V. sad news, especially as it sounded like he might have been on the mend, having got out of hospital and back to his houseboat. Legend... I remember back in the old MLMB days being excited to find in him somebody who had joined the dots between the critiques of capitalism and corp.media and with the environmental crises and even peak oil. A rarity to have somebody of his generation still so switched on and open to new information (albeit sometimes too open, I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one to point out) He wrote frankly and without apparent fear about death on a number of occasions, which I found inspiring and helpful. Here's one of those occasions I managed to find which seems appropriate to repost:

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It's doing a recapitulation of that right now for me, full of chagrin about things done that should

Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym [Email User] on April 6, 2017, 8:06 am, in reply to "life"

-n't have been, and things not done that should have been. OTOH, once you accept the high likelihood of re-incarnation, time after time, with the aim built in to the process of always striving to do things better next time than you managed last time, death seems - well, actually quite welcome, whenever it comes; especially when you get to that late stage where you think: 'Why am I lingering on like this, when all the means to make much of the time that's left have pretty much evaporated? Why not just quit this particular packet of life-experience and go and get re-born into the next one, all brand new, as someone quite different, according to what the pure happenstance of conception throws up?'

Apart from a certain residual animal apprehension, built in by evolution to our instinctual programming, I can't think of much of an objection, these days, to that insistent prompting. Pity that easy, reasonably dignified methods of self-release are made so difficult to lay hands on these days, by our really seriously weird attitudes - in the modern West - to death.

I don't see me spending several thousand pounds just to go to Dignitas in Switzerland, to get that release. My younger family members need that money too urgently in their own full-on here-and-now life struggles to justify such self-indulgence on my part.

My mam, at the end of her life, was lucky in her GP. When she asked him about ending it all, he wasn't one of the flinching ones who can't handle such requests - as mine is now. He just told her that she already had the means in her hand, in the sleeping draught that he'd prescribed her previously. He said: 'My dear, it's quite simple: The sleeping draught on your bedside table will do it. The rule is: One tot for a good night's sleep; two tots not to wake up again in the morning.'

As it happened, she never made use of this advice. But she gained comfort from knowing that the solution to the painful time she suffered at the end of life was right there to hand, if she ever made the fateful decision.

With all the insights that the near-death researchers, and the OOBE researchers, have amassed recently, it's become really pretty obvious that the reductive, mechanistic nihilism of modern Western thinking on the matter of death is wholly inadequate to explain to ourselves what really happens; and how - clearly - Juliet's nurse gets it wrong when she says to Romeo: "Oh sir, sir; death's the end of all!" On the contrary, as the ancient wisdom traditions concur, it's really just the gateway to what comes next. And that may involve some Purgation, sure, as is only right; but, it seems, not eternal damnation. And then you get to go round again; and again; and again; with a chance to do better each time...


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RIP Rhis, sadly missed but a life well-lived!
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