Category: Death

Turning Columbine Research Inward

Why does anyone research Columbine, anyway? Who knows. I can’t tell you what drove me to read 35,000 pages of documents multiple times, cataloguing the contents, and studying the details. Years ago I would say it was about the children who died and preventing future incidents and all that, but that isn’t the real reason. That was what interested me about the case, but researching Columbine turned out to be the koan that sent me hurdling into reality and out of the dream at breakneck speed against my will.

I didn’t know that’s what was happening until I flew off the cliff into nothingness forever. Whoops. Wrong turn? Not a chance. There are no wrong turns.

Some people would find it morbid to know that some of us have spent more time staring at the shooters’ dead, bloody bodies than we have spent doing homework. No matter. You either understand or you don’t. You can’t convince anyone of an experience they haven’t had, which is why I don’t expect many (if any at all) to understand this post.

Staring at the dead, bloody bodies of the Columbine shooters is one way to launch yourself into an awakening you don’t-know-you-don’t-want-but-can’t-avoid-because-you-have-no-choice. Dead bodies. Blood. Gore. Suicide. Death. Reality. Reality. Reality. Read that again – REALITY.

Huh.

Death is a reality.

“What if Eric had graduated, would he have gone on to become a famous video game designer? Do you think the creators of DOOM would have welcomed him on the team?”

Who cares, he’s dead, lying in a pool of his own blood with the top of his head blown off from a self-inflicted shotgun blast through the roof of his mouth.

Imagine that. You stick a loaded shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger. Hard to imagine, right? Really. When you look at Eric lying on the ground, put yourself in his position and imagine you’ve just done the unthinkable and you’re done. You’re going to cause your own death. You won’t be opening up the refrigerator tomorrow to look for a can of Coke or a slice of pie. You don’t know where the fuck you’re going or if you’ll even exist. You just know you’re done.

Imagine every detail of pulling the trigger. The initial feeling of blowing your own head off with a shotgun shell traveling through the roof of your mouth, blowing off the top of your head. How long do you feel before your brain cuts off? Everyone says this type of suicide ends a life “instantly,” but how can anyone really know? Nobody knows. Nobody knows anything.

And Dylan. Imagine you’re him, you just witnessed your sort-of best friend blow his head off and now it’s your turn. Do you hesitate? Why? You don’t want to live anymore and you’ve just done the unthinkable. If you don’t kill yourself now, you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail in misery.

Does the biological impulse of survival kick in? Or do you just pull the trigger?

Put yourself in Dylan’s shoes. If you don’t believe he killed himself, set that belief aside for a moment and just think. You’re kneeling in front of your friend who just blew his head off. You’ve got a TEC-DC9M aimed at your left temple. You pull the trigger and fall to the floor. After a brief moment, you roll over onto your back where you cough and drown in your own blood.

Maybe you should have used your shotgun.

What does that feel like? To die so terribly? To have a bullet rip through your brain and not even die right away?

Feel it, imagine you are him and feel every moment of it.

Now do the same with every person they killed that day. Imagine being every single victim and experience dying over and over and over again.

I bet you won’t do it.

Death is too much, too horrific, too… taboo. It’s something to sweep under the carpet and ignore. Yet, people die every day from injuries far worse than what landed Eric and Dylan on that library floor on April 20, 1999.

Death is reality. And you can’t see who you are and where you are without embracing death.

If you want to know what life is all about, carry a laminated copy of their dead bodies with you everywhere you go. You have to invite death to the breakfast table, the movies, your best friend’s birthday party. Stare at the photos every chance you get.

When you stare enough, one day, reality will become obvious. But that’s not where the journey ends. That’s just where it begins.

Once you realize what reality is, there’s an adjustment period.

What can researching Columbine tell you about yourself?

As you read the 11k pages of witness testimony, you’ll see a pattern emerge that shows memory to be faulty. It’s tempting to view discrepancies as some kind of “cover-up,” but that’s a treacherous path that will leads you into the weeds.

Human memory is extremely faulty and vulnerable to suggestion. Research hard enough and you’ll see that witnesses heard similar, but different things and their subsequent interviews began morphing into one snowball of an identical story after they conversed with one another.

Witness testimony is like a game of telephone.

If you’ve noticed this, did you ever stop to question your own memory? Like “wow, maybe my memory isn’t so great. What if things didn’t really happen the way I thought they did when I was in school? Maybe people didn’t hate me as much as I thought they did. Maybe I created a story that morphed over time into something that didn’t actually happen the way I remember…”

What if your narrative of Columbine is inaccurate simply because your memory, along with witness’ memory, is faulty. What if what you believe happened before, during, and after Columbine is not true, but a story woven together by the fabric of thousands of faulty memories, including witnesses, police, victims, parents, and community members?

What if…

Can you question “what really happened” regardless of where it takes you? That what happened is irrelevant?

How many times have you changed your perception or views about Columbine and what happened before, during, and after?

If you haven’t changed your views and been SHOCKED at discovering major truths you can’t believe you missed, you haven’t investigated objectively. You’re stuck in judgment, viewing the case through the lens of your personal bias.

Witness testimony is fodder for stories that will take you further from TRUTH. When you dismantle your stories about Columbine by seeking TRUTH (which cannot be found in witness testimony), it will give you a template by which to investigate your own life, which is really the only thing that matters.

Let the dead bury the dead. You want to wake up from the dream. You want to dissolve your own stories and narratives in your personal life until you reach a point where you see the world differently and more clearly because you’ve realized how many errors you’ve made because of wrong perception and faulty memory.

Researching the details of Columbine serve but one purpose: to facilitate a profound inner transformation. It’s not WHAT you find that matters. It’s the process.

Ultimately, researching Columbine isn’t about what happened that day or what led up to the massacre or where each shell landed and who said what in the library. It’s about you, researching. It’s the invisible, undetected zen koan that life has thrown in your path that you have yet to recognize as the catalyst for personal transformation… your personality is driven with an insatiable need to devour the investigation, but what your soul really wants is to use the process to destroy your own ego (identity).

Given enough time, that’s exactly what it will do… when you’re willing to stare at those bloody, dead bodies lying on the library floor.

Posted on by Spiritual Heretic 0

Why Suicidal People Don’t Ask for Help

People who have made plans to commit suicide don’t ask for help. There’s no reason to seek help. You don’t want help – you want to disappear. When you’re suicidal, asking for help allows others to coax you back into living with the pain you’ve finally found an escape from.

Only people who are undecided ask for help. Asking for help means you’re asking to go back to the lie that life will somehow get better. But life doesn’t get better. Life is complicated chaos – futile no matter how good it gets.

Even if all wishes were granted, lasting happiness is a distant dream and suicide is the only rational choice. That’s how life occurs when you’ve realized the impermanence of everything and don’t feel like enduring the bad just to experience the good.

Posted on by Spiritual Heretic 0

Heroes Always Wear the Morals of Villains

We love paying $12.50 to immerse ourselves in the story of a fearless hero who saves the world while wearing the morals of a villain. Sometimes heroes need to kill everyone in their path, commit theft, arson, treason, betray their friends and family, and desecrate an entire city in order to save innocent lives.

We celebrate Hollywood heroes regardless of their actions, so long as they’ve got sex appeal. And movies don’t do well unless the good guys win, so we know they’ll eventually get around to saving innocent people.

Destruction comes with the territory of being a hero. When you’re on a mission with the fate of the world at stake, it’s okay to demolish an entire city killing innocents including women and children. It’s an unfortunate “casualty of war,” as they like to say. And they’re right. The very thing that makes someone a hero is the destruction of oppression.

You can’t be a hero to a group of people without destroying their oppressors. You’ll never be seen as a hero if you try to have a conversation or “work things out.” Hero status is virtually guaranteed when you seek destructive revenge for perceived injustice relatable to others.

Kind of reminds me of Columbine.

Hundreds – perhaps thousands – of teenagers see Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as heroes.

In real life, we wouldn’t praise someone if they dropped a bomb on our house or executed our entire family in front of us. We wouldn’t give a damn who they were saving, and we certainly wouldn’t consider them a hero. But we’re willing to suspend those reactions in front of the big screen. Why?

Human beings are not-so-secretly fascinated with violence and destruction.

This sense of duty and mission is the reason military and spy movies are so captivating. It is in our nature to desire to feel important, to have a mission, break the rules and fly by the seat of our pants… to fail and then refine our tactics and up our game until we emerge as the victorious hero who saves the world.

But this isn’t just something kids do. This isn’t something mentally ill people do. This is something we all do.

Some of us do it by putting lives in actual danger, and some of us never take any risks at all, so we fork over $12.50 for a movie ticket every time we want to experience that adrenaline rush. We don’t want to get our hands dirty, so we let someone else do it for us; we live vicariously through characters on the big screen from the safety of our dilapidated, smelly theater seats.

Real risk is for other people. That’s why so many people see Eric and Dylan as heroes. They don’t have to get their hands dirty in order to feel like justice has been served.

Eric and Dylan took risks those people aren’t willing to take. They’re fulfilling their need to feel important by holding Eric and Dylan as heroes. They’re not willing to take the risk themselves. They’re not “there” yet. They aren’t entirely hopeless. They’re still hanging onto… something.

Risks are a requirement to play in this world.

By not taking any risks, you’re actually taking the biggest risk of all. The risk of living a mediocre life, never finding your joy and never truly living.

Dylan and Eric took the biggest risk of all. We call them cowards, but they were not cowards by any means. They faced death head-on, with no holds barred they planned and executed their own deaths. They saw it coming. They breathed it in with every inhalation. They counted down the number of meals they had left to eat on this planet. They were admittedly scared at times, but fear never stopped them.

Have you ever noticed that villains take more risks than heroes? And heroes only take risks when they wear the morals of a villain? Set aside good/bad, right/wrong and really look. It’s the villains who take the biggest risks with the biggest stakes.

I invite you to consider that perhaps we are the cowards, hiding behind our fear of death. And the reason we hate them so much is because we can’t face the way they unflinchingly embraced their own deaths.

They risked everything: their own lives, everyone else’s lives, their futures, their parents’ lives and reputation… they even risked the lives of their own friends in order to pursue their goal. Their mission mattered more than life itself.

We hate them because they gave their lives for their personal definition of freedom from oppression, yet we’re not willing to risk so much as being criticized to get what we want for our own lives.

I don’t think movies are to blame, I think movies show us what’s deeply hidden in our souls, fears, desires, and curiosities we’re too afraid to face. After all, who makes the movies? We make the movies. The big screen only shows what’s already in our hearts and minds.

Imagine if we pursued our positive dreams and goals with the same disregard for risk as Hollywood villains and school shooters have. Imagine if we were willing to die for the opportunity to pursue our big dream…

Instead, we hold back, sit on the couch, order a pizza and say, “eh, tomorrow’s another day…”

We all feel a drive to do something without anyone’s permission, to run freely through this world, without concern for anyone who may wish to stop us—and vanish through obstacles like a ghost walks through walls.

But something holds us back. Perhaps we’re not willing to risk being seen. Failure.

Maybe we’re all just winging it. Struggling and striving to keep up appearances, maintain an identity and survive.

Maybe we’re the cowards, hiding behind the fear of non-existence disguised as the fear of death. Maybe having the guts to do something with your life is a rare trait.

Maybe most people don’t feel any real urge to do anything at all until death is staring them in the face. Maybe most people only feel compelled to take action when nothing matters anymore… when suffering and death are an inevitable reality. At that point, there’s nothing left to lose. Why not put yourself out there?

Villains never wait to take inspired action.

Perhaps we can learn something from them.

Perhaps we can learn something from Eric and Dylan.

Regardless of their actions, they didn’t sit on the couch, gain 100 pounds eating potato chips while watching Netflix every night for twenty years, working the same boring job, complaining about the same boring people, posting the same boring shit on Facebook day in and day out.

What they did was wrong, but they’re no different than any Hollywood villain.

Think about that the next time you watch a movie and celebrate the destruction caused by the hero of the movie. Ask yourself, “why am I feeling excited to watch a virtual depiction of destruction and death, but real-life destruction and death is bothersome?”

This isn’t about Eric and Dylan.

This is about you.

What’s the difference between a destructive, yet celebrated Hollywood hero… and Eric and Dylan? Why is one celebrated while the other isn’t?

Why do we enjoy and celebrate the depiction of violence when it’s attributed to someone we’re told is a hero?

What happened to morality?

Anyone have a Cracker Jack box? Asking for a friend…

Posted on by Spiritual Heretic 0

All Fears Are Not Rooted in the Fear of Death

All fears are not rooted in the fear of death.

Once you’ve been ready and willing to die and/or kill others, fear of death becomes irrelevant and is revealed to be something else: the fear of non-existence.

Ever meet someone who’s “died” and come back? And suddenly their fear of death is gone?

Listen to how confidently they discuss experiencing the continuity of life. The belief that they will exist after death is the source of their confidence.

They say they no longer fear death. But listen closely. Their stories reveal that their “near death” experience didn’t relieve them of the fear of death. They never had a fear of death. It relieved them of the fear of non-existence.

Posted on by Spiritual Heretic