On The Beach

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I looked at Pinnacle Rock. The rising surf smashed against it, smothering it in spray. Pinnacle Rock had a strange quality. In its shadow I felt aware of the presence of death, as if death were perched among the sea gulls and pelicans, watching me. Don Juan informs us that a Warrior dances before his death, that that dance is performed in a special place of power. Death must watch the Warrior's last dance, in which he recounts all the battles he has won and lost.

One needs a myth for living and a myth for dying. This myth of the Warrior's last dance pleases me. My spirit will dance there in the shadow of that rock, among sea gulls and pelicans, sea lions and starfish. I would like to give my flesh back to the ocean to feed the fish, whose bodies have so often fed me.

I know that death will scatter all the elements of my personal self, as a necklace of beads is scattered when the string breaks. But I know that the archetypes recur again and again, endlessly playing their roles in the cosmic drama, each with its own memory deeply rooted in the collective unconscious. It is this, the memory of the archetypes, that gives us the sensation that we have been here before. The personal ego perishes at death. But the archetypes are longlived, because they are projections of the mind of the Old One. So-though my personal ego perishes-my archetypes will appear again and again and dance together on the stage of life.

The show must go on. It must go on forever, eternally recurring. My spirit, in its dance of death, will turn and whirl like the Mevlevi dervishes. What is the theme underlying this sacred dance? The turning, whirling bodies symbolize change . . . death and rebirth . . . the days and nights of the cosmos. The outstretched arms-one hand facing up, the other down-symbolize the great cosmic interchange: "One hand gives, the other takes." But the spirit of the dancers is beyond being and nonbeing, focused on the One.

La lllah llla Allah.

No God but God.

The whirling of the dervishes, the endless rolling of the wheel of rebirth proclaim -the message of Zarathustra's animals: the eagle, knower of the heavens . . . the serpent, knower of the earth.

"O Zarathustra," said his animals, "to those who think like us, all things dance: They come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee ... and return.

Everything goes, everything returns . . . eternally rolls the wheel of being.

Everything dies, everything blooms again ... eternally runs the year of being.

Everything breaks, every-thing is united anew . . . eternally builds itself the house of being.

Everything parts, everything meets again . . . the ring of beng remains eternally true to itself.

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