Pouring milk on my father's scalding bones

Sudden death and the sadhana that remains.

The morning after cremating my father in Southern India the old fashioned way, meaning on a bed of logs and dung and bricks and flowers and some rice sprinkled on his lips and a Brahmin priest speed-reciting various Sanskrit liturgical verses, the cremation yard worker handed me a small bag of cool milk, torn at the corner, to pour on my father’s still scalding bones, which had been plucked from the ashes and piled into a small wicker basket.

My dad picked up an infection while traveling in India. Probably while hiking the holy mountain Arunachala barefoot and bleeding all over the stones, though the doctors thought food poisoning. A 71-year old diabetic with congestive heart failure, his death was sudden and unexpected, but not unforeseeable. As a professor of religious studies at Vassar College, where he literally taught a course titled Religious Responses to Suffering and Death, which he’d call his seminar on dying for short, he’d been preparing to “leave the body” for decades.

He first arrived at Vassar as a graduate student from Columbia to teach a small group of faculty Sanskrit. Before arriving, he’d dropped out of Harvard as a freshman to join and eventually run the Hare Krishnas in Paris, which entailed shaving his head and chanting to god in public for a couple years. This latter portion, the chanting to god, was a habit he never kicked. Then he roamed India for a few more years. For as long as I’ve known him, he’d been trying to figure out how to die, which, put differently, is trying to figure out how to live given the pesky knowledge our species carries around that everything we have ever known, loved, hoped, and felt will all, at some unknown moment, forever vanish into oblivion.

My dad’s death has, unsurprisingly, stirred up some questions in me. The universe extinguished a beautiful, forceful instance of consciousness, a lifetime of seeking and striving and uncommon achievement and of course, spiced through with fuck-ups. If you can spend 71 years summiting most tracks of achievement, from conventional and professional to spiritual, and even then, death claims you all the same, and your body rocks side to side as medics wheel the gurney holding your evacuated body towards the flames that will turn you to glorified dust, then what of his accolades, his accomplishments, his myriad doings, actually mattered? What were his greatest triumphs over the entropic lean of all things, given where it was all inevitably heading?

I don’t mean this as some sort of cheap nihilism. Just because something is going to end doesn’t empty its impermanent forms or feelings of all meaning. You can still build a sandcastle on a shore with rising tides that will eventually wash it away. Worthwhileness or meaning in the face of death does not require eternal persistence.

But staring at his stiff, lifeless body as we wheeled it from the ambulance to the cremation yard, my mind speed-ran his long list of honors and achievements, and, as tends to happen, his lying there, dead, a smile pulled across his cheeks from dehydrating skin, made a number of them seem ridiculous. He knew this. One of his favorite stories: strolling into high school basketball practice a tad late one day, his coach fumed, nose and lips contracted, “Eric, you snotty piece of shit, you’re just like me. You know it’s all bullshit. But if you don’t show up to practice on time anyway, I’ll sit your ass on the bench.”

Culturally, our notions of achievement can be seriously misleading. The pursuit of culturally elevated accomplishments have this insidious effect of stripping away our capacity to achieve the sort of presence that, in the end, I think is what matters most. I think he would agree that some of his best triumphs were the moments of presence he managed to muster, and learning how to drop into those worthwhile moments of presence occupied him for a lifetime.

We tend to “invest” the present moment in service of some improved future, to instrumentalize the present, which is to make it about something other than itself, and in doing so we cultivate a habit of deference that renders us incapable of inhabiting the present in a way that cashes in all of our investments. We get so good at investing in the future that it’s all we know how to do.

Maybe a better way to put this kind of presence, the kind that can survive the scrutiny of death, is what Hindu and Yogic traditions call sadhana.

A few days after the cremation, my family traveled to Tiruvannamalai, a town in Southern India where my dad spent the last week before his death. We met with Ma Devaki, the resident spiritual figurehead of Yogi Ramsuratkumar’s ashram there, where my dad had spend a fair bit of time.

She explained that sadhana is that which makes us sensitive to the presence of God. But the God stuff is a major turn off to many Western ears, which can obscure the rest that would actually resonate deeply, the practices we take on to transform our experience of the present, to transform our capacity to inhabit the present in a mode of consciousness that we aspire towards, rather than whatever kind of mind the circumstances of our lives have bestowed upon us.

The world molds us into shapes we have not chosen, through systems whose driving incentives are more often profit than grace. At some point in our development, we blink awake to lives already on the move, trajectories and forms of life already in the making. The writer Annie Dillard thinks this moment of reckoning happens around ten years old:

"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here...They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning...surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way."

Sadhana is a commitment to reclaiming our experience of the world, refashioning our attunement to the present by routinely undertaking voluntary practices with uncommon devotion. For me, it suggests both a conceptual remembrance and a somatic dive into the mysteries that quiet the mind’s darwinian motion, and builds roots thick enough to keep a sense of that mystery even after the practice ends and the rhythms of daily life resume, when the bills are due and laundry needs to be switched over into the dryer.

Because that’s what it takes to become anything that runs agains the stream of how your life’s circumstances steer you by default¹ — an unwavering, nearly impossible devotion to practices for transformation, despite it all. Sadhana is to repaint our habitual experience of life, to progressively cast it in a sacred light through sustained intention and practice.

In my dad’s last published book, The Cloud of Longing, he translates a 4th century Sanskrit poem, the Meghadūta, as an example and exploration of rasa, or “the liquid mellow of aesthetic ex-tasis, which from the beginning of the classical Indian tradition, was said to be the goal of any valuable work of art.”

His interest in Sanskrit literature was a mode of engaging with the present. Translating the poem only set the stage for his actual project, was which was “to articulate a vision of nature that can add depth, richness, subtlety, and even transformation to our culture’s habitual way of viewing and experiencing the natural world.”

But as Anna Kornbluh notes in Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, our modes of cultural reproduction seem to be making us increasingly numb to these moments of aesthetic transformation. Rasa is getting harder to come by.

Consider the earless painter Van Gogh. “Van Gogh’s quotidian images, utmost color saturation, and mental distress are not enough to generate adequate sensory encounter” in our generation, she writes. Simply gazing into a Van Gogh painting no longer splits us open. So in our quest for rasa, we figured maybe we’d feel something more if we stepped inside of the painting? Perhaps we can rekindle that numbed sense of aesthetic transformation, of depth and richness, by digitizing and projecting his paintings onto the walls, ceiling, and floor of a room in which we sit, fully immersed in a flickering simulacrum of Van Gogh’s transmission, hoping for a spark of what the painting, humbly hanging on a wall, could do to generations past.

There is no lack of exertion in contemporary wellness culture. Hike the mountain for yoga at sunrise, religiously attend exercise classes that look and sound like cults, get your morning mindfulness meditation in, keep a gratitude journal. Cut out gluten. But there is a lack of orientation, of direction. The self is seen as a given vessel to be filled, rather than a medium to be refined. A spirituality of consumption will never get off the ground.

Kornbluh also invokes the performance artist Marina Abromovic’s installation piece, The Artist is Present, where she sits in a chair for 10 hours a day for three months, so still and present that she must piss through a hole cut into the bottom of her chair into a bedpan, where participants sit across from her for however long they can bear it.

In this piece, Korbluh observes that “presence itself is the work,” and that “presence overflows the constraints of modality, medium, even venue.” The work is not the content, the yoga poses, the particular meditation technique, the easel, the installation. The work, the sadhana, is what comes next, or through: it’s the variety of presence one can bring to bear on a given moment, a sustained presence that cuts through the ordinary churning of the Darwinian mind that culture and evolution have carved into our species and pressed into our skulls, a sustained presence that invites, as my old man put it, “depth, richness, subtlety, and even transformation to our culture’s habitual way of viewing and experiencing the natural world.”

Without it, death always comes too soon.

Another of my dad’s favorite stories to tell. After years in India doing the whole meditation and learning Sanskrit thing, a couple of his Western friends had thrown their passports into the Ganges river and declared themselves dead.

He was preparing to do the same. Roaming India as a broke spiritual seeker felt closer to the heart of living than the Western track (you can imagine how much he liked Thoreau). But then, in a serendipitous moment that you would not believe actually happened unless you’d witnessed, time and time again, how full of these story-book, surely scripted moments his life was, he happened upon an article by Carl Jung that changed his plans.

In it, Jung describes the necessity of working through your own cultural matrix. Throwing his passport into the water and disappearing in India would have been the ultimate act of repression, not transcendence. And so, he flew back to the states, got a PhD at Columbia in a program he got approval to create called East-West studies under the supervision of the Sanskrit literature scholar Barbara Stoler Miller, and worked through things not as an anonymous seeker in India, but an eccentric professor at Vassar College who perpetually wreaked of incense.

If Jung was on to something, it was that one’s form of sadhana is not exactly arbitrary. There being some alignment between our own constitution and the sadhana we practice is important. The alignment can give off some kind of spiritual lubricant.

This is where the idea of translating sadhana into Western cultural grammar gets fuzzy. The God-stuff doesn’t fit, and we haven’t really found anything else that can contextualize sadhana in a way that guides spiritual practice.

This question is open, and intriguing. Today, there’s this alchemical blend emerging between contemplative traditions and modern cognitive science that, among other things, is unmooring the question of sadhana from any recognizable templates. God is dead but science is blind. The old has been discarded and we’re no longer infatuated by the new. In this interregnum, what new forms of sadhana, of practices for transformation, might appear? And more relevant for our present condition, what new contexts of understanding and frameworks of value might emerge that can direct our efforts?

We know how to prompt transformation, how to deconstruct the hierarchies of the predictive mind so that we might reconstruct the salience landscape, but we don’t know what we’re trying to build. Go ahead and taste the ground of awareness, but what’s next? We don’t know what we wish to become.

In Mexico City 19 days after his death, on a wander through the massive Chapultepec park, I strolled into an art museum where Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitor was installed.

Brushing aside a heavy black curtain, you walk into a dark rectangular room with black walls and no lights except for a series of eight large screens around the room.

On each screen there’s a beautifully framed video of a different musician, each inhabiting a different room in the same old victorian house somewhere up in New York’s Catskills. There are two pianists, one of whom keeps sucking on a cigar, a guitarist soaking in a bathtub, a tall, slender banjo player slouched at an office desk, an electric guitarist sitting on the side of a bed where a naked women sleeps behind him, a forlorn, sort of haunting cellist, a staid drummer, and a shot of a big group sitting on the front porch. Each screen has its own speaker, playing the particular sound of that musician. But all are playing together, the same droning song at the same time, connected via headphones and spirit, singing the same haunting lyrics, or trading verses and choruses, the sound undulating around the room like a ghost.

You can walk around the room, and you soon begin to feel that you yourself are beginning to swirl as the song spirals around you. The separation between yourself and the music, and the musicians, begins to fade as you lean into a new space they are beginning to pry open. You begin to feel yourself transported.

In this space, the rasa begins to hit. The cello moans deep and pulls you into a basin of feeling that you do not often allow yourself to enter, and the chorus floats angelic, inviting you in deeper, and now the drums are hitting and some primal mechanism in your chest begins to beat too and a sudden moment of synchrony across the entire room, all speakers aligned in a burst of something that feels alive, and now you begin to leave your ordinary mind behind. And now you hear the accordion, and the accordion reminds you of the harmonium your now-dead father used to play every morning by the fireplace as if it were just him and God reveling in yet another sunrise and you wonder how he can really be dead and you have no words for the fact that his pale body lying in the cremation yard’s fire and releasing his bones into the ocean’s pull were the last new memories you will make of him. And now you notice the music is rising and your throat is quivering and you feel the deep rumble of a sorrow that words cannot reach and the fact that you are standing in a room full of other people slips further from your mind and you sink deeper into a religious forgetting of what usually preoccupies you, your pretenses of sanity slip away, and you feel the music pulling at the roots of your pain, which is not your pain alone but a pain that we all in this suspended space know, the cellist knows it in her forlorn stare, the guitarist in the bath tub has been here before, and he’s here now, and you’re confused by the beauty that comes with the pain, and now the music is cradling your whole being and you let tears fall because you know that you cannot, you must not try and think your way out of this loss and so you surrender to whatever is happening, you lift the gates of the mind and set them aside because there is nothing else to do unless you intend to bury this forever and you feel things that you do not describe but inhabit with equal measures of catharsis and despair and the music reminds you that stars are exploding all around you and there is nothing you can do and your father is gone but you are still here and through all of this you begin not to understand but to feel that here, now, in this space that has taken eight instruments and a mansion in upstate New York and a darkened museum room and the sudden death of a loved one to create, something sacred is present.

Now you notice the others, some seated against the walls quietly crying, some strolling around the room slower than they have ever moved in their lives, and you begin to realize how precious this space is, how so much has had to conspire in order to allow a space like this to emerge, and you realize how much of your life unfolds inside of spaces that are not designed to feel this way, to let this happen, that actively inhibit this unfolding, that have been built as if this sacred presence is not the thing that matters most in our lives that are buttressed by mystery, suffused by sorrow and beauty and pleasure and pain and woven of so many relations, these spaces have not been constructed to let the surfaces of the mind settle enough to feel the things that you cannot conceptualize, those vapors that crystallize only in sufficient stillness and support. And you begin to know that you will never be the same after leaving this room, this submersion in a tidal wave of inexpressible sentiment, this liquid mellow of aesthetic ex-stasis has engulfed and transformed you and yet, and yet, you also know that immediately upon exiting this place, this miraculously held space, with tears and darkness, when you push aside the heavy black curtains you will lose this sacred structure of feeling entirely, you will return to what you were, and you wonder how you might possibly change your life to return to this place, to sustain and nurture this atmosphere that quivered with grief, yes, but grace too, and you begin to understand that the work of returning here, this remote corner of the mind’s possible configurations, over and over, day after day, this sustained presence beyond words, this is the rasa that your dad wrote about, this is the work of presence that drives Abromovic to sit so still for so long that she must piss in pots to create, this is what Rilke meant when he told a young poet “You must change your life,” it is this place, this temple where the sacred begins to poke through the barricades of the everyday, that you must practice to return to with devotion. This is sadhana.

After sufficiently cooling his bones with the bagged milk, we drove to the beach. My dad loved the ocean. “For as long as I can remember, the mystery of the sea has absolutely enthralled me: its depth, its beauty, its utter enormity,” he had scribbled on some papers kept in his computer bag.

There, under the instruction of the kind Indian men² who shepherded us through the whole traditional Hindu cremation procedure, my mother and I waded knee-deep into the Indian Ocean, gripping a container each, and released him into the water, bone by bone.

Each time I plunged my hand into the sea, clutching a femur or a bit of skull, the current practically ripped them from my grasp, as if the gods were eager to finally have him back.

A long and still growing list of people have told me what will happen to my father’s soul. One group of Indian men assured me, directly after the cremation, that he would return as my son in one year³. That remains an exceedingly weird thought. Another time, I was told he’s making his way to the feet of the guru. Who exactly “the guru” is depends on who you’re talking to. But for him, I could imagine he’s heading for some celestial loft with Hilda Charlton.

As for my own read, I don’t have much to say about souls or spirits. Maybe consciousness is a primordial field of the cosmos, a stretched blanket more fundamental than time and space, and each of us are just these little topological twists in the fabric, forms folded from an empty expanse just as a clown twists shapes into a balloon. Maybe the cosmos is some kind of balloon twisting knots in itself, playing, creating shapes and feelings and living beings and earthquakes and solar flares and black holes and art installations and urinals. And, for some sick and twisted reason, mosquitos. That would jive with the Heart Sutra, which I have chanted so many times that now, in moments of silence, I sometimes hear it humming in the stillness: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. If that’s the case, maybe death just unravels the knot, the strangely-looped self, and form snaps back into its unity with emptiness like a wave crashing into the ocean.

But if I stick to my most materialist of intuitions — noting that actual materialism is not a reductive stance, but holds open an endless horizon of possibilities as to the true nature and capabilities of matter⁴ — then at least I know that his bones will rest in the mystery that so enthralled him, while the question that he spent a life working on, the question of finding resonant modes of sadhana in the West, or practices for inviting the sacred into our everyday lives that alchemically rearrange the workings of capital and bureaucracy and dynamic innovation into mediations of, rather than against, rasa, or habitual ways of experiencing the world that are shot through with depth, richness, and subtlety, his mode of living burrowed these questions into my own mind and so many others, like little mischievous organisms that outlive us by jumping from one dying body to the next, spreading a sort of holy affliction, a peculiar inheritance that will not allow you to sleepwalk through this life any longer. So what now?

Rick Jarow, 1952 — 2024, with love.

1. This is what I think makes economic policy such a strong leverage point for people inclined towards the goal of reducing the suffering of all sentient life — spiritual practices are good ways to reprogram the mind away from suffering. But also, we could design social institutions that tend to produce modes of consciousness less mired in stress and suffering by default, so that minds need less reprogramming towards this end to begin with.

2. One of the most extraordinary bits of those whole ordeal was the unimaginable kindness, which was really a devotion to God, that led this group of about 4 Indian men to handle all of the bureaucracy, and payments, necessary to get the exemptions and authorizations we needed to cremate my dad, a foreigner, in the traditional Hindu way (which, for anyone who knew him, was the only way it could have happened). These men spent literal 8-hour days, multiple days in a row, going from office to office, collecting paperwork, paying bills, satisfying power-tripping government officials, and who knows what else to pull this off. Did they have jobs they were calling out of? Personal matters they ignored? I wouldn’t know, because they didn’t make a single mention of it. And not a single one of them knew him. They did it because Ma Devaki, the spiritual steward of Ramsuratkumar’s ashram, called them up since they were known devotees of his and said helping us with this was an opportunity to serve Ramsuratkumar. And so they did, without question or hesitation. They even sharply rejected any verbal thanks, let alone cash, as receiving thanks would take away from the fact that they were doing this for Ramsuratkumar, as an act of service to God, not for us. Can you imagine planning, executing, and paying for a strangers funeral, just because your priest called you up and said doing so would be an act of service to your God?

3. This was actually a little strange, because I’d heard it before. My dad’s dad, Jerry, died in 1992. One year later, I was born. My dad had mentioned a few times through the years that for all he knew, I was his father, reborn.

4. If I am anything, it’s probably some kind of enchanted materialist, in the sense that Simone Weil meant it in contrast to a Marxist disenchanted materialism. “The true knowledge of social mechanics,” Weil wrote in Oppression and Liberty, entailed that “there exist certain material conditions for the supernatural operation of the divine that is present on earth.” Though “supernatural” and “divine,” to me, or just to be understood as relative to our ordinary intuitions as to what is both natural and possible.

In other words, as Eugene McCarraher describes, because matter was capable of conveying the supernatural, Weil saw Marx’s disenchanted materialism as, in a sense, not materialist enough. There is “a divine order of the universe,” Weil insisted, and the historical mediations of “labour, art and science are only different ways of entering into contact with it.”

This jab — not materialist enough — is superb. A true materialist, one who has not slipped from the scientific method into some sort of scientism, which is itself an unwarranted metaphysics, must maintain a deeply unsettled account of just what exactly is going on here, and what matter might be capable of.