NDE -- Glimpses of the Other Side

In a previous blog, I discussed some of the ways we learn about the territory of death and after death. The most familiar resource is religion. It is the main purpose of religion to provide a theological framework for why we are here and what it all mean. Invariably religions predict a relationship between behaviors in this life and rewards or punishments in the next. It has been suggested that religious doctrine gives society its moral compass and motivation for being good. Authority for this religious doctrine is almost always attributed to God or some divine being by way of inspiration to a specially chosen prophet (e.g. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith). Eventually the charismatic teachings of these religious messengers evolve into formulated rules of behavior. Considering the number of wars that are grounded in religious fervor, one might question the underlying definition of "being good," or the calibration of the proffered moral compass. Nevertheless, for many people in the world, religion has been a source of comfort and guidance regarding the mysteries of death.

A more down-to-earth source of information about death comes from the dying themselves. This too I mentioned in the earlier blog. The visions and communications of the dying, termed "nearing death awareness" by Kelley and Callanan in their book Final Gifts, provide a first hand-glimpse of the possibilities of death. Terminally ill patients frequently speak of a journey or trip they are about to take. Some report advanced traveling in the mind or spirit to various places around the world or in otherworldly realms, not unlike fledgling learning how to fly. There are also descriptions of visitations by deceased relative and friend, and if observed in those moments the dying do indeed appear to be looking at something invisible to others. Moments before her death, my friend Marianne, who had been unconscious, suddenly sat up in bed and gazed off into the distance, a look of beatific awe and amazement on her face. It was the sort of look that makes you turn to see what is there, followed by goosebumps upon seeing only the wall. Another friend told me that during her mother's final days she (the mother) seemed to have acquired the skill of astral projection, since she was able to report the details of her children's conversations conducted well out-of-ear-shot. The LA Times article, "Taking Life's Final Exit" provides a lovely summary the Final Gifts book along with other intriguing reports on "nearing death awareness.

A third source of information about death comes from people who have revived after being declared clinically dead. In his seminal book, Life After Life, Raymond Moody's recounts the many common features of "near-death experience" (NDE) -- a long dark tunnel, disembodied observation of one's physical body and the activities around it, a feeling of profound inner peace and contentment, bright golden light, the appearance of deceased friends and relative and/or an otherworldly being to assist in a life review and the subsequent return to the living. Moody's book is largely anecdotal and he makes no claims about proof of an afterlife, but he is clearly impressed by the reports of his subjects and discounts any rational scientific explanation. For a sample of a near-death encounter see Mellen-Thomas story. While not all near-deathers claim the spiritual insights of Mellen-Thomas, almost all report the loss of any fear about death after their experience--a comforting result in and of itself. The two near-deathers I interviewed in the course of making my film series, Secrets of Life and Death, both describe their reluctance and disappointment at returning to the living, so wonderful was their glimpse of the other side.

Those uncomfortable with the implications of NDE have sought physiological and psychological explanations, e.g. drug induced hallucination, brain shutdown, oxygen deprivation, depersonalization and birth memory. Discussion of the scientific viewpoint may be found on HowStuffWorks and Wikipedia. Evidence that favors the survival of consciousness after death is reported by Kenneth Ring in a paper written for the Journal of Near Death Studies and summarized on the NDE website. The jury is still out on where NDE proves or disproves life after death. Read the material and decide for yourself. Ultimately it boils down to what you believe in, and that may have a lot more to do with your own life experiences than any rational argument.

In my next blog I will describe a fourth source of after-death information -- communications from the dead themselves  These communications come to us in three distinct ways: channeled (not so very different from the way religions initially acquire their own death knowledge); electronically or telephonically transmitted -- also known as electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) or Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC); and dream visitations.

If you have any personal experiences or research related to this subject please share with the rest of us.

Dream Guidance

Dreams are an amazing resource if you can learn how to decode them. They can give you information about the purpose of your life, the state of your health, the people you have lost or the progress of your work. They can even hint at  what you should do or not do. But, how to make sense of them? So many wild visuals: water, zebras, butterflies, overflowing toilets, crammed bookshelves, trains, mountain trails, people you feel you know but can’t identify when you wake up. What does it all mean?

Like poetry, dreams are full of symbolism and metaphor. If you give them time and attention you can start to learn the language of your own dreams. The first step is to write them down. Best to do it when you first wake up, because dreams have a habit of slipping away quickly. Some dream enthusiasts will wake up in the middle of the night to record their dreams. Not me, I’m much too attached to my sleep. Also, I read in one of Jeremy Taylor’s books (big dream author) about writing down dreams only to discover in the morning that the writing had been a dream too. So why even try. The way I figure it, if it’s important, I’ll remember.

Expert dreamers have some helpful hints about keeping a dream journal and interpreting dreams. When you are writing down your dream always write it in the present tense as though it were happening in this very moment. This helps to bring the dream into the present and makes it more accessible to the intuitive side of your brain. 

How you feel about the dream and also how you felt just after the dream can be important clues to the dreams meaning. If you felt positive about the dream, what is going right in your life right now? Can you relate it to your dream.  If you felt frightened, or angry or sad, again consider what is happening in your life and see if there's a connection. 

Next, examine everything in your dream: every object, person and action and consider what special meaning each has for you. In my own dreams, buses, trains, cars and bikes regularly appear. They are all forms of locomotion -- ways for me to move forward. I usually associate them with the work I've doing for the last twelve years, making and distributing my film series, Secrets of Life and Death. Train? Moves fast, but not in my power. Bicycle? Slow and easy and under my own steam.

It helps to share your dream with others who are also enthusiastic about dreams. Their interpretations of your dreams and vice versa can provide many new insights, besides making it a lot more fun. The rule about interpreting someone else’s dream, however, is to always preface your interpretation with: “if it were my dream, it would mean. . .” The meaning of your dreams is always up to the dreamer. There is no one right interpretation, only the interpretation that feels right for you. 

Books of symbols can be a good resource for additional ideas. Since I often dream about animals, my favorite book is, Animal Speak by Ted Andrews.

My dreams have given me a lot of insight throughout my film making process. Scanning through a dream journal written in 2006, I happened on a dream titled, “Caught on the last step.” This was a month before I contracted with the editor who helped me finish my films. In the dream my foot is stuck on the last step of a staircase. I have to step backward to move forward again. And that is exactly what I ended up doing in real life. I went back to the editor I had given up on a year ago because she was too busy. The timing was the right and we were able to finish editing the first two films in four months.

So give it a try. Dreaming is one of the great mysteries of existence. It can put magic into your life.

Nonbelief or Disbelief

I want to share this exchange I had with a friend about my last blog post,  Understanding Death for Those Without Faith.  Daniel objected to my use of the word "Atheist" as its true meaning is one who does not believe in a God. One can disbelieve in God and still believe in some form of afterlife. 

I started by asking if there was a more concise term for "a person who does not believe in an afterlife."

Daniel: Good question. Personally I feel that "materialist" covers it, because that seems to be the gist of it -- the notion that all reality, including consciousness, can be reduced to some crudely material basis.  I think that if one firmly believes this, then any experiences or phenomena that seem to challenge it will be interpreted within that framework even if it means sweeping whole chunks of subjective experience or objective evidence under the rug. That seems to be how anomalies in general are handled by our arbiters of reality.

Michelle: Materialist... sounds more like a consumer or someone after worldly things. This may or may not be true for those who believe we cease to exist after death.

Daniel: That's a common usage of the term "materialist," but in philosophy and science it means someone who believes that matter is all there is. The philosophical materialist believes that consciousness arises from physical matter (specifically, brain matter), or at least from the *behavior* of brain matter, i.e., neurological activity.

The nonmaterialist considers that the brain and its activity may modulate, structure or create imprints in consciousness but sees consciousness itself as essentially independent of matter, and capable of being influenced directly by other consciousness.

Theoretically one can argue on behalf of either point of view and invoke supportive evidence, but the materialist overlay on mainstream science is so invisibly pervasive that self-described scientists will generally accept evidence representing only one point of view. In other words, this overlay is often equated with science itself, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Science is simply a *method of inquiry*. Properly conducted, it should be neutral with regard to particular philosophies, worldviews and subject matter. One might even say that the scientific method is very much a spiritual discipline in that its practice requires setting the ego aside and letting Nature speak without hindrance or prejudice.  (Sure, some distortion is always inevitable -- you just want to minimize it as much as possible.)

Michelle: It may be they have not been exposed to experiences or information that shifts their perspective. Perhaps "nonbeliever" might be more precise. Or "rationalist.

Daniel: I think genuine "nonbelief" is fine because it's neutral and presupposes openmindedness. What I think we're dealing with here is instead DISbelief, which is really just a fixed, unconscious belief in an opposing idea.

Michelle: "I did point out to the participants at the screening that Buddhism is an A-theistic practice.  However, there were at least two people who specifically said they did not believe in an afterlife.  And they are members of a group I truly need to address. They are looking for something.

Daniel: If their disbelief in an afterlife was unshakeable, what do you think they were looking for? For most people with high levels of disbelief, anything that smacks of religion (which would presumably be their only point of reference to an afterlife) is already pretty much off the table.

Michelle:  I think the nonbelievers (disbelievers?) were looking for some way to cope with the fact of their dying, to bring hope back into life when everything seems hopeless.

Some hopeful strategies those who do not believe in an afterlife include: leaving a life legacy for those left behind -- maybe an annotated photo album, an ethical will, videotaped messages to children. Examination of one's life is a good exercise.  Learning to live in the moment, to cherish each moment, to spend time in nature and joy, to feel gratitude, to feel awe.  These are all things available to the nonbeliever. Last, and more difficult for nonbelievers is opening to the mystery of life. And that may a little to close to religion for most.

Daniel: That's a tough one. The materialist/atheist must admit to no mysteries, while believing that science will eventually solve them!

But on the practical, human level, yes. Whatever works to raise the person's spirits and help them open to joy in the moment is a blessing. Philosophy is small comfort unless they've already opened up to interpreting their experiences in a new light and relaxing into them.



Please share your thoughts regarding afterlife. We may be totally off the mark. -- Michelle

Understanding Death For Those Without Faith

A survey of attendees at my last film screening revealed consensus for wanting a deeper understanding of death. While our discussion was amazing in its breadth and coverage of difficult topics such as anger, acceptance, loneliness and the need for help, nothing was said about what happens when you die. No one in the room appeared to have the requisite personal experience.  No near-deathers, no reincarnates, no prophets or seers.

My objective for my workshops is simple-- get people talking about death.  But the survey made me realize that my audience was looking for something more -- specific information about death itself. The traditional place for obtaining an understanding of death is religion. All major world religions have something to say about death whether it flowery fields at the foot of God, the luminous embrace of deceased loved ones, return to the dreamtime, absorption by the mother goddess, or scary visions that send us scurrying back into rebirth for another round. Those with a deep faith may be comforted by the teachings of their chosen path. But this avenue offers little to those who have lost their childhood religious beliefs or never had any to begin with. What can I offer to a person who truly believes at the core of her being that she will cease to exist at the moment of her death? Sixty-two percent of my screening participants either did not report a religious/spiritual identification or said they were Atheist.

In the workshop, I asked people to consider death is an option, a path that might be chosen instead of taking on still more aggressive chemos, more invasive radiation, surgical interventions or high-priced experimental treatments neither tested or approved. My mother had metastatic breast cancer. The surgeons removed 70% of her intestines because it spread there and she could no longer eliminate waste. The surgery gave her about four more months to live. It gave her time to finish up her life. Her oncologist, however, also recommended chemotherapy. I would not have thought her a good candidate. She was extremely underweight, could hardly eat because of a paralysis to the right side of her face and her cancer had spread to her liver. After two treatments, she said "No more." The physical impact was too debilitating, too awful to endure. Physicians will recommend procedures even though the probability of success is miniscule. It is hard to take away hope. Families beg for hope. And well, you never know. Miracles happen. Also, to put it crudely, it's a business model. If a patient never think of death as an option, if he/she never face fears about dying, treatment may continue right up until the very last breath.

Well, why not? If you believe that you cease to exist at the end of that last breath isn't living, even in suffering, preferable to non-existence??? Maybe not. My mother didn't think so. Maybe the atheists at my workshop are not so sure either.  Or maybe they are looking for something else when all hope seems gone.

Besides religion, another way we can learn about dying is from those nearing death. The following list of books look to the experiences of the dying for guidance. Even the confirmed atheist can find something useful here.

• Dying Well, Ira Byock, MD, Berkeley Publishing, Berkeley, 1997 -- Full of heart-opening stories about finishing up relational business, saying good-bye and letting go, this book is primer for dying in peace. His five essential steps are I forgive you; forgive me, thank you, I love you, good-bye.
• Final Gifts, Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Bantam Books, NY 1992 -- Rich and mysterious stories about the leave-taking process of dying collected over ten years by two hospice nurses. Full of the mystery of this amazing transition.
• The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Harper, San Francisco, 1998 -- Pulling together the essence of many world wisdom traditions, (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Zen, Native American religions, Sufism, the Kabbalah) and years of working at the bedside of the dying, transpersonal psychologist Singh formulates a sort of Jungian process of psychospiritual  transformation from ego to "Ground of Being." Interesting and heady, the book extracts the best teachings from our religious traditions. But it is not for someone close to death.  For those near death, she says, "...put the book down. And know that you are safe. ... If you are dying, your mind will come to know this soon. So go and rest or go and pray or go and meditate, so that when you begin to enter the realms of the sacred you will resonate with those realms gently."
• Who Dies, Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Doubleday, NY, 1982 -- Pioneers in the conscious dying movement, Stephen and Ondrea share knowledge and insights obtained from years at the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project. Included are wonderful meditations on forgiveness, pain and dying. There is also an amazing description of what dying feels like from the inside -- mentally transmitted to Stephen from one of his patients. I read this book after my parents died and experienced a profound shift in my understanding of illness and healing. 

Ultimately the message in all these books is to embrace the mystery. Life is an amazing experience and so is dying. Welcome everything. 

Growing Old and Liking It.

At my 60th birthday party

Not until I reached forty did I notice any signs of aging.  I had that youthful appearance that had liquor stores and restaurants carding me until well into my 30s. When I reach 40, however, my eyes started to go.  I resisted, as most of us blessed with 20-20 vision resist. I only wore readers at night when reading in bed. I recall sitting in an Indian restaurant with a friend trying to decipher the menu in the mellow glow of the table lamp. Gradually and insidiously the need for glasses spread to all my reading time. Now I wear progressive except when I'm walking outside where the signs are graphic or large enough to read.

What really got my attention regarding my aging was the day I ran down a mountain trail and at the bottom discovered that my knees hurt and the hurt didn't go away for several days. I was stunned. That had never happened before. I had been a long distance runner for fifteen years.  I understood fatigue, cramped muscles, temporary aches from over extension, but this was new phenomenon. This was aging. This meant I had to be more careful. I had to learn to respect my body's limits. The bad news is that with each passing year, new limits keep adding on.

I still look pretty good on the outside. I eat extremely well -- organic, mostly vegetable. I do yoga and walk everyday. I've kept my weight down. My small breasts do not weigh enough to sag. Yet something is going on inside that I have no control over. It is the time clock of my cells.

A delightful and yet disturbing book, The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, by David Shields, goes into great and at times humorous detail about the process of aging without being tedious or too scientific.

Given a list of 24 words, an average 20-year-old remembers 14 of the words, a 40-year-old remembers 11, a 60-year-old remember 9, and a 70-year-old remembers 7.

After age 30, your digestive tract displays a decrease in the amount of digestive juices. At 20, in other words, your fluids are fleeing, and by 30, you're drying up.

That may account for some of the digestive issues I began to experience in my late 30s which I always blamed on the fasting I did at Sufi camp and the inevitable food bingeing that would ensue afterward. I started taking digestive enzymes in my 40s and never looked back.

Shields' lists of age comparisons are interspersed with anecdote from his own life and that of his father who at the time of the book's creation was 97 and heading for 100.

The maximum rate of your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every years. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine.

You couldn't prove this decline in efficiency by my dad, who, until his early 90s, would awake in darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit. Birds would be just starting to call; black would still streak the colored-pencil soft blue of the sky; my father would be jogging.

The book is also interspersed with the comments of writers and celebrities and interesting stats:

Lauren Bacall said, "When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she's on the slide. It's downhill all the way from then on. It doesn't give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being."

Jack London died at 40; Elvis Presley, at 42.

Don Marquis, an American newspaper columnist who died at 59, said, "Forty and Forty-five are bad enough; fifty is simply hell to face; fifteen minutes after that you are sixty; and then in ten minutes more you are eighty-five.

I have to agree with Marquis about the hellishness of the fifties. For most women, that's when menopause sets in.  There is no exaggerating the impact that chemistry shift has on a woman's body.

As women lose estrogen, their pubic hair becomes more sparse, the labia becomes more wrinkled, and the skin surrounding the vulva atrophies. The cell walls of a woman's vagina become weaker and more prone to tearing; the vagina gets drier, more susceptible to infection, and--with loss of elasticity--less able to shrink and expand, less accommodating to the insertion of a penis.

Most women will recall receiving the book, Growing Up and Liking It from their school around the age of 11 or 12. It give graphic details about the physiological changes about to take place as a girl reaches puberty.  I seem to have missed the follow-up publication for young girls turning 50, Growing Old and Liking It. All my knowledge was gleaned from the locker room discussions of older women.

I also agree with Marquis about the speed with which the sixties follows on its heels. Remember those old movies in which passing times was conveyed by the leaves of a calendar falling away? (If you don't remember, you're probably too young to find this post very interesting.)  That is how time feels to me now. Yesterday, it was January 1st and today it's more than half way through the year. Is that because I'm aging or because time is really speeding up?

David Shields begins his book with birth and continues to old age and death.  It is an engaging read with some very usable information. Here's his recipe for living longer:

If you want to live longer, you should--in addition to the obvious: eating less and losing weight--move to the country, not take work home, do what you enjoy and feel good about yourself, get a pet, learn to relax, live in the moment, laugh, listen to music, sleep 6 to 7 hours a night; be bless with long-lived parents and grandparents (35 percent of your longevity is due to genetic factors); be married ....

Read the book if you want to know the rest. It's probably in your library.

If you want to know about death, which Shields doesn't discuss, check out my website or come to one of my film screenings.

Departures

Rick Fields' Ashes

In the Japanese film Departures by director Yojiro Takita, an out-of-work cellist accidentally finds a new career casketing the dead. The Japanese, we discover in this film, are as death phobic as we are in the West. This premise makes for a humorous, at times emotional, and very engaging film about life, death and relationships.

The young cellist, Daigo Kobayashi, is reluctant at first to accept this highly questionable vocation. But he learns from his boss to encasket the dead with the elegance and precision of a Japanese tea ceremony. The process is amazing to watch and he is soon drawn into it beyond the lucrative pay that first hooked him. With respect and dignity and various trade tricks deftly concealed behind wraps and cloth, the two men transform the deceased from a thing of horror into beauty before the eyes of the grieving family. Frequently, though not always, their exquisite work opens the family to their grieving.

The film stimulates a lot of thought about how we deal with death and dead bodies in the States. I have already written about our aversion to death as revealed in our obsession with medical technology to stave it off at all costs. After death this aversion continues in our haste to call professionals to remove the body and handle the nasty bits. And what do you think of the undertaker -- that tall slim fellow with gaunt cheeks, solemn face and back silk hat? Mercenary? Insincere? Obsequious? That's how he's depicted by Dickens. But what are your experiences?

When my brother Sandy unexpectedly died, we were able to briefly visit his body at the mortuary. It was not an official viewing, which would have been costly, but rather an "identification." The mortuary was fairly sure it had the right body, but family are permitted to examine and identify their loved one without additional charge. Sandy was laid out on a wheeled table dressed only in a black plastic body bag. He looked asleep, but he was cold to the touch. I must say, there is nothing quite like touching a dead body to comprehend that the former inhabitant is no longer home.

The impulse of my brother's widow was to glance at the body and then leave the room. "Yup, that's him." To be sure she was still in shock from finding his dead body in bed the previous morning. But our culture also supports a hasty retreat. I chose, however, to stay a while, as did my other brother, Skip. We watched and waited to see what might happen, to let memories and feelings emerge, to formulate final words for our brother's unhearing ears. The widow returned, three times, first to berate him for leaving her and finally to kiss him goodbye. I like to think we held the space for her to take her time. But we may only have prolonged her discomfort. Do what you need to do and let others do what they need. It is the best rule at times like these.

I am not sure how I feel about the primping of a dead body. I remember a lot of deprecating comments about how my deceased grandmother looked in her open casket all rouged and lipsticked. She did not look anything like our "gramma." In contrast, my brother Sandy looked very much like himself without any adornment. However, there was something very stark and discomforting about his utilitarian display on the gurney. After my dear friend Marianne died and the hospice orderly had cleaned her up, we dressed her, combed her hair, and applied lipstick to her lips even though her next stop was the crematorium. Doing this felt right and respectful. After our gentle ministrations, her mouth, previously slack-jawed and open, softened into a sweet, contented smile. Was she pleased? Primping seemed the right thing to do in her case. Perhaps the difference lie in the manner of those doing the primping, i.e. with reverence and love. That is why I find the the ritual preparation in Departures is so compelling.

In California, home-based funerals are gaining popularity not only to save money, but also reclaim the ancient and intimate ritual of preparing the body for burial. People trained in the practice of body preparation can be hired to guide a family through the process and paperwork. Or you can read up on it at Final Passages. Keeping the body at home has the added advantage of providing ample time to sit with the deceased, rather than be hastened by the organizational needs of professional facilities.

Although contemplating death and decay may be a time-honored practice among the Buddhists, it is not everyone's cup of tea. Even I, who can wax romantically about the emotional benefits of doing it yourself, pause at the thought of actually preparing the body of my six feet tall, 300+ lbs brother. Distributing his ashes, which nearly filled a tall garbage bag, was task enough.

The chevra kadisha, a team of professional volunteers trained in the burial preparation, offers a middle road approach between the do-it-yourselfers and high-priced professionals at least for those of the Jewish faith. They mix spirituality with practicality as they wash, purify and dress the deceased in a process called taharah. The Jews, apparently, have held on to their time-honored practices of handling death while much of western culture has spent the last 100 years hiding it in the closet. We might learn from them and and from our graceful encasketers in Departures, as we seek our own personal approach to death and the dead. The people in my newest film, The Heart of Grieving, offer some additional possibilities, none of which involve washing dead bodies. When clear cultural instructions are lacking, we do best to follow our hearts.

Mastering Life

In the film Julie and Julia, we are provide with an interesting contrast between the story of Julia Child’s start in the cooking profession and blogger Julie Powell’s one year challenge to cook every recipe in Child’s first cookbook. Child, married to a career diplomat and living in Paris, begins her adventure by seeking to engage her mind and time doing something she loves – eating good food. Julie seeks to prove her worth to herself and her friends, also by doing something she loves -- writing and cooking. It takes Child over seven years to write her famous book and many more to get it published. I found this reassuring given the ten plus years I have spent producing my film series. Julie becomes a stunning success after only a year. I felt dismissive.

Clearly, I have some judgments about Julie that bare examination. Julie was motivated by EGO, the desire to prove herself to her friends. She piggybacked on the work of another and she was an overnight success (ok, over-year success)! Child, in contrast, was motivated by her sheer love for food, was amazingly courageous in bucking gender stereotypes and praise-worthy for her many years of perseverance in writing and publishing her book. She was also played by actor, Meryl Streep, and thus irresistible. Reexamining my judgments I realized that neither woman is better than the other and both have something to teach us about life mastery.

1. Ego: How many of us are not first motivated by a desire to prove ourselves to others. The lesson from both women is to select something that we love to do. Julie shares her struggles with her ego -- her insecurity, her disappointments, her self-absorption and the near destruction of her marriage. We can identify and learn from her missteps and forgive ourselves as we can forgive her. Child, on the other hand, shows us how to stand up for our work, to resist compromising for the sake of acceptance (i.e. being published). Is this ego or not-ego? Was she so full of herself and her book that she couldn’t make the requested changes? Or was it love of her work and those who helped her that would not allow it? She won in the ends. Her book was published in its entirety. So we are grateful she resisted and can learn something about defending the integrity of our own creations.

2. Piggybacking: What artist does not learn from the work of other? It is where inspiration and ideas are birthed. Can any one look at their own creations and truly say they owe nothing to any one else? It is impossible. Of course there are limits. When is it piggybacking, when is it plagiarism, and when is it copyright infringement? It can be a confusing line that, rest assured, our copyright industry protects and expands with vigor. Julie was piggybacking on Child’s work. Child was piggybacking on her teachers. They piggybacked on those they learned from and so on and so forth back to that first caveman who discovered cooking over fire. Each one put something of themselves in the new creation that makes it truly unique. Of course sometimes they don’t, but we’ll let the courts decide.

3. Instant Success. Why degrade instant success? Struggling for years has nothing to recommend for itself. It is simply a belief one clings to in the long years of uncertainty and disappointment. “Got to put in the time!” It is a belief that can undermine us and hold us back right along with thoughts about being unworthy, not good enough and undeserving. Instead of dissing Julie for her relatively quick success, we should be celebrating her and trying to copy her. Of course there is also a lot of serendipity and luck, not to mention good connections involved in achieving what we traditionally think of as success, i.e., fame and fortune. Perhaps we should reconsider the meaning of success.

When it comes to the end of our lives, what will we remember as being most important? In a blog post at Inspiration and Chai we are told of five regrets that recur among the dying: failing to live a life true to one’s self rather than fulfilling the expectations of others, working too hard, not expressing one’s feelings, losing track of friend, and not being happy. Might a truly successful life be better gauged by how few of these regrets we have in our final hours? So, how are you doing?