Why We Say We Lost Someone When They Die

Recently someone said they thought it was odd that people will say, when someone they love has died, that they’ve ‘lost’ that person. I used to think it was odd too…until my husband died. Now I find myself saying, “I lost my husband.”

This came to mind tonight because I wrote in my journal: Oh my love my heart aches for you. The anguish at your loss is still overwhelming.

Of course—this is why we say we ‘lost’ someone when they died. Not because we’re saying death is like losing your car keys and we think the person will be found (although there is that wild irrational hope). It’s that death is loss. Profound loss. When someone we love dies, that means we have lost a part of our life, a part of our self, the part that was that person. I have lost Arthur. I am suffering the loss of his physical being in my life.  

Even Desolation is a Country to be Explored

Last year someone kindly gave me a book of daily meditations for grief, called Healing After Loss, by Martha Hickman. Each day has a quote by someone else and Ms. Hickman’s reflections on the quote. A few days ago the quote was:

“Even desolation is a country to be explored.” Sylvia Townsend Warner

There are some platitudes that people in our culture fall back on when confronted with uncomfortable situations, like being around someone who has just lost a loved one. A particularly distasteful one, to someone who is freshly grieving, is the intimation that the experience will make you a better, stronger person. I have hated the idea that grief could be a growing experience. It’s a horrible concept to imagine yourself profiting by the death of your loved one in any way.

But this quote has a different spin for me. This says: I’m here in desolation, what is this experience? What is here for me to learn?

In an earlier blog post I wrote about my first trip to the grocery store after Arthur died. I was raw and bleeding and it felt like it must be obvious to all who saw me. And yet the woman at the register acted like everything was ordinary. She couldn’t see my pain! I turned and looked around me with wonder: what sorrow was under the surface of all the people around me that I couldn’t see?

In her discussion of this quote Ms. Hickman writes of a Buddhist tale in which a woman whose child has died went to see Buddha to ask him to bring her child back to life. He told her he could help her if she brought back a handful of mustard seeds from a house where death had not visited. The woman traveled far and wide but she could find no one who hadn’t lost someone they loved. This experience taught her that suffering is a part of life. And she found a way to heal her suffering through compassion, understanding, and love for all of humanity.

This week three people I know are exploring their own personal countries of desolation. The first is a single mom who underwent emergency surgery yesterday. Her mother died a few years ago so she was lacking that most basic support. What worries must she have endured in the few days between her trip to the ER and her surgery?

The second is a man who has worked brutally hard for fifteen years to build a successful business. Today he had to tell his lenders that he will default on his loans.

The third is waiting on test results for a fatal illness.

I find myself holding these three in my heart, walking that desolate country with them, holding them close. And I can do this only because I have become so familiar with my own personal desolate landscape.

Through the exploration of the country of desolation—the understanding that everyone lives in this place at least some of the time—I am beginning to experience a profound fellowship with everyone on Earth, bringing a deep compassion to life. I ask every day that my exploration will open my heart to the suffering of others and help me to love without judgment or condition.

Note: The Buddhist story brings to mind Jesus’s admonition that if your faith was as a mustard seed you could move mountains (Matthew 17:20). What is it about mustard seeds? I know they are tiny, but is there something else?

Footnote: I'd like to give credit for the quote but Ms. Hickman does not provide any information for where these quotes come from.

Stephen Colbert on Grief

I am a fan of Stephen Colbert. I haven’t seen him on the Tonight Show yet, and I only caught the Colbert Report rarely. When I did see his show I felt his heart was enormous and his joy infectious.

My favorite part of the show were his interviews. I thought he had a sensitivity lacking in many other talk show hosts, and in addition, Colbert asked interesting and unusual questions.

Not long ago I read an interview with him, published in GQ, and felt like I got a sense of why his heart is so open. Colbert is the youngest of eleven children. His father and two of his brothers, the two that were closest to him in age, were killed in a plane crash when he was 10. All of his other siblings were in college or living elsewhere, so Colbert lived alone with his mother for many years.

One day, when he was 35, Colbert had a revelation while walking down the street: “The world it’s so…lovely. I’m very grateful to be alive, though I know a lot of dead people.”

I loved hearing him say that about the loveliness of the world; what I call the ‘bounteous beauty’ has helped carry me through this year of grief.

The article says he used to have a note taped to his computer that read, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the existence of God.”

Here is the section of the article about his experience with grief [This is towards the end of the long interview.]:

“I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.

“It's not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened.”

I hope that one day I can get to the experience of love for that thing I most wish had not happened, and I am grateful to Stephen Colbert for his example.

Love and Beauty

Before Arthur died I tended towards agnosticism, if not outright atheism. I have always had a skeptical mind. Arthur was deeply spiritual and this was a thorn between us.

One of the components of grief is a searching for meaning: Why does life exist if it’s just going to end in death? What is the meaning of being alive? How can someone be so vital one moment and in the next moment the light goes out of their eye and they are gone even though their body remains? Why does this universe exist? What’s the point?

These questions swirled in my mind in the first grueling months of grief.

In those months there were also moments where I had undeniable feelings of connection to something deep and true underlying the material world. These moments gave me a lifeline, a spark of hope in the gloom.

Eventually I had enough of these experiences that I realized I could no longer be an agnostic. There is something deeper, something more than the physical. I know because I have felt it.

I refer to my new faith as STM: Some Thing More.

The two pillars of this faith (at least so far) are the existence of love and beauty.

Beauty spoke to me in the deepest hours of my grief, lifting my heart and giving me the strength to carry on. On hikes last spring I was regularly struck with the bounteous beauty in all things (Bounteous Beauty blog post).

Nature kept whispering to me: Beauty is the underlying essence of the All.

Love. In my grief I felt the love in my heart expanding. How does love endure past death? How could I love Arthur more now than when he was alive? Why is love one of the greatest needs of the human heart, the need to love, and the need to be loved?

Love is a force at the heart of human life.

And not just human. Recently I saw videos of two very unlikely animals enjoying having their stomachs rubbed: a bat and a penguin. Not long ago I went on a tour of a local nature center with a woman who works there, and when she called to the wolves in their open enclosure they came running, wagging their tails like dogs, and hung out near the fence with our group. 

How many videos are there on FaceBook that show animals from different species caring for one another? 

Perhaps when humans remove the need for survival from animals’ lives, by providing all the food and shelter they need, we create the environment in which the lion can lie down with the lamb.

Why? Because Love is the underlying essence of the All.

Love and Beauty. Some Thing More.

Poetry Helped Save My Sanity

I’ve never been a fan of poetry. Arthur always thought that was silly of me. And it was, since Arthur, a songwriter, was actually a poet.

The book on Arthur’s bedside table when he died was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whitman was Arthur’s favorite poet; Arthur believed Whitman expressed the theme of universal love in an exquisite way.

A story from Arthur’s youth that speaks eloquently of his heart involves Whitman: on the night John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Arthur stood alone under a streetlamp and read “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the first poem in Whitman’s “Memories of President Lincoln.”

When we were married (the first time…it’s a long story) our vows were passages from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.”

Seeing this book by Arthur’s bedside was quite moving, and I picked it up the day after he died. Little did I know in that moment what comfort and solace those poems would bring me. For months I started every morning with a poem or part of a poem. Whitman helped me hold on to my sanity in the darkest hours of my grief, and that is not an exaggeration.

Six weeks or so after Arthur died I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. This is a memoir of the year after her husband died. Didion felt the same way about poetry; she wrote that poetry was the most soothing literature, and it was the most “exact” about the experience of grief.

In my journal I speak almost daily of the beauty I’ve found in that morning’s reading of Whitman. Here are some of the passages that moved me most deeply.

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” from “Sea-drift”: In this poem Whitman is a child, living near the ocean shore, who often goes to watch a pair of birds tending their nest. Then one day the female disappears, and for the rest of the summer the male grieves.

There’s a passage where Whitman translates the male bird’s song of grief, and I cried at the way it described my experience:

Hither my love!
Here I am! here!
With this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you,
This gentle call is for you, my love, for you…

O darkness! O in vain!
O I am very sick and sorrowful.
O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
O troubled reflection in the sea!
O throat! O throbbing heart!
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more.

Arthur and I were soul mates, and it feels as if part of my soul has been torn from me.

Whitman finishes the poem by saying that this experience, hearing the message of the bird’s song of grief, changed his life and allowed him to hear thousands of songs of sorrow.

In “The Sleepers,” there were a couple of lines that spoke of what the early days of grief were like for me; Whitman is imagining himself as all the various sleepers and dreamers around the world, but there’s one who’s not sleeping:

It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter midnight,
I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

There were many a night when I was up at 3 and 4 am looking out at the stars and the moon shining on the icy February landscape out my bedroom window.

“From Noon to Starry Night” talks about the primacy of love, and ends with joy, ecstasy, and getting to the place where it is enough just to be.

                                    5
Blow again trumpeter! And for thy theme,
Take now the enclosing theme of all, the solvent and the setting,
Love, that is pulse of all, the sustenance and the pang,
The heart of man and woman all for love,
No other theme but love—knitting, enclosing, all-diffusing love…
Love, that is all the earth to lovers—love, that mocks time and space,
Love, that is day and night—love, that is sun and moon and stars,
Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume,
No other words but words of love, no other thought but love.                               
                                    8
Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life!
Enough to merely be! Enough to breathe!
Joy! joy! all over joy!

The Only Words Left to Say

I love you.Thank you for loving me.I miss you.I am sorry that I hurt you.

Arthur has been gone ten months now and I haven't thought of anything else I need or want to say.

Tomorrow is a Mirage

In the last week I’ve been looking back through the journal I have kept since Arthur died, on the 9^th of February of this year. This passage from March 2 jumped out at me:

Last night I had a wonderful dream full of portent. There was a gathering of young people, like some kind of church service, and I was going to speak. During the service for some reason I walked down the hall and found a room filled with old and ill men. A small, crippled man was down on the floor and couldn’t get up, and I tenderly helped him to his feet. One of the men was holding a baby and asked me to take it. A person came along and said I wasn’t really supposed to be there, and it was time for me to speak anyway.

On my way to the lectern I handed the baby to someone (and hugged my niece Gwen, who was wearing a pretty white dress). Then I started to speak, about loss. I talked about how we take someone or thing for granted, and forget to tell them we love them, or learn more about them, or just fully enjoy who or what they are. Then one day they are gone and so much of our feeling of loss comes from the realization that while they were with us we thought we always had tomorrow to fully pay attention to them. Tomorrow is a mirage. Love what you have today. Pay attention, say I love you, ask questions. You may never get another chance.

The Importance of Contrast

I’m reading John O’Donoghue’s book on Celtic wisdom, Anam Cara. Yesterday I was struck by this line: “A friend of mine who loves lace often says that it is the holes in the lace that render it beautiful.”

In the photo to the left, the white lace pattern is clear against the black background, but when it crosses the other white fabric the pattern is hard to see.

My dear Arthur, a musician, often said it is the ‘holes’ in music—the silence between the notes—that make it beautiful.

Artists talk about ‘negative space,’ the importance of defining an object by juxtaposing it with not-that-object.

One of the first lessons a photographer learns is the importance of contrast—light and dark combine to make a great photograph because it is contrast that creates the illusion of dimension.

I think this principle of contrast is applicable to matters of the heart also. I thought I knew what compassion was before Arthur died, but my experience of grief has taught me how shallow that understanding was.

I have had a very blessed life, with few major difficulties or misfortunes. I had a long-term relationship with a man I loved and who loved me. Of course we had conflicts, but we felt we were soul-mates. My experience of life was shifted to the ‘positive’ side.

But then Arthur died, and I have been plunged into darkness. I know what it means to have a broken heart, to feel anguish, to ache with loneliness. And out of this brokenness I have discovered something wondrous: a deeper understanding of love and compassion.

Through the contrast given by loss I have a fuller appreciation of the love I had with Arthur. The pain caused by this gaping hole in my heart has opened my heart to other’s sorrows in a whole new way. I see now that my earlier compassion was mostly intellectual; now it’s become experiential. 

I am grateful for this change.

Love in the Age of Tinder

I haven’t dated since the early 1980s. So I am wildly out of the loop when it comes to modern dating. But I’m always curious about what’s happening in our culture, so a Vanity Fair article on the online dating site ‘Tinder’ caught my eye this week.

From what I understand from the article, users of Tinder specify a geographical radius-of-interest, then scan photos of interested users in that zone. Using only the photo as a basis for decision—thumbing right for yes and left for no—they ‘hook up’ if one of their chosen users is also interested in them.

This is not about dating though. This is about sex pure and simple. Many of these ‘hook-ups’ last less than an hour. Specifying the distance to the hookupee means you can leave your friends at the bar, go off for a casual fuck, then rejoin your friends and continue partying; maybe even hookup again before the night is through.

I felt really sad by the time I finished reading. These young people are suffering the consequence of a huge misunderstanding of what the free love movement and women’s liberation movement of the 1960s were all about.

The free love movement did not advocate Tinder-like sex. What it did advocate was: if you feel a strong emotional and physical connection with another human being, act on it. Don’t be constrained by societal rules. This was the feminist message also, counteracting the double standard where men were relatively free to act on their desires but women were more limited.

The crucial difference between free love and Tinder is connection. Free love says connection is first and primary. Sex flows from that connection. Sex is actually secondary. You may note the word ‘love’ in ‘free love.’ It’s not ‘free sex.’

Somehow this became translated into ‘women’s equality means the right to have sex with anybody without any emotional attachment just like men do.’ It’s like the ethos of porn—sex stripped of all feelings—is becoming the American norm for sex.

This isn’t freedom. It’s the equivalent of America’s obesity epidemic, which is being fueled by consumption of processed foods completely stripped of nutritional value. Tinder sex is love-making stripped of the nutritional value of love and emotional connection. It’s starving the people who are consuming it. And at what cost in their individual lives and the life of our society in the future?

The author of the Vanity Fair article talks with groups of young men and women (separately to increase frankness) and it’s well worth reading. What came out in the discussion with some college women was that it was very unusual for them to have orgasms in a Tinder hookup. The men are only interested in their own pleasure, and sex often has a very porn-like feel to it. What was surprising was that in this conversation:

They talk about how it’s not uncommon for their hookups to lose their erections. It’s a curious medical phenomenon, the increased erectile dysfunction in young males, which has been attributed to everything from chemicals in processed foods to the lack of intimacy in hookup sex. 

“If a guy can’t get hard,” Rebecca says, “and I have to say, that happens a lot, they just act like it’s the end of the world.” 

“At four in the morning this guy was so upset, and I was like, Dude, I’ll just go to fucking sleep—it’s O.K.,” says Sarah, 21, the one with the long curly dark hair. “I get really tired of faking.”

These young people are interacting with other people through screens almost all the time. Are they losing the ability to interact authentically, face-to-face?

A Love Affair with my Dead Husband

My beloved husband Arthur has been dead for almost four months now. Yet, in the last couple of months, I have come to realize that our love affair is continuing. Obviously it’s taken a different form, but the relationship lives on in a very real sense.

Before today I have only talked about this with one other person because I thought it would probably sound odd to people who haven’t lost a lover to death. I know it would have seemed odd to me not long ago. The one person I did share it with lost her husband some years ago, and she was quite sympathetic, as I knew she would be.

Then yesterday I read an essay in the New York Times entitled I Am a Bigamist. The author, Jill Smolowe, is also a widow, and she writes about how her love affair with her dead husband has continued, even in the new relationship she has with her second husband, a man who lost his wife and has his own separate love affair. Ms. Smolowe says they discussed their continuing love affairs before they were married. Because in her heart she is still in love—and married—to her first, dead husband, to be married to a second man means she is a bigamist. How beautiful; such an expansive vision of love, and of life and death.

In “Better Angels,” a lyrical film about Abraham Lincoln’s youth, death plays a major role. Abraham’s mother died when he was fairly young. In the film, Abraham has a very special relationship with his mother, and her death was difficult for him (I assume this is based on fact). His father re-married, and there are some touching scenes where Abraham learns that loving this new mother doesn’t diminish his love for his biological mother.

The most moving scene for me was when the new mother went into a field and met the ‘ghost’ of Abraham’s mother, and the two women interacted in a loving way. What I saw communicated between the two was the understanding that the biological mother had her part in this family and the two women were going to co-exist. After I saw this movie, I thought, “If I ever have another intimate relationship, that person is going to have to learn to co-exist with Arthur’s spirit, which will always be here beside me.”

I am grateful for Ms. Smolowe for this article, helping me understand that this experience I’m having is something to celebrate, a sign of the great love that exists between Arthur and I. Arthur may have died, but our love lives on.

The Phone Call

One of the consequences of having suffered the death of a loved one (my husband of 34 years died three months ago) is the people around you get a little nervous. They are afraid of reminding you of your loss (as if there’s any chance you’ll forget), or of exposing you to something that will make your broken heart bleed anew.

This happened to me this weekend, when I was at a friend’s house. For some time she has wanted to share some of this years’ Oscar-nominated short films with me, and this night we settled in to watch her favorite, ‘The Phone Call.’ It quickly became apparent that the film is about a man who is in despair over his wife’s death, and my friend hit the pause button, horrified, and apologized for her thoughtlessness. I replied that not only do I not want people to censor themselves around me, I also have to get past any reluctance to see or read about people encountering death, because that is one of the great themes of art and literature.

In fact, I have found that art provides one of the best solaces for grief (being outdoors is another). And I am not alone in this. I’ve read a few ‘grief memoirs’ recently and every person has said that poetry helped them cope.

If you haven’t seen ‘The Phone Call,’ I’m going to give some spoilers so you might want to stop reading now until you’ve seen this beautiful film. Here's the trailer:

Interspecies Love

Recently I saw a video on YouTube that shows kittens and dogs meeting for the first time.

The video is incredibly sweet, and watching these natural enemies play together made me think that humans are bringing about an incredible new thing on this planet: interspecies love and affection. Without the influence of humans, these cats and dogs would never be snuggling together for naps or playing games.

Anyone who has ever owned a pet knows that animals are loving, caring, loyal, trusting, and forgiving. But in the wild, animals can usually only share this love with members of their own species. There are the rare examples of animals caring for members of another species in the wild, but from what I can find these are usually cases where a mother has adopted an infant.

But when animals get domesticated, because they no longer have to worry about survival, particularly obtaining food, they are freed up to express empathy and take care of other animals. This article gives examples of some unlikely pairings, including an orangutan caring for tiger cubs, a male pig with a lamb, and a chihuahua with a marmoset (great pictures at the website). The book Unlikely Friendships, by National Geographic magazine writer Jennifer Holland, documents 47 stories of interspecies relationship, including the Biblical lion lying down with the lamb: a female lion adopted a baby antelope at a nature reserve in Kenya.

GLACHH

Recently someone asked me to describe my spiritual path. First, I dislike the word “spiritual,” because I’m interested in being a more loving and caring person; I have less interest in connection with the divine. I think of my path as being more about consciousness; becoming more aware every day.

The basic components of my path are: acceptance, love, humility, compassion, honesty, and gratitude. For fun I thought I’d make an acronym to remember them better, and the best sounding word I could come up with is GLACH₂.

Gratitude: This has been a tough one for me. I seem to expect a lot from the world, and since my life hasn’t been perfect (according to my expectations) for most of my life I couldn’t see many reasons for gratitude. However, the foundation of my path is this concept: reality, as it is currently manifested in this moment, is perfect. This moment is whole and complete. The more I experience this, the more I feel gratitude for the way it is (no matter how it is!). I feel like I have a lot more to learn about gratitude, and perhaps that is why it ended up first in the acronym, to keep it present in my awareness.

Love: My definition of love is “the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is.” Loving what is means I am seeing the perfection of this moment of now; I’m not bitching about it and wanting it to be some other way. Loving what is dissolves the boundaries between the world and me.

Acceptance: My ego-identity fights to survive just like an animal, with fight/flight behavior. It seems like the world is almost never quite right, so I have to either battle to get my way or run from what’s happening. There is an option, and that is to face the world as it is, to bow to the reality of the now. This doesn’t mean I become a doormat, it just means I’m not rejecting what already is.

Compassion: Another foundational premise of my path is that everyone is insane (We are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity). Crazy people do crazy things. In addition, free will is a cruel myth. People don’t choose to do mean, cruel, or hurtful things, they are driven to do them by their mental programming. The only sane response is compassion: seeing another’s limitations without value judgment.

Honesty: I used to hide myself because I believed that if people knew what I was really like, what I really thought, they’d start laughing or run screaming. But then I felt like a fraud, and hated myself for my weakness. I began seeing how I was hurting people by not telling the truth. As a simple example, say you’re about to give an important presentation. I notice you have a piece of food between your teeth. It’s a little embarrassing for me to tell you about it, but wouldn’t not telling you the truth hurt you?

Humility: This is another one that has caused me some trouble. I used to confuse humility with humiliation. I couldn’t understand why anyone could want to be humble, it sounded weak and pitiful to me. I tried hard to never make mistakes and to do everything perfectly, because I believed that only if I was perfect would people like me. I couldn’t laugh at myself when I made a mistake. I’ve come to realize that humility is extremely powerful because it’s just recognizing the truth of my limitations.

Every moment is an opportunity to experience/express GLACH₂. Every moment I'm not experiencing/expressing GLACH₂ is an opportunity to learn about what I'm still attached to, afraid of, or angry about. 

We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity on sale!

My book, We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion, is now available as an e-book at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com. At Smashwords you can read the first four chapters for free.

Here's a brief description:

Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately, but we don’t. What we see is an individual mind-generated reality, heavily distorted by our beliefs and assumptions. We erroneously believe our subjective reality is actual reality. We’re all insane because we’re deluded about what is real.

What better explanation for dysfunctional human behavior than universal insanity? What better way to explain why loneliness, fear, and hatred are so familiar and love so rare? Why so many people need to use alcohol and drugs just to get through another day? Why half of all marriages end in divorce?

We are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity presents the idea that the primary cause of human suffering is universal insanity. Insanity is defined as: confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality. In practical terms, this translates as confusing subjective opinion with objective fact.

For example: “I made a mistake” is an objective fact. “I made a mistake because I’m a loser” is a subjective opinion. When I think and act as if the subjective opinion is an objective fact I’m confused about what is real. It is this confusion of fantasy with fact that makes me insane.

Free will is shown to be a complete myth. Insane people do not have free will. We are driven by subconscious psychological forces over which we have no control. Recognizing our insanity means the end of blame, shame, and arrogance.

In addition, the recognition of universal insanity is the key to compassion: we’re not right in our minds.

By understanding that all hurtful behavior—from gossip to mass murder—proceeds from insane thinking, we can experience compassion for ourselves and everyone else.

The book includes references to recent scientific and psychological research that demonstrates how out-of-touch with reality we really are. Other references range from Zen stories to the Three Stooges.

I use examples from my own life to illustrate how we all build a personal subjective reality—My Story. I also share my personal growth as I face my own insanity.

This book is for adult audiences. There is a chapter on sexuality and passages in other chapters that discuss sex in an explicit manner.

Sanity is love. Love is defined as: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is. This means that when we experience acceptance of reality exactly the way it is we experience love.

This book may transform the way you see yourself and the world.