Energy, impact and presence and meditation
The impact that a person makes on us, the significance of what they say or do, the feel of them, often takes a lot longer to be felt than the time they literally spend stimulating our immediate senses.
It can take minutes, hours, days, months and years until we can impact what a person has said, done or danced in front of us. The impact might be thought of the fact of being able to consider the light from a star, which died millions of years ago.
In this way, then, much of what a person is to us, their affect, their energy, the experience of them is something that takes place within us, at a time of our own choosing, and often when they are not around.
It is the same for the dead, as for the living. Like the light from a star that died millions of years ago, we continue to process people and be impacted by them long after they have left us. Whether they are alive or not is immaterial.
In this way we can talk about the living dead, just as much as the living live.
Or the living can be dead. If a person is not impacting on us, even though dead, we might consider them dead.
If a person continues to impact on us then they are alive.
We are sure that they are not corporeally there in front of us, within reaching distance, but in all other respects they continue to impact on us; we may even remember how they smell. These triggers continue, and can be very strong.
It is meditation, the quelling of stimulation from our immediate environment, which allows us to tune into their ongoing resonances, energies, insights and wisdom.
Simply by remembering and reflecting on people, we can continue to learn from them long after they have left us, and long after they have died. In this sense people never die, but we have to meditate on them, invest in them, to keep them alive.
Russel Hoban
They were all shamans and they were all dead but they were still busy with the living because the living are the link between the dead and the unborn and the dead have to work all the time to pass long to the unborn all the things they’re going to need. Maybe you think you’re doing it all by yourself but it’s the dead working in you. They simply have no rest, the dead. Life is hard and death is hard, nothing is easy.