after the memorial on Wed it felt like a HUGE weight/darkness was lifted! I still had a hard time getting myself to do any work yesterday though... talked with my dad quite a bit, and then just kept searching the online papers and emailing people about it.
Ananda and I went to the healing service at my dad's church last night, and while I didn't necessarily feel anything dramatic that night, I DO feel even lighter today. So that's good.
Ananda and Jyoti came over the past two nights. Wed we had tea, apples and arequipe on graham crackers, and last night I made yummy heart shaped biscuits, and gave them some of the yum insta-coffee from Colombia. They liked it yay. kind of bad, we stayed up way late both nights, and I'm a little tired as a result. grr. but I think it was important just to be with people for all of us, and it was really good for them to get off campus. Wonder if they will finally tear 'Purn down. People REALLY don't want to eat there now, and last I heard, no one will sit at those tables in particular... eek. been following the story in the Ledger. There was a very nice editorial on the opinion page by the guy who has been reporting, reminding people to have compassion in the time of grief, that the admins are human and grieving too, and ends asking people to offer the college students a smile in the next days. Very nice, esp. coming from a non meditator. Erin forwarded a letter from Jennie R about the memorial that sums it up rather well. She's a good writer! it looks a bit long, but for anyone with a hurting heart about this, it goes quickly and helps to heal...
>Hello,
Here is a letter a friend from MUM sent me about last night's memorial for MUM student Levi Butler. It's written by Jennie Rothenburg, and I know you would appreciate it.
Love you,
Erin
"
Hello my dears,
Most of you, even those of you halfway around the world, have heard by now that a student named Levi Butler died on campus the other day. If you haven't heard about it, you can write to me for the details -- I'm not going to go into all that here. What I want to tell you is that I've just come from his memorial service. I was not at all sure I wanted to go, but I'm so glad I did. It made a world of difference for me, and I wanted to share some of that with you.
When I first came in to the MSAE auditorium tonight, everything felt extremely surreal and, maybe most disturbingly of all, random. I looked down at the evening's printed program, and in my mind, I substituted Levi's name and photo with that of a dozen other students all sitting around me. There was no apparent reason why it wouldn't have been any one of them, or for that matter, anyone I know or love.
I basically didn't know Levi at all. I definitely knew who he was. There was something very distinctive about him. He had a very clear, intelligent face, and I saw him tango dance once, which was entirely unforgettable. And in the close-knit social network of Fairfield, I had a couple of very strong one-stich-away connections with him. Those links have made the past couple of days much more intensely personal for me.
Have any of you ever had the experience of getting to know someone at his or her memorial service? It's quite an amazing experience. Of course you get the most glorious picture of the person, the best memories and impressions everyone had of them. But if the person's friends and family are warm and real and have the gift of putting things into unique words, you get more than that. You really get to see the essence of who that person was and is, with all his distinct talents and quirks and qualities. That's what happened tonight.
Two things quickly became clear to me early one. One was that Levi Butler actually was an amazing human being, way beyond the norm -- brilliant, charismatic, talented and a genuine seeker.
The other is that he is someone I in particular would have really liked. I smiled when one friend talked about playing basketball with him, how he never got very good at the sport because he kept taking breaks to have deep philosophical discussions. Another friend talked about how they would have two-hour discussions out in the library parking lot late at night about space and time and life. She said he told her, "Time is just a costume party," and they just laughed at how simple and totally wonderful it all is.
One thing I should mention about Levi is that he was a very new meditator -- in fact, he found the University on the Web and transfered from California in August just a week before class was about to start. He was very committed to world peace and conflict resolution before he ever learned TM, involved in all kinds of ways, and once he came here he developed new plans to save the world. The whole picture that came through of him was of someone who just plunged into this place and absolutely, as Thoreau said, sucked all the marrow out of life and out of every moment here.
His teachers said he asked the most probing questions, that his mind was so awake and so penetrating. One teacher wrote and read a poem called "Levi's Fire." It described Levi's mind in terms of a flame, and at the end, it had an image of a prairie fire and blackened earth -- "and afterwards... green."
Another teacher read an essay that Levi himself wrote about dancing. As I mentioned earlier, he was an exquisite dancer. That essay was actually immensely comforting to me, because dancing is something so physical -- and Levi described it in the most subtle way. He talked about how sound begins in silence and starts reverberating in waves, how all of creation emerges from that, and how the music flows through your body from there. It showed how he thought of the material world and how, even though he was fully in his body and in his life, he was acting from a level much deeper than the physical.
Two moments started out to be really difficult for me. One was when the parents of his girlfriend, Rebecca, got up to speak. They read an email that he wrote to her just before he died. She's still in India right now on the Rotating University trip, and he wrote that he thought of her all the time but didn't feel sad. He said he liked to imagine her on a beach in India, that he wanted her to climb trees and pick coconuts. Seeing her through his eyes like that was incredibly beautiful and poignant. Honestly, that's been the hardest part of it all for me -- just thinking about Rebecca. A few people commented that they were the most obviously in love couple they'd ever seen, and -- well, I saw them dance together, and if you've seen them dance, not much needs to be said beyond that.
But later in Levi's email to her he told her he was on a residence course and seeing the most amazing Maharishi tapes -- he said he was "falling for Maharishi" and totally enthralled with everything he was hearing. He mentioned in particular that he'd just seen the tape where Maharishi explains that "all love is directed to the Self." He told Rebecca that if they loved each other in that way, if their love was truly Self-referral, that their relationship would just get better and better.
Rebecca had also written a message to Levi's parents, just saying what an angel and a blessing he had been and still was in her life -- how, as she meditates in Rishikesh and dips in the Ganges, she is so filled with love for him. Her brother and parents also had beautiful things to say about Levi. It was clear that they'd been really blown away by him and amazed that, given their impossibly high standards for Rebecca, she'd actually brought home someone they thought was good enough for her.
The other difficult moment was when his parents and two brothers first walked onto the stage. Everyone stood and clapped for them, and his father's face was so sad but so totally open, looking very much like Levi. But by the end of his family's speeches -- all four of them spoke -- I think everyone else in the room actually felt immensely relieved, as if they were there to comfort us. His father spoke with the deepest love and respect and said, "I'm going to miss my boy." But he also managed to bring through some lightness, in the sweetest way. He started his speech by saying, "It wasn't always easy raising a 300-year-old saint."
What came through most in the speeches of both Levi's parents was a humble gratitude that they'd gotten to have him in their lives. His brothers, too, seemed to have a deep conviction that Levi's essence is still not only very much alive but that he's actually found a higher purpose. One of his brothers said he knows for sure that Levi is still a "mover and a shaker" on whatever level he's on now. The other brother said that he knows Levi has found his life's mission and is living it out wherever he is.
All throughout the ceremony, it almost felt to me like some veil had been stripped away and I was just seeing a Life, with a capital "L." If I remember correctly from philosophy class, Plato had the theory that every object in the universe has a corresponding pure Form -- that there may be lots of different tables on the surface of things, but that somewhere there is the Table, that underlying the small "i" idea there is the Idea. It was like that tonight, seeing not one person and his specific parents and girlfriend, etc., but Life and Parent and Girlfriend -- an ethereal network of Relationships, each one boiled down to its purest essence.
I knew that at some point in the evening somebody was going to read from Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad-Gita. I've heard those verses many times before, but what made it really powerful tonight was that Rama Hall read them (that's Jivan's little brother to some of you). Rama said in a totally heartfelt way that he couldn't fathom this kind of transition yet, but that he'd been given the opportunity to read the words of someone who could -- he looked out at all of us and said he hoped we would be able to reach that level of understanding. Then he read the verses, and I have to say, they did really hit home.
Each time someone dies, a different verse from the Gita leaps to the foreground for me. Tonight it was this one: "He who understands him to be the slayer, and he who takes him to be the slain, both fail to perceive the truth. He neither slays nor is slain." And this, too: "He is uncleavable; he cannot be burned; he cannot be wetted, nor yet can he be dried. He is eternal, all-pervading, atable, immovable, ever the same." Uncleavable.
All in all, I'd say there are three things that made me feel deeply better tonight. One was that a lot of the randomness went away. By the end, I wasn't glancing down at my program and imagining other names, other faces on the cover. I was just immersed in this one Life, like one perfect work of art with every brush stroke exactly where it should be.
That's not to say I don't wish with all my heart that this hadn't happened or that I in any way understand the need for suffering in this world. But when everyone spoke tonight, Levi's life and everything in it seemed intensely purposeful and meaningful, from beginning to end. His life didn't seem so much like a sequence of changeable events anymore, just one single entity existing all at once. As Rebecca's father said, it's not that his life was tragically cut short -- this was the exact span his life was meant to cover, and he absolutely lived every minute of it.
The second thing that comforted me was just seeing the brightness of all the students who spoke. Each one of them was truly amazing -- not only articulate but able to speak deeply from the heart. People were crying and moved, but the dominating emotion didn't seem to be misery. Many of them were clearly feeling a lot of bliss, and that came through to everyone. Levi's parents were obviously blown away by how amazing all his friends were. And after these dark few days, it made me feel so much better to see that MUM students are still radiate that incredible light, maybe even more than I've ever realized.
One final thing became clear to me as I was driving home. I thought about the evening -- I thought about Levi and everything I'd heard about him. Then I thought, "If I were this human being, this intense seeker who loved every second of his time here, how would I feel if my death were a source of heaviness that shrouded the campus and all my friends?" I knew it would feel totally counter to everything he was and is.
Then I thought, "How would I feel if I knew my transition was making people more vibrant, more able to suck the marrow out of life? How would I feel if, instead of heaviness, it brought a flame-like lightness to people's lives, making each moment that much more beautiful and real?" I knew then nothing would make him feel more fulfilled, and then I knew, too, that it's all right -- much more than all right -- not to feel overwhelmed by fear and darkness over all this.
You know how it is. Sometimes at times like these you start feeling guilty, like you should be taking all the suffering onto your own shoulders. You feel obligated to imagine a tragedy of this kind happening to everyone you know and love. You feel like you can't trust life, like there's no guarantee that anything you give your heart to won't be taken away and, in the process, utterly destroy your universe. But really, where does that kind of fear lead? It doesn't lead to anything except paralysis. Fear is the opposite of Life, and Life is the only thing that can disperse it.
After watching everyone tonight and really understanding what kind of a person Levi was, it's very clear that living more deeply, experiencing more wonder and more joy is exactly the right reaction to all this. One of my friends said afterwards that tonight was cleansing, and that's how I feel too, that there was a stripping away of some dull surface layer. Like William Blake said, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is -- infinite."
Those are my thoughts for tonight, sweethearts. I love you all more than I can say and feel so grateful to have friends who can understand Reality in this way. Meanwhile, I do still have a body, and I'm quite glad I do, and it's time to give it some sleep.
Lots of love,
Jennie
yes, some very different verses of the Gita stuck out for me - all the ones about cutting down/cleaving etc... I don't think I've ever been to a memorial where the Gita didn't read more literally instead of symbolically....
I wonder how long this will take, processing all this...
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