best yet to be

the best is yet to be 

To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man, but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil.     –Socrates, 399 B.C. (Apology) 

I have long imagined, as may have many, that leaving this world is like waking from a dream. The first impression is utter confusion, as the “waking” world begins to intrude on the familiar world of the dream. In an instant, this is reversed, and the intruding world is familiar again, while the clarity of the dream rapidly fades.  

Dying might be something like that, perhaps in slow motion. The title “Buddha” means the “Enlightened One”, or the “Awakened One”. In his chapter on Buddhism in The World’s Religions, Huston Smith writes: “While the rest of the world was wrapped in the womb of sleep, dreaming a dream known as the waking state of human life, one of their number roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who….woke up.” 

In 1872, at the age of nine, Black Elk, a Lakota of the Oglala Sioux, became ill and lost consciousness for several days, and his family had just about concluded he had left them for good. He returned to his family and the Oglala people changed by a vision he would not convey in full to another human being until John G. Neihardt came to visit him in 1930. (And even then there were aspects of his vision he could not put into words.) Their collaboration produced Black Elk Speaks, a religious classic. Here are three excerpts:  

If the vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost. 

[N]othing I have ever seen with my eyes was so clear and bright as what my vision showed me; and no words that I have ever heard with my ears were like the words I heard. I did not have to remember these things; they have remembered themselves all these years….[E]ven now I know that more was shown to me than I can tell. 

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together as one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. 

When Black Elk was sixteen, he had become quite anxious that he had not been able to fulfill the vision he had received. He had prayed to the Grandfathers of his vision and they had helped him, but, in his words: “I did not know how to do what they wanted me to do.” 

A terrible time began for me then, and I could not tell anybody, not even my father and mother. I was afraid to see a cloud coming up; and whenever one did, I could hear the thunder beings calling me: “Behold your Grandfathers! Make haste!” I could understand the birds when they sang and they were always saying: “It is time! It is time!” The crows in the day and the coyotes at night all called and called to me: “It is time! It is time! It is time!” 

Time to do what? I did not know. Whenever I awoke before daybreak and went out of the tepee because I was afraid of the stillness when everyone was sleeping, there were many low voices talking together in the east, and the daybreak star would sing this song in the silence: 

“In a sacred manner you shall walk! Your nation shall behold you!” 

His parents sought the help of a medicine man named Black Road. Black Elk related enough of his vision to Black Road that the latter urged him to enact part of it. “You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth,” he said. You must have the horse dance first for the people to see.” 

And so, preparations to enact the horse dance of his vision were made. Black Elk spent most of one night in a tepee with Black Road and another elder, Bear Sings, teaching them songs from his vision. “While we were in there singing,” Black Elk related, “we could hear low thunder rumbling all over the village outside, and we knew the thunder beings were glad and had come to help us.” 

The next day as the enactment was underway, Black Elk recalled, “a strange thing happened:” 

My bay pricked up his ears and raised his tail and pawed the earth, neighing long and loud, and the whites and the sorrels and the buckskins did the same; and all the other horses in the village neighed, and even those out grazing in the valley and on the hill slopes raised their heads and neighed together. Then suddenly, as I sat there looking at the cloud, I saw my vision yonder once again—the tepee built with cloud and sewed with lightning, the flaming rainbow door and, underneath, the Six Grandfathers sitting, and all the horses thronging in their quarters; and also there was I myself upon my bay before the tepee. I looked about me and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder, and the darkened dream of it was here. 

Decades later, Black Elk told Neihardt that the vision had been given to a man too weak to use it; to a large extent he felt he had failed his people. Perhaps he found some solace in knowing that with Neihardt’s help he had preserved for future generations the part which could be expressed in words. But if God speaks to all peoples in terms familiar to each (Qur’an, 14:4), then Black Elk’s vision might be a portrait, tailored for the Oglala people, of the real world which we all will awake to, as the last excerpt above suggests. Hence, what was true and mighty once may yet be true and mighty, for all time and beyond.