I'm a bad boy. It's past time for me to begin preparing for the show at the Catalyst tonight, but I can't fight off the compulsion to feed my obsession with Rapunzel just a little more.

I'm sauntering towards the home of Katrina, the one person I know who might be in possession of Rapunzel's phone number. She lives in the heart of the residential neighborhood north of the Catalyst, one of my most favorite places on Earth. I feel exhilarated here. Every half block or so contains a building that shelters the memory of some twisty, transfigurative liaison I've had. I salute the house whose backyard harbors the elm tree where I enjoyed a most gymnastic yet oddly lyrical tryst with the anarchist nymphomaniac Blade. There's the old Victorian that hosted my temporary hierosgamos with the linguist Lugienne, an androgynous beauty who was my wife in two previous incarnations.

Not every memory is a fond one. I shudder to see the apartment where one night Laurie and I wrecked our fine, long-standing Platonic friendship. We should never have made love at all. But if we did, it should have been with more kindness and care than we managed to summon for each other on that star-crossed occasion.

And then there's Eva. We were getting along so deliciously until the day I lent her my Chevy Malibu and she totaled it in a four-car accident on Highway 17. My trust and my lust both disappeared overnight. It stings to think about it now, but forever after I entertained a stupidly superstitious fantasy that she was bad luck.

But the good karma I incurred in these precincts far outweighs the bad. The saintly Cassidy lived here when I first met her, and we enjoyed our first mutual deep-tissue massage under her attic skylight. There's the house where I helped Kaitlin undo her ex-husband's curse on her sexuality. Three doors down is the cottage where Diane and I dedicated our tantric love-making to the magical project of getting Vaclav Havel elected president of Czechoslovakia. (It worked.)

A happy fantasy begins to bud. I theorize that all the intimate adventures I've enjoyed in this neighborhood have been lessons in a kind of sacred school. Now, finally, after all these years of studying, it's as if I've mastered the undergraduate work and am ready to move on to the graduate level. My advisor and master teacher will be Rapunzel, whose expert guidance I've more than earned with my diligence and devotion.

And to be honest, there are still a few holes in my education, which I'm quite ready for Rapunzel to fill. Like the following, for instance:

Theorem 1: What characterizes almost every woman I've ever loved for more than one night is that she looks good and smells good. Why the hell do I have to be such a looksist? (And smellist?)

Theorem 2: I'm afraid of women's anger and all too often run from it like a coward.

Theorem 3: I love to fall in love more than I love to stay in love. I'm addicted to the play of infatuation and the wonder of beginnings. Not that I've never had a committed relationship; just that my expertise is more in the realm of inspiration and revolution, less in the slow steady struggle which a long-term intimate relationship must be. Hypothesis: Rapunzel's going to fix all that. I don't know how. I just have the unshakable certainty that class will very shortly be in session. Whatever I need to learn next, Rapunzel will provide the means.

I'm so high on this scenario that when I arrive at Katrina's house and find no one home, I almost don't mind. I leave a note on the door telling her I desperately need Rapunzel's number and address, and to phone it in to my voice mail as soon as possible.

A relaxed reverie cracks open as I lean against an old elm tree in Katrina's front yard. Images from earlier in the day begin weaving themselves into a collage, and the germ of a new song implants itself in the songwriter section of my brain. Maybe I could even do it as an improv at the show tonight. Fragments of potential lyric lines erupt first. Graffiti in the ladies' room ... met the witch with the fairy tale name ... she crowned me with her underpants ... I kissed her boot reverently ... took a psychedelic journey with the magic goddess-pad....

The song could start with me sing-talking in my growly low register over a funky bass line. Guitar and drums would kick in after the first verse, and I'd push my voice up to the next octave. The chorus would burst out, but slightly restrained, after two verses. Following that there could be another verse and chorus, leading into a bridge. I could have Darby, my co-lead singer, cut loose with some undulating background melody there while I interjected a percussive chant.

Uh-oh. A rude interruption breaks in. I suddenly have a nightmare vision of arguing with a record company executive on the fourteenth floor of hell. "Nobody wants to listen to a goddamn confession about menstruation, fer chrissakes," he's barking at me. "Least of all from a guy. You should keep the chorus melody, though; it's a great hook. Just drop the menstrual crap."

To borrow an epithet I learned at age ten while reading the dirty book Candy under the covers with a flashlight when my parents thought I was asleep: Fuckshitpisscuntcock.

In other words, the reverie's over. How can I generate the creative flow I was born to exude when there's that asshole bureaucrat pontificating in my brain? I must still be pretty far gone if he's able to spoil the artful fun inspired by Rapunzel.

I leave my sanctuary next to the elm and head back in the direction of the Catalyst.

If only. If only. If only the whole world could be, say, just twenty percent more like Santa Cruz. Nobody in Santa Cruz would ever ridicule my intention to write a song about menstruation from a male point of view. On the contrary. I would find abundant support, fierce encouragement, even adulation.

In minutes I arrive back at the Pacific Garden Mall, the downtown's main drag. Two gaggles of conga players and percussionists are performing for an audience consisting entirely of themselves. They're so lost in trance they apparently don't notice that their respective rhythms are clashing.

I stop in front of a store that I've nicknamed the pagan beauty shop. It has a whole range of fashion accessories for wannabe pagans and neo-tribalists, from crystal-tipped wands and athames to tit clamps and cock rings with ancient Egyptian designs to rentable costumes of twenty-two different goddesses. This evening, in the "performance window," there's a green-haired woman with a scraggly but unmistakable blondish-grey beard. Her supertight magenta bike shorts bulge comically, in places revealing the precise patterns of the cellulite beneath. She has the sleeves of her canary-colored satin smoking jacket pushed up as she tattooes the eyelid of a middle-aged woman who seems to be wearing Native American medicine rattles bound up in her hair like old-fashioned curlers. The woman receiving the delicate branding has another tattoo engraved on her substantial belly, a vast stretch of which is revealed between her violet harem pants and a battleship-grey, cone-shaped bra akin to the monstrosity that rock diva Madonna once sported. The belly tattoo shows the Goddess Isis entwined with the Goddess Persephone. I know they're Isis and Persephone because there's a tattooed caption below the image which reads "Isis mudwrestles Persephone for the right to make me CUM." Another image is etched into the woman's left arm, splayed vertically from elbow to wrist: a buffed Barbie doll with snakes for hair. She's wearing a martial artist's uniform and has a double-headed ax slung over her shoulder. The caption above her head reads "Tantric Mutant Ninja Barbie." I guess my earlier vision of creating a "Barbie of Willendorf" for Rapunzel wasn't as original as I imagined.

But I love this scene. I truly do. Not with perverse glee; not because of a decadent attachment to any old thing that happens to be vaguely odd. I love it because it's scenes like this that symbolize for me Santa Cruz's quixotic role as a nurseryland utopia -- a big open-air performance art gallery and living museum of evolutionary mutations. What other town on this continent can brag that it has had a gay socialist feminist mayor? Where else can you find poems by Coleridge spraypainted on a highway underpass? Or shop at a store called "Art: Fifty Cents a Pound"? Or attend the "Christstock" festival, an only-half-satirical, three-day mini-Woodstock whose attendees all claim to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ?

And what of this: Has my performance art campaign for the Santa Cruz city council ever been matched by any other candidate in any other town in America? Has any other aspirant for political office ever claimed to channel the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and sought solutions to the homeless problem in lucid dreams and pledged to consult Tarot cards before making every important decision and called for holy mudwrestling rituals between liberal and conservative politicians as a way to decide intractable disagreements?

Where else besides this seaside paradise can you find a group of men who wear veils all day on International Women's Day? Or make the acquaintance of three different women painters who all claim to be channeling, in their own work, the spirit of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo? Has any other hamlet in the history of the planet ever passed an ordinance that made it illegal for businesses to discriminate in their hiring practices against people with nose rings or mohawk hairdos or ritual scars on their cheeks?

Now it's true that far less than a majority of the population of Santa Cruz County is composed of street-singing UFO abductees and parapsychology researchers who proudly breastfeed their infants in public and soap bubble-blowing artists who've developed their transitory sculptures with such grandiose craftsmanship that they tour the world doing shows to sold-out audiences. And for the majority of respectable, tax-paying, four-hours-of-TV-a-day Americans who make up the bulk of the Santa Cruz population, the data that make my heart glad are embarrassing. They would no doubt be repulsed if they ever heard my estimate that fully five percent of the adults in Santa Cruz have relationships with invisible friends.

But I myself am in full resonance with the eccentric side of this town. I beam with civic pride. I can't justify my illusion that the vegetarian astral-traveling conspiracy theorists and twelve-step, cigar-smoking, pagan bisexual folk singers are more spiritually advanced or psychologically healthy than everyone else in the world. I can only say that's what the playful, optimistic, I-want-heaven-to-be-here-now side of myself yearns to believe. My secret ambition is to take this Santa Cruz in me and find a way to give it to the whole world.

I browse on down the Pacific Garden Mall until I come to my other most favorite landmark. It's sorta kinda an art gallery and part-time cafe, but sometimes you can get your Tarot cards read here or buy odd occult knickknacks like "mojo bags" (hand-sewn velvet containers filled with talismans, crystals, straw fetishes, vials of essential oils, and other magickal stuff) or packages of sage (an herb that when burned is used for psychic cleansing). At least two people seem to live in the back rooms here. Like the pagan beauty shop, it's a hotbed of entertaining people and events that rarely fails to give me a seed idea for a new song lyric or poem.

I don't even know what the proprietors are calling the place these days. They seem to change the name regularly. I look around for a sign that might hint at its current alias, but all I see is a poster for an event that's scheduled here for tonight. It's an art opening for "The Eater of Cruelty."

"Take mad genius Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty," the poster reads, "and insert a mutant e. What do you get? THE EATER OF CRUELTY. We find the treasure in the trash, the gold in the lead, the manna in the junk food. Sometimes the only way to get the good stuff into your system is to eat the whole disgusting thing."

This is spooky and exhilarating. Though Artaud's work has receded into near-obscurity in the last decade, he's one of my heroes, and a seminal influence on my performance career. And not only that. According to one of the early loves of my life, a woman who proved to me beyond a doubt that she had psychic skills, I was a friend of Artaud in one of my past lives.

The front display window of the storefront is filled with TV monitors, a scene which is also dear to my heart. My band World Entertainment War is well-known for the way we pack the stage with TVs, some tuned to whatever network or cable shows happen to be on at the time we're performing, some to rented videos. Lately I've been partial to using Disney's Fantasia and a documentary on the paintings of Matisse. "Too much entertainment," I sometimes proclaim to the audience as we arrive on stage, "because you're too much!"

The images appearing on The Eater of Cruelty's TV installation are of a different order than ours. The technology seems far beyond normal video. The almost three-dimensional vividness of the images surpasses the quality of a typical TV by several magnitudes. Their excruciating hyper-reality gives me a queasy thrill. The effect is exacerbated by the cruelty of the images. I mean, my band is famous for its shocking imagery, but The Eater of Cruelty makes us look like Sesame Street.

Example: In the midst of a vast stretch of snowy tundra, a wizened old pregnant woman with very little hair is joined at the hip, like a Siamese twin, with a teenage boy. She swings a double-headed ax at a ten-foot-high totem pole composed of the heads of well-known historical figures (all male), while at the same time she's breastfeeding a baby whose umbilical cord is still attached and being yanked on by a vulture wearing a pink tutu.

One of the monitors is itself highly anomalous. It's apparently made of stone and mud. Vines are growing out of cracks in it in several places. Among the hard-to-look-at but irresistible scenes lingering there is this: A creature that's simultaneously beautiful and hideous is puttering around the outside of a domed stadium at the main entrance of which is a neon sign in the shape of an equal-armed cross with a partially bloomed rosebud at its center. The sign reads "Mary Magdalen Memorial Stadium."

The creature's face is that of an attractive woman in her thirties. Her body, except for two phallic-shaped breasts that look like those of a human female, is a large vulture. The span of her wings is enormous, markedly greater than her height. She's using them as brooms or rakes, gathering trash and refuse into piles with majestic sweeping motions. Across the bottom of the "television" screen scroll the words "This Bud's for You, Uberwoman."

I can't resist going inside the building to explore what's behind all this. There's a series of circular black tables around the periphery of the room, each holding a stone and mud TV like the one that caught my eye in the front window. Near the back wall, a woman appears to be getting ready to speak or perform. A crowd of maybe thirty people sits on the floor.

The most striking feature about the performer is that she's apparently about eight months pregnant. The second most striking feature is that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Rapunzel. The bushy eyebrows are the same shape, though black instead of auburn. The flared nostrils. The gap between the front teeth. The high cheekbones and expansive forehead. About five feet, ten inches, same as Rapunzel. Am I simply exhibiting the signs of extreme infatuation: Rapunzelizing the entire race of women?

I don't think so. She's a close match for my beloved except for a few details. Twin sister? Rapunzel herself in some kind of twisted disguise? Her black shag hair is ridiculously fat on top, which suggests that she's wearing a wig.

She's also wearing a gold contraption which is a near replica of the vulture headdress customarily worn by the queens of ancient Egypt. I know this for a fact because when I was a kid I learned all there was to know about vulture lore. The bald head and beak of the fake vulture bulge out from the top of her forehead, and the wings hang down like flaps all the way to her shoulders.

This would look almost regal if it weren't for the fact that she's also got a silly old pair of bulky black-rimmed eyeglasses with wing tips, and their lenses are tinted magenta. Her all-white costume is like an Indian sari. A stately, multi-tiered gold necklace, which matches the intricate engraving of the headdress, gives her the look of a mad sybil.

The third most striking feature about Rapunzel-Clone is that she has awakened in me a curiously guilty lust. Shouldn't the sight of her protruding abdomen cancel out the sight of her Rapunzel-like gorgeousness? Am I not breaking some taboo by sexualizing the carrier of another man's child?

Then again, Santa Cruz has a reputation for having the world's most single mothers per capita. An abundant and easy access to social services, combined with a fanatically supportive feminist community, has created a fledgling cult of young bohemian welfare moms -- and another gang of cheerfully irresponsible and itinerant dads. The odds are fifty-fifty that Rapunzel-Clone's inseminator has already wandered on down the road.

I decide to listen to her spiel for a while, though I'm increasingly aware of my responsibilities back at the Catalyst. Finding a spot near one of the stone TVs, I squat. The screen next to me is more shocking than any in the display window. My first unconscious reaction when I catch it out of the corner of my eye is that it's pornography. But as I look closer, I see it's not exactly.

A naked pregnant woman on all fours is in the throes of strenuous labor. She's huffing manically, her muscles rippling involuntarily in exhaustion and duress. Her back end is facing me at an angle, and the crown of the fetus' head has split through her engorged vulva. There next to her, resplendent in a magenta bodysuit, is a woman who resembles the robust crone with grey dreadlocks I saw in the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show. I take the book out now to compare. Yes. It's the same person. Her name is Vimala.

Rocking and swaying like a saxophone player, Vimala is massaging the woman's back and stroking her thighs. The tiny brown wet feathered head bobs at the threshold; it pokes through and retreats twice. Vimala leans down close to it and blows gently, and in a slow-motion burst the tiny puckered face oozes free. With her left hand lightly grasping the head, Vimala sweeps her right index finger under the side of the baby's jaw and slips the chin out. There the reddish blue face remains lodged and suspended, between worlds, awaiting the next contraction.

And then the screen goes blank. After a few seconds, a looping cartoon appears. It features two recurring icons -- my old friend the bull skull and the creature with the body of a vulture and the face of a woman. At times bull skulls emerge from the nipples of the vulture-woman; at other times twin vulture-women fly out of the eyes of the bull skull.

I feel queasy, shaken, in a light trance. The scene of the birth was provocative enough, but I think I'm even more disoriented because it was interrupted. I take a few deep breaths and lie down to try to quell my vertigo. As I cover my eyes with my forearm, I feel something skitter onto my midsection. Peeking out, I see that a woman in a black robe has airdropped a sheet of red paper. Everyone else in the room is receiving a similar gift. It turns out to contain the text of the little speech Rapunzel-Clone proceeds to give.

Her first words sound like a text that might be delivered by a television pitchman introducing a late-night infomercial or an HBO pay-for-view spectacle. On the other hand, she delivers it in a soft, lyrical voice as she opens out her arms in a majestic welcome.

"Live from the Drivetime. You're tuned to the Televisionary Oracle. Coming to you on location from your own future. Featuring continuous news updates about you. Brought to you by The Eater of Cruelty. Are you ready to lose your ridiculous omniscience?"

Huh?

Though I don't understand what conceit is informing this introduction, I can clearly hear that the woman's voice is a dead ringer for Rapunzel's.

Her next speech makes more sense.

"I hate to break it to you, beauty and truth fans, but your body's going to fail you one day. It'll utterly collapse and stop working. Your heart will shut down. Your genitals will go numb forever. Your brain will no longer whirl with liquid light.

"That's the bad news. The good news is that you're actually dying little deaths every single day. The inside of your body is a killing field where your cells ceaselessly give up their lives in service to producing the energy that keeps you animated.

"In another sense, your cells are tyrannical liquidators, immolating the food you pour inside you so that it might be radically transformed into useful substances. You're a slaughterhouse, beauty and truth fans. You're an uncompromising terminator who ruthlessly destroys the forms of the plants and animals and minerals that sacrifice their lives for you.

"So you're practicing death every day in every way. You're committing little murders with each breath you take, each move you make. In truth, you're so thorough and constant in your deathwork that you regularly disappear yourself completely. A few years from now, there will not be a single cell in your body that is here today. They all will have been annihilated in the ongoing carnage, replaced by new volunteers who in their turn will also perish while expressing their pragmatic love for you.

"Yet though your very survival depends on your mastery of burnt offerings, most of you have somehow managed to retain your innocence about it. If I asked all of you right now, 'Who in here is an expert in the art of dying?', I doubt I'd see any hands raised. I'm not criticizing, but mourning. Not condemning you to permanent ignorance, but exhorting you to awaken. If only, beauty and truth fans. If only you could own the hidden knowledge you harbor. If only you could bloom a continual stream of vivid meditations on the death that energizes you in every moment.

"But here's a secret: You can. You must. You will. Why? Because it's your best hope for surviving the ultimate death of your physical form. It's the foolproof way to learn exactly what you'll need to do in the moment of transition -- when your body shuts down -- in order to slip away with your soul's integrity and treasurehouse of memories fully intact.

"You must practice death, beauty and truth fans. If after your current body fails you want to be born again in a new body in complete possession of the consciousness you earned this time around, you must practice practice practice death. Not just instinctively and unconsciously, as you do now. But with the full participation of your intelligent will. In the bright light of day. With your courage and gratitude blazing.

"Practice death, beauty and truth fans. Not simply by noticing the destructive fury of your teeth as they rip apart the flesh you offer for sacrifice. Not just by contemplating your stomach's acidic assaults on this decimated material. Not just by tuning into the literal fires that rage in your lungs as they seize oxygen from the atmosphere. These visualizations are helpful, but for most of you they won't be enough to prepare you for crossing the abyss at the end of your body's days. That's because the processes in question have been going on since before you could talk, before you could even laugh or focus your eyes. They're too numbingly familiar, too woven into the unconscious fabric of your awareness.

"There is another kind of death that is pregnant with more viable meditations -- if you're a woman. It typically occurs once in every orbit of the moon around the Earth. When you menstruate, a specialized cell in your body, the only type of cell capable of spawning a new creature, begins a quest for larger life -- only to fail in its mission and disintegrate. This is a death that is more shocking to the body than digestion and oxidation, and therefore more palpable to your imagination. It even generates a symptom that in any other situation is a dramatic sign of rapidly ebbing vitality: loss of blood.

"Each menstrual death is potentially an initiation into the mysteries of the body's final demise. Potentially, I said. In fact only a shamanatrix trained in the techniques of The Eater of Cruelty has the skill necessary to extract the initiatory insights. Each month she steals a piece of the Other Side of the Veil and inseminates herself with its wisdom. Each month she becomes more and more pregnant with the secrets of death. Until one day -- let's hope on a day before her body finally quits -- she births not just a new vision but a new version of herself: an immortal soul capable of surviving intact during the traumatic exit from the body and the preparation for eventual re-entry into human flesh. Thus, she kills her own death.

"Now let me address those of you who might feel neglected by my last comments: the men. I want you to know that though you may never be able to enjoy the literal physiological experience of menstruation, it's not inconceivable for you to court a vivid metaphorical equivalent of it.

"Your success in this project may depend in part on your ability to remember when you were a woman. And I assure you with utter certainty that you were a woman. There was a period in your earliest life -- indeed, in the life of every man -- in which you were purely female. It was the first five weeks after you were conceived. That's because every fetus starts out female. Every fetus, in the beginning, has a clitoris, an Ur-phallus. It is only at the five-week mark that those fetuses destined to be males endure the spontaneous explosion of hormonal abracadabra that transmogrifies their clitorises into penises.

"Think back, men. Meditate back. You'll find those five weeks. And when you do, the gifts of menstruation may begin to become available. Perhaps we may offer you some help in this task with the next part of your program tonight.

"We'll get to that in a minute. First, let me say that what we're doing here now is but a bare introduction to the advantages of consciously dying every day of your life. If you'd like to know more, please sign our guest book. We will contact you.

"OK. Now we're happy to present you with a practicum that should allow you to begin putting to use the ideas we've spoken about.

"To begin, place yourself in a comfortable position. Relax and breathe deeply.

"Now bring your awareness to the inside of your abdomen below your navel. If you're a woman, do your best to locate the inner walls of your uterus. If you're a man, faithfully hallucinate that you feel a uterus.

"Imagine that a ripe ovum has just popped out of your left ovary and has begun its migration into your fallopian tube. You've ovulated. As if in time-lapse photography, follow that egg as it journeys. Let your mind picture this if you want, but more importantly, feel the sensation in the appropriate place in your body.

"Can you sense that there is a sentience in the ovum? It's more alive than any other individual cell in your body, even the unripe ova it left behind in your ovary. Without getting sentimental or anthropomorphic, pretend that this little fragment of you is a potential new creature, a proto-being that vibrates at the same frequency as the first chains of molecules that were shocked alive by lightning bolts in Earth's ancient primordial soup.

"It's important that you suspend any beliefs that might interfere with your ability to tune in directly to the actual living presence of this cell. What you're doing has no bearing on your political or religious notions about abortion, for instance. To worry that it does will only encourage your chattering mind to try to hijack this experience.

"Now imagine, as you follow your ovum in its travels, that it's a highly specialized essence both alive and not alive, both belonging to you and serving the agendas of an ancient instinct that has no interest in your personal needs. Become aware that the ovum is on a quest driven by a primitive longing to find a nest.

"Next, experience that perfect moment when its longing is satisfied. Feel its ecstasy as it nestles into the bed of tissue that has been prepared for it on your uterine wall. Exult in this homecoming--but not too long. In the ensuing moment, this inconceivably old entity launches the second half of its imperative: to be fertilized.

"Simmer in this sensation. A thing that is alive yet not alive, that's both you and not you, waits, yearning with a desire that's millions of years old, to become fully alive. Feel it waiting. Imagine its vivid instinctual intent, its utterly concentrated animal readiness. Waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

"And then visualize the moment when it gives up waiting. The exact second when it surrenders its lust to live and begins to wilt. Maybe your conscious mind is pleased there'll be no pregnancy. But a different mind in you, a primitive mind, feels loss and grief. Opens to the underworld. Falls down the hole. Feels the breath of death. "Now imagine that as the ovum and its nest peel away from the uterine wall, they send a signal to your pituitary gland to secrete the hormone that will in turn detonate the ripening of a new follicle. Feel the signal. Follow the hormone. Tune in to the ecstatic twinge in your ovary as the cycle begins again. And wish yourself happy birthday.

"Meanwhile, remain aware of the dying that is simultaneously taking place in your womb. And wish yourself happy deathday.

"Imagine at this moment that you are between worlds. You're both alive and dead at the same time. Womb and tomb are conflating.

"And welcome to the Drivetime.

"Steep yourself here in the threshold, looking both ways.

"Now please visualize that you are the person you will be on the day your body dies. Pretend you're fully aware that these are your last hours on Earth. Don't worry about whether this is 'real' or 'imagined,' whether you're psychically viewing the future or merely fantasizing. Remember: There is a realm that is neither 'real' nor 'imaginary,' but both: a realm in between. The Drivetime.

"See where you are as you prepare for your adventure. Are you lying in a bed in a familiar place, or perhaps in a musty bed in a strange land? Look at your arms. Are there wrinkles and age spots, or is the flesh still smooth and clear? How old are you? Wiggle your feet if you can. Stroke your own cheek with tenderness. How does the inside of your body feel? Pulsing pain? Slow, dissolving serenity? Confusion and uproar? Resignation and excitement?

"Since this is wherever you imagine it to be, maybe you're not expiring in bed. Be frank. Do you think it's more likely you're going to die in an accident or during an earthquake or from a sudden heart attack? Or perhaps you've decided not to wait for death to overtake you on its own terms, but are going out to meet it. Can you see yourself standing on a beach, preparing to lose yourself at the bottom of the ocean?

"If you want, run through a host of scenarios, letting each tell you some quiet or spectacular secret. But at last settle on one. This is your last stand on Earth. The sweet spot where you will take your final breath. Become aware of how much you love yourself. Tune in to your amazement about how beautiful and strange and difficult and mysterious your life has been.

"See and hear and smell every detail of these closing moments. If nothing specific pops into your mind's eye, make something up. What color are the walls or the sky? What time of the year is it, what hour of the day or night? What are you wearing? Are there companions here with you? How do you feel about being separated from them?

"This last question may be the hardest. Leaving would be simpler if it weren't for these grieving souls begging you to stay. Look into their eyes now and say exactly what you mean. In this propitious moment, everything can change forever. This is your chance to banish suffering you've caused, to correct a thousand mistakes, to alter the entire meaning of your life.

"Or let's say that these are not your final seconds. Maybe you have an hour or two remaining. If you're dying of disease, your body is in full retreat from the fight. If you are to be killed in an accident, your subconscious mind is turning towards the Other Side as a dandelion swivels at dawn to follow the rising sun.

"Become aware, then, that your heart is in conversation with death. Consider the possibility that your passing from this world will be nothing like what you've ever believed, and that your real education begins now. Does it seem pointless to become a student in these waning moments, or can you glimpse the hint of a reason to become more alert than you ever have before? What if this is a great awakening? What if you're about to navigate an abyss as dangerous and exhilarating as the one you crossed in order to be born? What if there is another life on the other side of that abyss--a life as unimaginable as this one was in the moments before you arrived?

"Let's hypothesize that what you've heard is true: Your entire life can pass before your eyes at closing time. Do you want that? Say yes, and every experience you've ever had -- every nuance of feeling, every amazing and trivial thought, every wordless memory of a memory -- will flood through you in a vivid waking dream so compressed that only a person in your threshold state is capable of enduring it. Surrender to this extravagant blessing. For all you know, it's the fuel that ensures you'll make it to the other side with your self-awareness intact. For all you know, it's the key to a kind of immortality you never guessed the existence of until now.

"As you relive your life in this timeless time, we offer you our love in whatever form you need it, from tenderness to adrenaline. We pray that you will see what you could not see before. "Spend as much time here as you need. We will leave you now for a while to muse and peruse."

"Imagine now that you have intimately experienced two kinds of death without having to endure the inconvenience of literally dying. You've zeroed in on that moment when the withering of one ovum triggers the bloom of a new one. And you've learned what your life feels like when you explore it from its last moments. Pretend that as a result you're now ready to wield death's purifying slash yourself -- with love not cruelty; with joy not violence. You're sensing what it would be like to become an adept of creative destruction, a master dismantler of whatever threatens to kill your soul.

"Scan yourself now, searching for the hard, frozen fixations; the broken, frazzled obstructions; the angry, arrogant traumas. Track down the false hopes, short-sighted beliefs, and useless emotions that your death knows to be superfluous. Allow yourself to look at just one terrible truth about yourself; let yourself feel the suffering you've steadfastly refused to feel; come face to face with the ignorance you have nurtured most obsessively -- the ignorance which, if demolished, would free you to become a more ultimate version of yourself.

"This is where you learn firsthand what the alchemists meant when they said, 'Dissolution is the secret of the Great Work.' This is the time and this is the place to use the Death Medicine on yourself.

"Continue breathing deep, hilariously sacred breaths. With each exhale, remember that your body is a furnace that destroys its fuel in order to live. With each inhale, imagine that enlightenment is not the accumulation of knowledge but the stripping away of amnesia. It's as if nothing can ever again be dangerous; as if not even time can murder you. You're better than dead. You're better than alive. You're dead and alive at the same time. From now on you will grow more ecstatically intelligent whenever you meditate on this: To the degree that you steal death's method and use it to invigorate your life, the specter of your own corpse loses its power to scare you."