Supply Closet - Chikhai Bardo, Ego Death & Grief

[00:00:05] Hey everyone, David here. Severance is back. The Lorehounds are partnering with Properly Howard to bring you in-depth weekly coverage of Season 2. Join me, John, Anthony, and Steve as we unpack every twist, theory, and revelation. We've created a dedicated feed just for our Severance coverage. Simply search for Severance Lorehounds in your podcast app, or find the direct link in the description below.

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[00:02:07] Hey everybody, David here with another Supply Closet bonus episode. However, I've severed this podcast, and the Audi version of this podcast, which you're listening to now, is a partial conversation that I had with Nicole from Nevermind the Music, and Marilyn Arpikila, who's our favorite Tolkien scholar,

[00:02:34] and has been one of our co-hosts almost since the beginning of this podcast. I invited both of them on to this because I was really interested in talking with Nicole about the concept of ego death, and I wanted to learn a little bit more about what that concept is and how modern psychology understands it.

[00:02:56] But I also wanted to think about and talk about the concept of grief and how we have this phenomena as a very integral part of our human experience.

[00:03:13] And from my previous conversations and working with Marilyn over the years, I've come to understand that she has a very interesting insight into grief from her own academic studies and professional work, as well as her personal interests, especially around Tolkien literature, and there's a lot of that that's embedded in there. So I was really interested to hear what her thoughts were about that. So I thought, why not bring those two together, and we could all three have a conversation.

[00:03:41] I also did some more reading into the concept of Bardot and of Jakai Bardot specifically. I've written a blog post, which is about to go up onto our website, exploring the concept and how it's directly relating to Mark and Gemma's journey in episode seven. And I will talk about it on this podcast, and I'll share that with Marilyn and Nicole.

[00:04:06] And then Nicole will talk about ego death, and then Marilyn will talk about grief. And then there I'll have the podcast severed, and subscribers and season pass holders will have the remainder of that conversation where the three of us just sort of explore the topics and issues.

[00:04:23] But I thought that it was important enough that the details of those three concepts were important enough to be able to share publicly with everyone to help everyone's understanding of what's going on in the show, because there's some really fascinating concepts there.

[00:05:08] As always, if you have any feedback, please send it to severance at thelorehounds.com. I would invite you to join our Discord. We have a great conversation happening there. We have siloed all the channels. And so, you know, you can be severed from the episodes if you've not fully caught up yet. And of course, I should indicate that there's a full spoiler here for this episode because we do talk about some of the details. So if you haven't watched up to episode seven, please do that and then come back. But otherwise, thank you.

[00:05:38] And we will see you on the other side of episode eight. I would like to invite each of you, I think each of us, actually all have a topic that we can bring to bear regarding episode seven.

[00:06:04] I have some stuff to talk about with the Chakai Bardo state. I've written a blog post, which is going to go up in the next couple of days. Nicole, I asked you to be thinking about the concept of ego death. What is it in modern psychology and how do we understand it and what's the phenomenon? And then, Marilyn, I just threw a big one at you and I just said, what do you think about this?

[00:06:33] And the topic of grief, because I remember that at times when we've been talking Tolkien and you brought up Nienna and this question of grief, I really felt that you had a point of view about the human condition of grief and that you could kind of speak to it. And then you, of course, wrote some notes for yourself. But then when I saw those notes, it was like almost a fully formed blog post.

[00:06:59] So I'm sort of encouraging you strongly to get that posted up as well. And I think, Nicole, I saw something about you had written something about ego death. So maybe there's a little triangle of posts that we can all go out there. But I think what we can do from here is if we each talk about what we're going to talk about,

[00:07:18] and then we can have a full flowing conversation once we've each presented our particular aspects or what we're coming to the table with. Does that sound reasonable? That sounds great. Yeah. Why don't you start, David, so I can get a sense of what you want for the first portion as compared to the free flowing conversation. Sure. Sounds good. So the topic that I was really interested in was this question of Jakai Bardo.

[00:07:47] And it's the episode title. It gets brought up and sort of worked through episode seven. So I did some internet reading, and I started to pull some ideas and thoughts together. And then as it happens, as you do that thinking, new things start to open up, and you start to understand things in a more different way.

[00:08:12] So using the idea of writing some explainer suddenly opened up a whole world. And this whole question of these liminal spaces that both Mark and Gemma are in. Oh, and of course, I forgot the Tolstoy of it all. And with his book, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I read or I listened to over the weekend.

[00:08:38] And then I started to read the Hajmarad, but that's a whole other blog post in conversation. But I did listen to the audio book of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. And I can really see where the writers were lining up a couple of things because, spoilers, Ivan dies at the end. And in that moment, though, he's also in this liminal space on his deathbed.

[00:09:03] And then he comes around to this realization that his life has been for naught, and that's not really the meaning of life. And he has this clear light, this clear death light moment where he has a realization, and then he's able to accept his passing. And then, of course, so that's part of the story, right? That's not the whole story.

[00:09:28] And then we have this whole question of Chakai Bardot, which Bardot is a much broader concept and is practiced and understood and has different traditions depending on where you are in the world. It's mostly centered around India and in China.

[00:09:55] I don't know how much in Japan, but it's in Buddhism, Zen Buddhism. It's in various traditions of what we umbrella call Hinduism because there's a lot there, right? It's hard to call Hinduism Hinduism because it's not a simple thing. But there's this idea that death is not a binary state. You're alive or you're dead, but that death itself is a process.

[00:10:22] And then if you believe in the structures of reincarnation, then the Bardot's actually makes sense in that regard.

[00:10:33] Because if you are a practitioner of some variety and the idea is to improve your lot on your next go-round by learning techniques and practicing certain things, you can actually guide yourself through these liminal states of non-corporeal being, I guess you could say, not of being in our world as we know it.

[00:11:02] And that when you are reincarnated or reborn, that you actually have the ability to affect how you're reborn of what you end up getting in that regard.

[00:11:14] And so looking at both Mark and Gemma in this episode, they're both in these liminal spaces where Mark is in a comatose state. He's chosen to pursue reintegration. And that's put him into a coma.

[00:11:40] And we think at the end of this episode that he might be fully reintegrated after he wakes up. And so he has gone through a kind of ego death where his two halves both have to die. So a new version of Mark can come into being.

[00:12:01] And so this idea that he's being reincarnated and he's taking active measures to guide himself through this with Ragabi kind of being a midwife, if you will, and helping him through his spiritual process. She even calls it journeying, which I think brings up a really interesting idea because a journey is an intentional movement. And so he is, is he on a pilgrimage? Is he on a quest?

[00:12:30] Is this a kind of hero's journey where he has to go into the, uh, some other world to find some secret knowledge to bring back so that he can, you know, change the fate of, you know, all of us. It's, uh, interesting to think about that in a, a meta context level of the story is, is there some hero journey stuff going on here? But anyway, so he's in this, uh, Chakai Bardo state where he is going through a death and a reincarnation.

[00:12:57] And then in this absolutely stunner of an episode, we get a full understanding of where Gemma has been on the testing floor and what's going on with her. And as they're, uh, testing her in these strange ways with the severance technology, she too is in this liminal state where she, but it's, it's technologically induced and it is not of her free will.

[00:13:24] And she is ultimately trapped and thwarted by Lumen and not able to complete her journey of rebirth. And when she does, she gets bounced back into a Gemma or a Miss Casey state. And then when she comes back down to the testing floor, right, she's, she's gone nowhere. She's been stuck.

[00:13:43] And so she too, but then the idea of, um, spiritual practitioners who believe in this reincarnation process, if they're trying to affect their ability through the Bardo, you know, their, their, uh, ability to affect the Bardo process. Part of what you have to do is you have to be sharp of mind and be present and develop some skills. And so we see her making her bed.

[00:14:12] We see her practicing some sort of yoga or Tai Chi kind of a thing. We see her stimulating her, her mind by reading and listening, you know, reading books and listening to music. So she's constantly preparing herself and whether through escape or through, uh, release by Lumen, right? She is working to prepare herself to be reborn, but yet is thwarted or is being controlled by, by Lumen.

[00:14:40] So not only do they use the title of the episode, but they really structure the episode around these processes is where our two mirrored characters. And, and I, Marilyn, you have some thoughts. I know this, uh, on this a bit as well, but that while they're in these intermediate states, in some way, they're still connected and they're still paralleling.

[00:15:06] And both of them, and this is where the Tolstoy stuff comes back into it is here they are. And as they're struggling or grappling with or confronting these, uh, uh, circumstances of, of their condition, they're coming to, you know, it, it engenders some sort of realization. And that realization then, uh, uh, initiates a transformation.

[00:15:34] Then in this case, some sort of rebirth is, is something that we're, we're expecting. And so I think that's the Tolstoy of it all is in this moment, if somebody is willing and, and, um, capable and willing to, to question the very nature of their existence, there are answers to be found.

[00:15:57] And both of them are, ooh, boy, man, you can feel this, um, this, uh, the emotion of this episode, the, that they're both struggling to get somewhere. And then to, I think, I don't, I think Jebba's thwarted in having that clear light of, of, of death sort of moment where Mark is able to achieve it. And then that's what we see. Sorry, I need to get a tissue or something.

[00:16:25] But when Mark has that, that tears in his, almost coming to tears as he wakes up and he has those lingering images of Gemma. So that's this concept of, of Bardot and how I think that they've woven it into the story. And there's some really important things in here though, regarding grief and regarding ego death that I think we need to discuss to, to complete it.

[00:16:52] So, uh, Nicole, do you want to just present a little bit on ego death or Marilyn? I see. Did you want to. I just wanted to comment on the things that you've just said. Well, I want to save that for the main discussion. All right. Then I better start writing things down. Yes, you better start writing things down. Go ahead, Nicole. Nicole, please. Yeah. I, I just want to nod to what you said about when Mark woke up, he had tears in his eyes because I, throughout this whole episode, saw Mark as being really emotionally shut down and being really kind of, um,

[00:17:22] uh, separated from his emotions until that moment where he breaks the crib and it's this moment of catharsis and frustration. So it was nice to see this self-actualized Mark, uh, feel a feeling. I'm usually a big fan of that. But in terms of ego death, um. I'm going to put a pin in that and we can definitely talk about Mark's journey when we get into. It's really fascinating. A full round conversation. But yeah, ego death.

[00:17:46] So ego death is a term that we use in psychoanalysis and mysticism and also in some religions. As you meant, we're talking a lot about religion today, but I want to just start at the very beginning in case we have listeners that don't understand basics of psychoanalysis. So psychoanalysis is a Freudian method of therapy and understanding the self and the ego as part of it.

[00:18:11] And Freud believed that as individuals, we're made up of three major units almost like your ego, your superego, and your id. And he had his iceberg theory of self that the ego is a bit of the iceberg that floats above the surface. And then everyone around you can see your ego. You're, that's the part of your personality that you're showing the world around you. And in Freudian psychology, we have other parts of ourselves.

[00:18:41] Our id is like that devil on your shoulder telling you to make bad choices and follow your impulses and stay up late and party all the time. And your superego is like the angel on your shoulder saying, you know, go to bed early, eat right and exercise, make good choices, right? And our ego is trying to make sense of all of it to present to the world a sane human, a balanced, regulated human.

[00:19:07] So when we talk about ego, a lot of times we'll say like, oh, Beyonce has a big ego or Kanye has a big ego. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about this identity and this sense of self. And ego death is the disappearance of that individual sense of self and removal of your perception of yourself as an entity that's separate from your social or physical environment.

[00:19:34] That you would, almost you're existing in a void or a vacuum or a big expansive universe outside of your own sense of self. So during ego death, people might feel a loss of control over their thoughts or emotions or bodily senses. And this can be really scary. There's like a transcendence of time and space, which we see a lot in this episode. Like time isn't linear.

[00:20:03] We even see the time run backwards in one moment. And like the perception isn't clear. You're not sure whose storyline you're following, whose memories you're tracking. It's like we're all nothing and everything all at once. Right? Which is wild. So what can cause ego death? Right? It's a very clear assumption that drugs can cause ego death. Right?

[00:20:31] Psychedelic drugs can make you feel that you're in everything and nothing all at once. You are in the world and part of a world and your individual identity doesn't matter. It is more about where you fit to this massive ball of energy we call a universe. Right? So drugs can do that, I heard. And then also we can do that through dedicated spiritual practice, through like meditation,

[00:20:57] through things like Tai Chi, through things that like separate us from the burden of the physical world. So when we talk about Bardo and that death is a process and we can practice that process and prepare for it through meditation, through mindfulness, through spiritual practice, part of that preparation, the way I see it is this ego death. Right? This understanding that you are not of your body.

[00:21:25] You are not of the time and place of your existence. You're more than that. Right? So we take drugs. We go through meditation and mindfulness, whatever. Pick your poison. And you experience this ego death. And what happens next? What happens when you self-actualize and you come to terms with this idea that you are everything and you are nothing and it all lives inside your entity?

[00:21:51] This can lead to a deep sense of self-awareness, spiritual awakening, personal growth. You're confronting and transcending your usual ego-driven perspectives and attachments. You're not worried what people are thinking of you. You're not worried about what your next move is going to be or the burdens of the emotional labor of your life. You're thinking of how do I best serve this entity, right? This void or this existence.

[00:22:22] This lasting effect on a person's worldview and sense of self can be very, very profound. So this is why you have people go on like ayahuasca retreats or even when you think about psilocybin therapy or therapy with psychedelics, we're experiencing this little bit of a crash of an ego death to kind of break down your perceptions of yourself to ascend and to get to a higher spiritual plane.

[00:22:47] I think we can even find some of that in some of the modern self-help type movements of est or and it's children of that, you know, ilk and these workshops and things that you're doing that you're trying to become better in who you are and how effective you are in the world. Yeah, it's almost like a very holistic, lovely way to conceptualize attack therapy, which is a

[00:23:14] really not ethically okay form of therapy. Oh, is that? Right. Not ethically okay. Where you break down someone's complete existence to nothing and then build them back up. And the e-vest in that regard. Yeah. Right. And build them back up to your perceived likeness, right? Rather than self-built or directed built, right? Yes. But still breaking down, violently breaking down the ego. Yes. This feels more nurturing than that.

[00:23:41] This like sense of ego death, even though it's a scary name, right? In Buddhism, ego death, they call it the great death. And this is the end of this ego's quest. Again, this like sense of self's quest to understand the self as a thing and just reach this transcendent acceptance that you are everything and nothing all at the same time. And I relate that back a lot to Mark's journey in the show, especially in this moment that

[00:24:08] we think that the ego death can be caused by, yeah, drugs or meditation or I read it as described as the short circuiting aspects of your brain's default mold network through intense experiences. Okay. And when I read that, I was like, that feels like severance to me that we're for Marilyn, that we're like short circuiting his brain to break down these conflicting senses of self he's experiencing so he can reach complete acceptance.

[00:24:38] Right. And thus reintegrate. And thus reintegrate. Yeah. So it's all just too much, man, this whole show. All right. So now, Marilyn, I'm going to set you up, but I want to make mention to everyone that you have not been watching any of this show. It's not of your, it's not of your, it's not on your menu of things that you would like to necessarily participate in. Nope.

[00:25:08] However, I did ask you if you'd be willing to watch episode seven. Because it is a, we, there's a term in television called a bottle episode and its meaning has, I think we're evolving. It's meaning a bottle episode had something to do very differently back in the days of, you know, sets and studio audiences and 20 episodes, 25 episodes a season. West Wing was very fond of the bottle episode. Right.

[00:25:37] So this is a bottle episode where it's just, it's a story within the story, right? It's, it's contained within itself. And I think you can come to episode seven without a lot of foreknowledge, understand that Gemma is being held in this particular state and that Mark and her have this relationship. And then we get to see unfolding the depths of their relationship and how they came to be.

[00:26:01] And then some of the traumas that they experienced as a couple through the process of trying to start a family. And then their ultimate loss and separation from each other. And this episode is just packed with grief related things. And so we, on the one hand, we have, you know, this ego death and transcendence.

[00:26:27] And we talk about letting go of our expectations because that's what causes suffering. But grief is this very, very rooted down in the soil, human emotion that we all have to deal with because of our, our nature as, as physical corporeal beings. So you are someone that I know that in past conversations, we've talked about grief. You've talked about grief from Nienna's point of view, from your studies of, of Tolkien.

[00:26:57] And I thought you would just be a perfect person to talk about this concept of, of grief. And then once we've done that, then I think we'll, we'll start to come back around together and then we'll start to explore a little bit more to see where these different concepts come into play. But please, Marilyn. Yes, it is true. I have not watched a single episode other than this one. And sorry, folks, I really don't intend to watch anymore for all kinds of personal reasons, which I think we're maybe sharing at some point and I'm perfectly fine with that.

[00:27:27] But I mean, being a part of the Lorehans community, I was hearing enough to get the sort of basic concept. And you're right. This was an excellent standalone episode for someone who knows nothing about it at all, because it was unfolded in a way that was comprehensible to me anyway. Now my reading may not be accurate because there are other details or significant symbols or whatever that I know nothing about.

[00:27:57] But David approached me with this initially on the topic of spirituality. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what I understand healthy spirituality to be and then move into that topic of grief. So healthy spirituality, and it doesn't even have to involve deity. It often does, but it isn't necessary. Healthy spirituality teaches the ability to live at both the circumference and at the center.

[00:28:26] And it's not an either or. It's a both and. It's a moving in and out, back and forth. And the more we can live at the center, the more we are generally connected to ourselves, to others, and to love. But we cannot live exclusively at the center. We have to be able to live at the edges in order to reach out to others. So it's actually, it's like a spiral dance. You spiral in and you spiral out.

[00:28:56] And you spiral in and you spiral out. And it's no coincidence that one of the more well-known writers and practitioners of feminist spirituality, Starhawk, called her very first book The Spiral Dance. So that may be familiar to some of you folks. I'm also going to draw upon one of my favorite, favorite authors, podcasters, Father Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan priest, now retired, and a contemplative.

[00:29:25] And I've learned so much from his series and also the Center for Action and Contemplation, which he founded, concerning this question, what is healthy spirituality? How do you live a contemplative life and be active in the world? What is that like? What is that like? So, time and again, you hear Richard say that healthy spirituality consists of both good psychology and good anthropology.

[00:29:54] So, good psychology part, you know, hating oneself, even parts of oneself, is not good psychology. So, you know, the whole notion of sin and repentance and so on, it can be a mechanism for people, but most of the time, it's just, it's not good psychology. Even the notion of getting rid of, quote unquote, bad parts of ourselves is not healthy.

[00:30:19] It's difficult to love our neighbors as ourselves if we don't love ourselves as we are, healthy and unhealthy. In fact, it took me until my 30s to figure out that if I'd been loving my neighbors as I've been loving myself all that time as a committed Methodist, it was a wonder that they hadn't risen up and murdered me a long time ago.

[00:30:41] And so, when I first heard, you know, as Eastern philosophy were becoming more part of the zeitgeist, and I first heard this concept about kill your ego, my first thought was, could I please develop a healthy ego first before we talk about killing it? And I think there's some gendered aspect of this.

[00:31:04] I think there is a way in which often it may be that men are more skilled or more trained or more culturated into developing a healthy ego and women less so, for whatever reason. And that's, of course, a whole separate podcast. But, you know, you can talk about some people and say, well, yes, I think, you know, overinflated ego, they could tone it down a little bit.

[00:31:29] But for women, by and large, and I'm talking back in the 60s and 70s, I think the task was to figure out that they had an ego and then to embrace it. And that is a very spiritual path, whether or not you're a Methodist or any other kind of practitioner of any other kind of religion. It's also, to speak to the anthropological side, it is not good psychology to participate in a spirituality that identifies an in-group and an out-group.

[00:31:58] As we know, in-ies and out-ies, right? It's not a good plan because it feeds ego. It causes group identification and it is founded in the principle of I'm better than you. Or I'm not you, which is even more difficult.

[00:32:21] I remember in the second wave of feminism, and there was such strong emotional visceral resistance on the part of men to hearing, you know, women can be strong and women can be active and they can have anger and all the rest of it. And men can cry and men don't have to be interested in sports and so on and so on. All of their lives, I think men were being told that the way to be men was to be not women.

[00:32:49] And so now here comes a movement saying, actually, there really isn't a whole lot of difference between the two of us. Well, then who am I as a man? What am I as a man? How am I supposed to identify? And so out of that kind of existential dread, you hit back. You fight back. You're terrified about what's being done to you. So this is the problem with this whole notion of drawing a circle and saying this is us and everybody else is outside.

[00:33:17] Even hierarchies can be dangerous depending on how they're used. And of course, hierarchies, I think, is one of the greatest sins of the church. And I'll use that language. I'm thinking now of Conclave and the wonderful way, David, you pointed out that certainty can be a sin. Oh, I didn't point it out. I mean, I pointed out that somebody pointed it out. Well, sir, you pointed out that it was said. During our podcast coverage of that, yeah, I did point that out.

[00:33:43] But I believe Ralph Fiennes did a very good job of illuminating that concept for us as well as the writers. It was so well delivered. I thought about sharing some of that with me and I thought, I'm not Ralph Fiennes. How much of it was the words and how much of it was the delivery. Anyway, I found it striking that Gemma was having more and more flashes of her outside life with Mark at the same time when Mark had been unsevered, if I understood the process correctly.

[00:34:11] And I think this could make a case for a spiritual connection of love, which is also a core tenet of most spiritual practices. However, it may be named or misunderstood or understood. And this is something that I think both encompasses ego, it's superego, and supersedes it. It goes beyond it. And I'll talk more about that when we're in our general conversation.

[00:34:42] Okay, so focusing now on grief specifically. Religious and spiritual communities have developed many rituals and practices around grief, which is a sign of its profound impact on most humans. And it's important to recognize the difference between grief and sadness or sorrow. And to some degree suffering. You do suffer grief. There's no doubt about it.

[00:35:07] But grief is not the kind of thing that can be brushed away, eased away, and so forth. And therefore, I think our culture is afraid of grief, and therefore it is very bad at teaching us how to grieve at all, in a healthy or an unhealthy way. The rituals that many religious and spiritual communities have created can provide a container, as it were. And that's helpful for this great big enormous thing.

[00:35:35] And to have some sort of sense of cohesion around it can be helpful in just being able to sit with it. But the actual practice with grief, the spiritual practice of acknowledging the pain, sitting with it, and allowing it to heal in its own time, goes on for a lifetime. I mean, I'm still grieving what happened to me when I was three years old, when it comes up. Now, it's no longer in front of my face.

[00:36:05] As I say with post-traumatic stress disorder training, it's not that you're supposed to forget the event. It's that you're not supposed to relive it every time you remember it. And so, I think grief is a very similar phenomenon. It's a cyclical thing. It's not a linear thing. We think, oh, well, I'm better today than I was yesterday. And then suddenly, boom, you're back in the soup. So, again, you're spiraling in and you're spiraling out.

[00:36:35] And it seems to me that many of the ritual practices are as much about separating the grieved person from the rest of the community. Almost as if grief were infectious, which is a pity because communities can be supportive at times of grief. And it's a very delicate discernment as to when something would be helpful and what would be helpful.

[00:37:00] And so, approaching it with caution and even with awe, I think, is very appropriate. At the very least, it's a reminder to us that we will all experience loss. And that's not a happy thought. But particularly if we have been fortunate enough to experience love, we know that every single thing we love we're going to lose. We're going to be able to lose. Either by that leaving or us leaving.

[00:37:28] And I think that's a lot of why people don't really want to fall in love or put hedges around it. Or, you know, they're very self-protective. To be vulnerable is one of the scariest things about being human. So, some of the spiritual practices I was talking about. Sitting Shiva. I'm not Jewish, so I can't speak specifically to that practice and what it means. David, you might, I don't know if you have any. Just a little bit. Sitting Shiva, yeah. It's, again, it's about community.

[00:37:58] It's about things that will bring you comfort, food, neighborliness. And then there's a particular period of time in which you do this. Yes. Yes. And then a year later, you say Kaddish. Right. In front of the congregation. For up to a year. Yeah. So, it provides a structure. Go ahead. Structure. I was going to say, I'm Jewish as well. And I have experience with the sitting Shiva. Oh, sorry. It's okay. We don't know each other that well, so I'm sharing. Right.

[00:38:26] And a lot of it has to do with surrendering to grief. Right? Yes. And like giving, and as you're saying, giving that space to cover all the mirrors in the house so you don't have to worry about what your appearance looks like. Right. To not shower, not change your clothes. Just like get into it and feel it and have like a time stamp to allow you to feel that feeling. So, when that time passes, you can let go and you can move on as best you can.

[00:38:55] And you're not meant to worry about any work or worry about food and people bring in food and come and sit with you. And it's just being present in grief, as you're describing. And it's a beautiful practice, I think. Yeah. I think so, too. Wearing black is another process by which you demarcate yourself from the community. And again, it can be a double-edged sword. Are you, you're signaling to people, I am in mourning. Does that mean now that everybody's going to avoid me like the plague?

[00:39:26] And again, that speaks to the fear that we have about, you know, is grief contagious? Is death contagious? Social isolation, often for set periods of time, and then appropriate gradations of clothing as time passes. This was a big thing in the Victorian universe in England that, you know, it was shocking if you didn't wear black as a widow for an entire year. And then maybe you would be allowed to wear dark purple and, you know, going to parties. Heavens no.

[00:39:55] You know, so that whole concept of you are expected to perform grief in a certain way. For some people, that could be liberating. Oh, good, a set of instructions I can follow. For other people, that might not be what they need or want. And yet they are forced into this particular behavior. So communal rituals of mourning, of celebration of life, acknowledging the loss of one member of the community,

[00:40:23] it means a loss to the entire community because of the web of connection that love forms. All of these are spiritual practices in that they may be said to admit the existence of a spirit, which is no longer part of the community in physical form. So you have burning bodies, you have burial, other means of removing the physical manifestation from the culture. But one finds cultures that treasure the skulls or remnants of their ancestors.

[00:40:52] So it's not universal. A recent Voyager episode. I've been watching Voyager all the way through, like practically one every night, and it's just wonderful. But this recent episode, recent to me, showed just how easy it is to misunderstand the other culture's practices around death and grieving and beliefs around a soul. I don't want to say exactly how they did it because I don't want to spoil it for anybody who might not have seen it yet, but it was very moving.

[00:41:21] And it made very clear that these are culturally embedded practices, which comes back to the idea that this is not something you do in a solitary way. And yet you do do it in a solitary way. Because, you know, some of the participants were rebelling against, I don't want to do this, you know, because of the underlying fear of what it meant. So in Mark and Gemma are faced with a need to mourn the loss of a child.

[00:41:50] There is little or nothing in their split lives that will support them in that, that I can see. Gemma weeps in the shower and the water is crying with her. Does Mark ever weep? Well, he does when he comes back after the reintegration, but I don't know that we see him weep up until that. That unattended sorrow, that spiritual wound gets between them and eats at their loving connection.

[00:42:17] And there's a marvelous book called unattended sorrow, which is all about the kinds of losses that are not as specific as the death of someone. There is the loss of a person from Alzheimer's. Are they dead? Are they not dead? There is the unattended sorrow of a parent who migrated from one country to another. That a child will intuit and understand there's this big sorrow in the room and I'm afraid of it.

[00:42:47] I don't know what it is, but nobody talks about it. And the word home means something different to me than it does to my parents. So what's that all about? Very, very confusing. And she treats this extremely well. It seems to me that it's not simply their personalities and their memories, but their very souls or spirits that have been split. And that seeps into the rest of their lives together, or as together as they may be said to be.

[00:43:16] Now, again, I haven't seen all the previous series. I don't know how much they show of their relationship, or if this is the first time we see any of it encapsulated. This is the first time. Okay, well, good. Then I will stand by what I'm saying. Miss Casey and Mark have interacted, but obviously they're both interacting with severed personalities. Okay. And not their outie. See, I never really picked up on Miss Casey and what that all meant, but that's okay. I didn't, you know. Right.

[00:43:44] It would have helped a little bit more, but it wasn't essential. Neither of them appears to have what could be called a center. Lacking that wholeness is a great impediment to any kind of genuine connection. And to my mind, connection is another definition of spirituality. And yet, even so, it was clear that they were able to love as outies, and that was powerful enough that their innies did not forget it,

[00:44:13] even with the ghastly treatment they were undergoing. Gemma rebels against losing her feelings. Mark has a flash of her looking at the Chikai Bardo cards, the fighting oneself. Gemma practices Tai Chi in the treatment center, a physical and spiritual form of finding one's center. And she rejects the training when a doctor tells her that Mark is happily married with a daughter. Minds and memories may be severed, but it would seem to me that spirits remain.

[00:44:44] Thank you, Marilyn, for that. I don't know about you, Nicole, but I got about a zillion things in my head to hear that Ricker saying all off. At the same time, I just kind of wanted to be still for a moment. Take that in. I think this is the point of the conversation where we'll say thanks to everyone who joined us on the public feed, and if you're a season pass holder or a regular subscriber, we'll carry on for our conversation with them.

[00:45:25] Is it the Frank or the beans? The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. In one podcast, called The Lorehounds by Some, a weekly recap with tons of analysis, two Wheel of Time superfans will lead you through a world of powerful magic, tricky prophecies, and cutthroat politics. Join me, John, and my co-host Alicia for weekly coverage of Season 3 by searching your podcast app for The Lorehounds.

[00:45:55] Dov'e andi se tovas again. It's time to roll the dice.