Friends,
I woke up today, quite happy. I was able to purchase a CD with many of the songs my parents used to listen to when I was a child. As I was listening to it and reliving a lot of hapy memories, I read on Yahoo about the death of David Carradine, from suicide. He was found hanged in his hotel room in Bangkok.
David Carradine was my childhood hero as the star of the Show Kung Fu, where he played the shaolin monk. I was big into martial arts as a child and to this day I am. I have been actively studying and practicing the martial arts with my Sifu over the last 3 years in a one to one setting. I have seen few things as difficult, in terms of self discipline and working through tough situation. IF in part I am able to continue it is because of the momentum of enthusiam and joy I that has been building since my youth, since watching Bruce Lee and Kung Fu the legend continues.
We never know what another person is carrying, we never know what going on inside. We can judge the actions the person does but not the person. I have been humbled many times on the path. We all have this idea of what is right and what is wrong socially, ethically morally, personally and we hold on very tightly. Yet as it is in life sometimes we do things with the best intentions and they work outhorribly and something we do things with the worst intentions and they work out well. I truly believe that there is a relaity that is so far beyond right and wrong that is experiences in a Master’s glance, or in deep meditation or anything that opens it doors to transcendence for you.
We have all been hurt by others, we all have had to leave situations, blanketed by words of hatred which are always the last words of love according to the Charles Aznavour song Il Faut Savoir. Can you remember the time when you had to keep smiling though you were dying inside? No one comes out of this life without scars, everyone from saint to murderers get a thorough beating but we are all graced with death at the end of it all. Which makes me thing a lot about this latent fear of death, being that all of us great and little have to go through it, sort of like puberty.
Our pain is so tailored made, beause in pain by dealing with it we learn specific lessons. My pain my suffering, the one that is not created by my small mind is cleansing, and uplifting because it comes from the Same source of the few joys and scattered happy moments I have dealt with. I cannot tell you how life has opened up to me, and really embraced me since being so sick. You may say Dave, you are merely anthropomorphizing life, but I say there is a point when through pain you are able to commune deeper with all around you and everything become a personal wonder.
I have had the humbling experience of judging someone and then being in as similar a position as possibly and succumbing just the same. Life is so hard for each of us, we should by into outward appearrences, I have smiled my biggest smiles in the most profound of pain physical and otherwise. With my own experience of depression and suicidal thought its such an intense feeling of isolation and many other feelings. My heart is with David Carradine, in the hopes that though his transition was turbulent, he is still not beyond God’s grace.
There is something I have been carrying with me for a while now, aside from some pain, Its a simple quote that encapsulates everything.
I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin. – St Exupery
I remember Paramahansa Yogananda saying, when you hold a beautiful flower in your hand, how can you crush it? We are each a rare and beautiful flower, and we are each in each others hands. This may sound like poetically bullshit, but there are times in meditation or those special random moments in life where u expand, and like the air you are everywhere but no one place, you neighbor , your dog, the plants in thegarden are all “one swaying being ‘ as Rumi puts it.
Our frailty is our greatest asset, knowing this how can we be mean to some one or ever show anything but compassion for each other, for David Carradine, for the people who have allegeded wronged us, those who have actually wrong us. Its something we are all guilty of each to our own extent myself included. If we could see things clearly and know why things happened there would be no need for Rumi’s poetry, no need for the Path, no need for the Master’s grace etc.
May David Carradine Rest in Peace, and may we all cherish what and who we have in our hands, who has come into our lives and those who have left us under good and bad circumstances. I can say with certainty that not even death can close the door to someone who has smiled at and loved us – take that with some grains of salt if you must.
David Carradine (December 8, 1936 – June 3, 2009)
he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation, so there was nothing “going on inside”, he was trying to have a more pleasant orgasm by inhibitting the flow of O2 to the brain. he wasn’t suicidal. kind of an embarassing death, actually…