. Because that is there natural state of being. I am sharing this story with a couple of close friends.

Most think & dream by their minds, but live by others' .

Though translations are utterly poor at conveying the underlying emotion of poetry written in a different language, yet I share an old Hindi song which when translated goes...
But before I present the translation I want you to know that the Hindi word 'man' stands for both heart & mind and it is very pertinent in the context of this song. As Indian philosophy does not distinguish between mind & heart in some cases.

Oh my heart why can't you be calm & understanding that, he who you love & expect an emotion response is now beyond emotions.

Who my heart, has ever constrained the rising or the setting sun, or hid the colours from being seen or beauty tied, why are you then expecting a response from the one beyond emotions

Oh my heart, be grateful for the time that he was with you, the longing to be with your beloved through many lives is a dream, dispossess it. No two beloved have ever died simultaneously.

To hear the Hindi title click the title: Man re tu kahe na dheer dhare (oh my mind/heart why can't you be calm)
Written by the great poet Sahir Ludhianvi, sung by one of the greatest singer of Bollywood Mohammed Rafi.  Though in Hindi, but if you hear it, the music will sooth.
The song was sung by the Indian Nightingale (yet alive) Lata Mangeshkar also and it is worthwhile to hear it as well.

Truly yours
Deepak

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[I'm sharing with you all my message to the Arkansas Psychological Association]

 

My best friend died at the end of last week.  Of what?  You know what.  We can't talk about it here much in Arkansas, though.  

 

I met him at Summer Theatre Academy when we were 14.  He was a giant who acted like he was nearly mentally retarded, and then would hit you with the punchlines to make you laugh uncontrollably.  It didn't take long to find out he was a comedic genius.  He "picked me" and I started going over to his house in North Little Rock over the weekends.  At the time, he was simply fun to be around.  There weren't many people like him around: curious, fun, smooth with girls, musically gifted, science-minded, spiritually advanced, and infinitely sensitive.  We formed our first band together soon after. 

 

By 10th grade he and I were becoming serious spiritual students.  We shared anecdotes, ideas, and texts.  My weather-worn copy of  "Lucid Dreaming" was a signed birthday gift from him.

At Arkansas governor's school, we, the two of us, were allowed special meditation training from Dr. Jim Rush, an ethicist and Tibetan priest.  Before Jim Rush, I was an intellectual bully.  It was short-work to find someone's weak support structures and pull them out.  Even easier to make it funny so the whole room could get a laugh.  The impact of the Buddhist training, then was profound.  My best friend's mantra became "I was born to protect the weak."  I went on to become a NASA funded sleep researcher in undergrad at Hendrix College, pursuing clinical psychology formally.  He became a rock-star. 

 

Riverfest in 11th grade is when I realized how popular he was.  We couldn't get to where we needed to go because groups of people from all ages and walks of life would surround him.  Social Psychology was just another field of study he devoured in a hyper-focus session, and he applied himself to the art of being cool with the same dedication he committed to learning Van Halen's "Eruption" and Chopin's "Fantasy Impromptu."  He slayed in nearly all he did.  That and the fact that he was born cool made him impossibly attractive.  We all have countless stories of his ability to surprise you with the most assuring and validating comments, often delivered in a bumbly, soft-spoken mumble.  He was half social butterfly, and half psychedelic lunar moth.

 

There was one area of obsession, however, that stood out even when we were kids:  pandemics.  Normally the one to sooth my anxieties about all the ways we could disintegrate at a "Great Filter,"  he had a deep concern about pandemics.  His mother was a nurse, and I theorize he was particularly sensitive to the pain of healthcare professionals.  I wish I could convey efficiently to you now the breadth and depth of his wisdom and specific content knowledge.  It was something I envied about him.  In short, I trusted him.

 

There was a dark side to himself he saved for those who could handle it.  A deep, impenetrable loneliness we shared.  As young men, our inherent competitive natures would not allow us to achieve the fullest intimacies that could ameliorate the ache of being an "n of 1."  Or maybe he knew earlier than me that "the path" we were on was inherently a solo one.  It hurt to watch him suffer in his particular way.  We both knew there was no cure.  So long as the world was hurting, we would be hurting.  So long as we had ego, we would be alone. 

 

When either of us would get too close to the sun, or swim too far out, we would pull each other back to Earth.  We had many bar-stool conversations and late-night phone calls about how to keep staying alive.  He helped me with my exasperation about the idiocy around me.  People shitting up-river and then claiming it was "God's Will" that we were getting sick.  It wasn't going to get better, was it?  "No, and that's okay," he would say. 

 

I asked him last year when he was at a moment of turning corners if he would tell me if he started doing the hard stuff again.  He said, "I don't know.  Right now I feel this way, and if I feel a different way I know how to hide it, and would hide it."  It was so easy to love all of him at that point in our lives.  He was sticking around for our benefit, not his.

 

At James Madison University I studied meta-psychology and human ethology.  We predicted with our models a massive identity-crisis that would continue to unfold and potentially wipe out humanity.  It was like seeing a Titanic that would hit the iceberg sometime within the next 10 years.  We tried a bunch of stuff to stop it.  None of it worked.  Suicides kept increasing.  Inhumane policies kept proliferating. Earth itself was dying.  The science was abundantly clear on that fact.  The future was looking objectively hopeless.  Indeed, in a recent phone call with my ex, an environmental scientist and world expert in Apocalyptic terrorism, we resigned ourselves to "climate resiliency," which is the assuring way to say, "we're fucked."  My fantasies shifted to underground tunneling, mushroom farming, and water filtration systems.  Conservatives and authoritarians simply would not allow us to live in peace and health.  Low trait-openness will be the death of us.

 

To stay sane, somehow, we would have to learn to live without futures, and without being able to understand each other.  That's a big ask, but I'm an obsessive problem solver so I kept working on it.  How to communicate this?  How to get us refocused on the solutions?

 

Nobody wanted me to come back to Arkansas except my friends that missed me.  They told me I would be chronically unappreciated and cramped.  A civil rights attorney friend of mine that quietly escaped to New York warned me my life would be in constant danger.  I agreed (and he was right), and yet the danger I saw everywhere else was roiling.  It seemed like everywhere I would travel would incur some natural disaster.  You couldn't breath in the Pacific Northwest anymore because of the California wild-fires.  You couldn't live in a cool place unless you were rich enough to pay 60k a year in rent. 

 

Oh, right, I forgot there is no future right now.  Back to the present. 

 

Then the pandemic hit.  It was hard on my friend already because he was an extreme extrovert.  He looked rough when I met up with him at the start of the Summer.  A lot of my friends were starting to get hit with the meta-crisis effects but they didn't know what to call it.  Arkansas is a particularly insulated state.  Out of all the states in the Union, Arkansans are the least likely to leave and the most likely to come back if they do leave.  A friend of mine calls it "the dome."  

 

I started getting friends to go for walks.  It was the only thing I knew that could get underneath all of these problems that, if I was being honest with myself, were impossible for us to solve.  8-10 billion hallucinating apes competing to make the future into a personal and exclusive vision while the most evil and influential of us actively plot for our destruction and exploitation in a sexual-sadist repetition compulsion (who needs fiction these days, amirite?).  Our politicians in Arkansas are semi-retarded oil company puppets who corrupted our institutions to the core, but they have the bona-fides and the bibles and a population so mentally and physically sick they can barely stand up when the doctor calls their name for the med eval.  How, then, can they stand up to the injustice?

 

If you'll notice, even the Arkansas Psychology Board is now a branch of the Republican Oligarchy of Arkansas.  Hopeless Hopeless Hopeless. 

 

Then I remember, none of us have a future.  Breathe, relax, go for a walk.  Enjoy your last chance to see.  Love on your friends, dare to dream, pluck the strawberry before falling off the cliff and so on.

 

My friend started to lift out his depression.  He looked and felt great.  His music was the best it had been.  He was still feeling the pain of the world, but he had found "the spark" that was missing his entire life.  In psychoanalytic terms, he started living for himself.  In spiritual terms, Ping Ting no longer sought others for his own fire. 

 

In all of my confidential talks with my best friend, there was one speakable torture in particular he feared:  seasonal affective depression.  It hurt him like nothing else.  He was meticulous in creating interventions for himself.  Lamps, staying on the move, staying social, touring, projects, medication, therapy, and so on.  He talked about the winter like a Siberian political prisoner with joint replacements.  In a simpler time, he would have walked to the equator and gotten some sun.

 

He started to become an activist about the pandemic.  Confronting his conservative and checked-out friends and family directly, he was a force when he wanted to be.  I was so glad he wanted to be.  At the same time, he was obviously deliberately alive.  There were more threads holding him now, but they were still threads. 

 

I got the news and wept immediately. I'm so grateful the crying is coming so easily.  One of the benefits of training as a warrior shaman is that you learn special techniques for communicating with the physically dead, and for traveling beyond.  I hear his voice now mocking me for bragging about this, while also hearing him say, "go ahead and tell them."  In Gestalt it is the 'empty chair,' a materialistic and 'empty' interpretation of this phenomena if there ever was one.  He is still a friend to me, in a different form now.  By the end, he was exhausted with words.  A lot of our communication was a look and a vibe.  He knew I liked to talk, though, and would humor me.

 

I talked with his beloved partner and soul-mate yesterday.  She agreed that he had never been in a better place mentally, never been of better sound mind.  She believes this was an accident.  It's a comforting thought, to be sure.  Things were looking up and would keep going up.

 

But that wasn't what my best friend saw.  He saw a winter of death, suffering, imprisonment, and brutality.  He looked at the reports, the documents, the stats, the biological science, the social psychology, and concluded that COVID was going to be worse than it had been.  The gigs weren't going to return, the humans would continue to be confused, the nurses in particular were going to be in unbearable agony.  He was fighting to stay and also flying close to the sun to stay warm.

 

My friends have told me not to make any decisions for at least a couple of weeks.  I agree with them.  There's not a future anymore, and it's easier and easier for me to live in the elusive "present moment."  In the words of the late, great Dick Gregory, "Time is over." 

 

The image we are all seeing of my friend is his profile picture on facebook:

 

 

 

 

 

Some people will try to make this about addiction or mental health or something like that.  I agree that this frame could make some folks in the mental health industry some money.  I prefer to see it for what it is:  I lost another friend to the hell-scape. 

 

A while back I expressed exasperation about what's going on here in Arkansas.  What's really going on.  A senior member of ARPA wrote me a kind message saying, "I hope we don't let you down."

 

I'm here to be honest with you.  You did let me down.  I don't blame you, though, because you can't help yourselves.  You're trapped in this swamp with no way out.  If you're not panicked already, you will be.  You didn't listen hard enough, study enough, and do enough in the right ways.  You worked harder but not smarter.

 

You earned a failing grade because there's a suicide epidemic and you have no answers, and the guild will have no answers for you either.  It's a shell-game to pass money around.  I hope you can enjoy your last meals and the music because the band does appear to be playing to the last gasp. 

 

I can hear your thoughts.  "Chance, there's a vaccine just around the corner."  I refer you to the earlier paragraph on the meta-crisis.  Study up on Abraham Maslow.  Get in touch with what this discipline was about in the first place, and why William James, the American founder, quit a long time ago.  Put down the paper-work.  Confront your wealthy friends that make the rules.

 

Or don't.

 

As my best friend would say, "that's okay, too." 

 

 

 

 

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