The Eyes of the Dead

(where we start and where we end)

“I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.”      —Mark Twain

At the beginning of Twain’s masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the main character can only escape civilization by faking his own murder and pretending to be dead…only then can he launch himself back into the rivers of time.

I’ve long suspected that Twain himself in addition to being a river boat pilot was, like so many novelists, more than a little in touch with the unseen world. He was a self-acknowledged pre-cog, in that he could see the future and witnessed his beloved brother’s death before it happened. He predicted, accurately, that his own death would be timed with Hayley’s comet, whose bright light had ushered him into this life. Most mysteriously, he was obsessed throughout his life with Joan of Arc, despite having no affection for anything religious or anything to do with France, and long before she was sainted. In fact, his biography of her was one of the first English language books to popularize her outside of her own country. He considered it his greatest work of art, the most important thing he ever wrote for reasons he himself could never adequately explain and which biographers all tend to overlook or ignore.

Because Twain is so funny and sly, such a natural trickers, it can be easy to overlook the depths of his wisdom. What does it mean to him to “start dead?”

And how does a person who grows up in a culture with no reference points to the long story, no belief system that embraces the entangled realities of rebirth and reincarnation, make sense of what they know, what they understand, what they are feeling and seeing?

Because don’t we all “start dead?”

We all arrive into this life with memories of death behind us, with memories of the land of the dead fresh in our consciousness, with memories of lives lived, of innumerable returns and departures. We all start life “dead.”

And some of us keep a hold of that perspective despite all kinds of civilizing influences that would have us dismiss our dreams, ignore our perceptions, and neglect the storehouses of wisdom every soul contains.

I often say that I work with the dead so that I can remember to see with the eyes of the dead. Their personalities do not change but their perspective does. They see how we all souls are woven together to create the fabric of existence. They hear the resonances of our connection to each other from across the ages. They remember that we have all been each other’s mothers, we all been each other’s children. What we recover when we can remember that we ARE the dead is the radical empathy of our intimacies with each other.

When I think about what it means to sober up from our addiction to civilization I know it has to do with reclaiming that long story, that river of lifetimes that flows through us, that is our souls.

I don’t know what my connection is to Mark Twain. I was obsessed with him as a child, read all the books, the short stories, the quips. I never read his self-proclaimed masterpiece until I, too, began exploring my devotion to Joan of Arc, although after the first three chapters I found it mostly tedious. I haven’t returned to his books for a long time—but as I think about the way civilization shutters us from knowing who we really are and where we’ve really been, I find myself embarking on a trip down the Mississippi with him again.

I think Twain knew a lot about how to see with the eyes of the dead and I’m ready to rediscover what he knows.

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My book, Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is officially available as of Tomorrow, Sept. 12. I hope you will read it and join the conversation. You can find out all about my workshops for the coming year at my website: takebackthemagic.com