Remembering Morrie

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

June 29, 2019

I

When I was a little boy, I thought that the most terrifying thing in the world was to be buried alive. I got the idea when I read "The Cask of Amontillado," a story written in 1846 by the great Edgar Allan Poe. It is about a young man named Fortunato who has been sealed in a dungeon by his friend, Montressor. "For the love of God, Montressor!" he said, as the man began to build his tomb brick by brick. But I'm a grown-up now, and I have realized that there is something far worse – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

II

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is basically the gradual loss of control of muscle movements, with the person not being able to walk, to eat, and soon, to not be able to breathe. It is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease because it came in 1939 to Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees baseball star. Recently, it was what happened to the legendary physicist Stephen Hawking who died in 2018. In the Hawking biopic "Theory Of Everything," the most unforgettable scene was when he was in a wheelchair, and he cannot talk and he cannot move, and his eyes were pleading for his wife not to leave him. I think I'd rather die than suffer like that, and yet, that same medical condition could not defeat a frail old man who gave so much inspiration to the world.

III

His name was Morrie Schwartz, the one in the novel "Tuesdays With Morrie" by Mitch Albom, and he was a real person. When I first read it in 2013, I was Mitch in my mental movie version, and Morrie was Eddie Garcia as he was in the 1991 Lino Brocka movie "Kung Tapos Na Ang Kailanman," which is also my favorite Eddie Garcia role. It was sad to hear that Eddie just died a week ago, but I'm also happy for him because he lived his life to the full and gave so much, and I will always think of him as young. I also thought there should be a Hollywood version, but I can't think of anyone as Morrie except Burt Lancaster because he was so magical in "Field of Dreams," but he died in 1994, the same year Morrie got the symptoms. Then I saw the movie, with Jack Lemmon as Morrie and Hank Azaria as Mitch, and all I could think of is that I just wish everybody could see it.

IV

I love the way they turned the narration into dialogues, like when Morrie asked, "Are you giving to your community?" then after Mitch answered, he asked next, "Are you at peace with yourself?" like a regular conversation. On their first meeting after 16 years, Morrie told him: "You know, dying is just one thing to be said about, living unhappily, that's is another matter." My favorite scene, in both the book and the movie, is when Morrie described how he was going to die, which is really painful to even contemplate, but he said not everyone was as lucky as he. "Lucky?!" exclaimed Mitch. Morrie told him in the book: "It's horrible to watch my body slowly wilt away to nothing, but it's also wonderful because of all the time I get to say good-bye."

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Heaven, I'm In Heaven

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

June 22, 2019

I

Haruki Murakami once said, "Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it." Personally, I am not afraid of death. Yet it does not mean I want to die now. I see life as precious because I have seen many times how it has been touched by Grace. I see all around me the countless miracles of this world, and I'm so filled with gratitude for my own life and for being here. But if it is my time, then I am ready. I remember a scene in "Deep Impact" years back. A giant asteroid was about to destroy all life on Earth. A man and her daughter were at a beach to watch it hit the ocean and create a giant tsunami. They hugged each other as the waves came, but they stayed where they were. That is how I want to face my death – with supreme courage and quiet dignity.

II

What happens to us after we die? After the near-death experience – finding ourselves floating above our body, trying to talk to people but nobody could hear us, going through a dark tunnel toward a light, a being of radiant light welcoming us, and the sense of peace and homecoming and completeness – what comes next if we are not coming back anymore? I have been listening to the lectures by Dolores Cannon, the pioneer in past-life regression and the creator of Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique. She shared the stories of people who have actually died. Then, which is probably just a coincidence, I found a now out-of-print book from Ruth Montgomery that speaks about the exact same thing.

III

Ruth Montgomery was a political correspondent in the sixties when she began her work in the paranormal. I have her books "A Search For The Truth" and "Threshold to Tomorrow" where she talks of her encounters with nonphysical entities and departed loved ones through automatic writing, and of the Walk-In people – highly evolved souls who take over a body if the original occupant wants to leave. The book I found about life after life is "A World Beyond," the account of her communication with the psychic and trance medium Arthur Ford after he died on January 1971 of a heart attack. They had been very close friends so Ruth was able to confirm that it was really him.

IV

This is what Heaven is like in Arthur Ford's own words, "I found that it was as I subconsciously remembered, although no one can quite recall the beauty and the deep affinity that one has for others of like-thinking here. It was like coming home, to slip through that door and release the tired old body. In an instant, without conscious thought, I was here surrounded by relatives." Our prayers for our departed loved ones are important. "Let me say that prayers do indeed help all of us here," says Ford. "We strongly feel the vibrations for good that those yearning, loving prayers provoke." As in all prayers, everything is heard.

Photo courtesy of of Abe Books

Power Of Now

Power of Now

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

June 15, 2019

I

Eckhart Tolle writes in The Power of Now, "The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved minds runs your life." I love Eckhart Tolle. I feel a sense of comfort when I hear his voice in YouTube. But his spiritual awakening came in the midst of a severe depression. "I cannot live with myself any longer!" he thought, and then he wondered if the "I" is the same as the one who was thinking the thought. Then he felt himself drawn to what felt like a vortex of energy, and he was afraid, but a voice said "Resist nothing." He surrendered to the power, and when awakened, he was the never same person anymore.

II

But understanding is different from knowing. I understand the sense of bliss he felt, but I can't say I know it because I haven't experienced it in that way. But I know the feeling of looking outside of yourself because it happened to me, and it happened most recently at a crucial time in my life. It is not something that I would normally share with the public, but I have to say it because it is part of the story. I was at a hospital emergency room last Monday night after I suffered massive pain on my chest for over an hour. I never felt pain so intense, and I thought it was the end for me. Yet, my soul was at peace, and I was ready to die.

III

But I didn't die. A part of me was looking forward to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but a part of me believed I would survive and move on with my life. I lay at the bed, watching the nurses attach all these wires on to me – the heart rate monitors, the oxygen, the I.V. drip – but I was also watching myself watching them. I was thinking that I don't want a funeral – I repeat, I do NOT – yet I was also watching my thoughts. There was no future, there was no past, only that moment, and I finally understood the meaning of being in the Now.

IV

Eckhart taught me a deeper way of meditation and prayer. Instead of doing what I normally do, think, I would just sit in silence, and contemplate the Presence within the silence. The Presence is the space of consciousness that lets me observe my own mind, helping me to be aware that the "I" of my consciousness is more than than my thoughts. "So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought," he writes. "A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, a you feel a conscious presence – your deeper self – behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power of you."

Photo courtesy of Amazon

Prince Caspian and Schroedinger's Cat

Prince Caspian and Schroedinger's Cat

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

June 8, 2019

I

One afternoon recently, I was on my way home as the street lights came on. It made me think of the nature of light. Light is made of photons which can sometimes be like a wave or a particle, so it can also be both a wave and a particle at the same time. This reminds me of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, first posed in 1925 by the Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr, that says a quantum particle exists in all possible states at once, and the state it will appear in would depend if there is an observer. So, if no one is looking, a thing is also something else simultaneously. 

II

And, naturally, it calls to mind Schrodinger's Cat. In 1935, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Edwin Schrodinger posed this idea as an argument against the Copenhagen Interpretation. Imagine a steel box, and inside the box there is a cat and a vial of radioactive poison that is set to be released at a random time. In other words, our hypothetical cat will die but we don't know when. And since the box is sealed, we can only assume that the cat is dead or alive, but it can't be both alive and dead at the same time.   

III

And so I thought: is it really possible for something to be one thing and be another thing simultaneously? For example, can a person be in one place, but also be somewhere else? More to the point, can a person be in London and in Narnia at the same time? In C.S. Lewis' "Prince Caspian," the second book in "The Chronicles of Narnia" series after "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe," Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy had stayed in Narnia and reigned as Kings and Queens. They were there for many, many years, but when they found themselves back in London, they realized they have never been gone at all. 

IV 

Time is a curious thing, probably since it is relative, because when they got back to Narnia after a couple of days, it turns out they have been gone for a thousand years. Appparenly a lot of things have happened. Narnia was now ruled by the cruel King Miraz who had stolen the throne from the rightful heir Prince Caspian who is his nephew, like what Claudius did to Hamlet, or what Seth did to Horus. Their castle, Cair Paravel, is now in ruins. There they meet the dwarf Trumpkin, a.k.a. Tyrion Lannister. In the movie version, they saved him from the Telmarine soldiers who were about to drown him. Susan aimed her arrow, and she said, "Drop him!" The idea was to save him, but the soldiers took it literally, and so they threw him into the river. 

Photo courtesy of Harper Collins

The Chronicles of C.S. Lewis

The Chronicles of C.S. Lewis

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

June 1, 2019

I

One of the most touching stories I have seen is "Shadowlands" from Richard Attenborough, the director of "Gandhi" which is one of the greatest movies in history. It is set in 1950s England, and the rural countryside with its rolling hills and complete absence of people is one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. The star is Anthony Hopkins, and he is the great author C.S. Lewis, and everything is just ... perfect.

II

Clive Staples Lewis was a writer, theologian, and member of the faculty at Oxford University in England from 1925 to the 1954 along with his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien, author of "The Lord of The Rings" trilogy. Lewis was a devout Christian, and he has written more than 30 books which included religious writings. But he is most famous and beloved by generations for his children's fiction, among which is the seven-book "The Chronicles of Narnia."

III

The first in the series is "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe," published in 1950, and set in 1940 at the outbreak of the war. The Pevensie children – Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy – had been sent to live in a mansion in the country to avoid the air raids in London. As they went exploring the big house, Lucy saw a wardrobe, which is like a big closet, and it leads to a magical place called Narnia where animals and trees can talk, and where there are unicorns and centaurs and satyrs and fauns and other enchanted creatures.

IV

But Narnia was being ruled by Jadis, the White Witch, who said, "Winter is coming!" – no, she didn't say that. I've read the book and have seen the movie version (of course) and the Witch is The Ancient One who had taught Doctor Strange the mystic arts so she is very powerful. Only Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy can stop her, but they need the help of Aslan, a lion who speaks like Ra's al Ghul and the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn. Jadis invokes an ancient law which states that she could lawfully kill Edmund. Aslan saved the boy by offering himself instead. Lewis had always said that Aslan is a metaphor for Jesus Christ. He gave his life so that others may live, and when it seemed that all is lost, he came back. And everytime they call out to him, he would always come.

Photo courtesy of Behance