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breeder.
    I was also given pesticides to eat. Apparently designed to kill flies and other parasites, the pesticides passed through my body and killed insect larvae hatching in my excreta. My usual food consisted of putrid rations delivered by a mechanical feeding system. The system, a kind of automated feeding trough, made a hellish sound when operating.
    Year after year—feeding after feeding—the food was always the same. A kind of meat paste, it was composed of flesh torn from human corpses.
    I initially resisted this horrid diet—I tried to subsist on spiders, lice, and raw worms—but eventually I came to accept the cannibal way. I remembered the words of the Jesus, ‘except ye eat the flesh of the son of a man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.’
    The evil-smelling meat paste, which had a revolting flavor, was always mixed with dried human feces. Since humans, like most animals with one stomach, are inefficient digestive machines—we defecate, for example, about one-fourth of the protein present in rice and potatoes—the dung was fed back to us.
    Human farmers are known to inflict the same atrocity on their farm animals. In all worlds, the lower fauna are abused by the higher.
    Thoughts On Death
Tormented by life—hounded by suffering—I often thought about death. Called ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone’ by Plotinus, death is indiscriminate. ‘All beings are destroyed when their time comes,’ declares the Shiva Purana , ‘whether they are gods or mosquitoes.’
Death—inescapable death—is the great mystery. Freud said we cannot imagine our own deaths—whenever we try to do so, we actually survive as ‘spectators’ watching our own funerals—but still the phenomenon obsessed me.
    I knew that approximately 100,000 people perished somewhere on Earth every day, and I wondered what happened to them. What happened after the final breath?
    Did the dead evaporate and rise to the heavens—perfect summerlands of light and fragrance—did they descend to a loathsome pit called hell—the eternity of which is stressed in 27 separate Koranic verses—did they return to Earth— reincarnated through the hazards of chance or the so-called ‘laws of karma’—or did they join a listless herd of nomadic dead—a horde of unhappy translucent ghosts wandering on the other side?
    Or, did the dead simply die? That is what the Bible claims— ‘The dead know not any thing,’ says Ecclesiastes 9:5, ‘neither have they any more reward.’
    In the long run, was man only ozone and fertilizer? To discover the truth, would I have to ‘die and become’? ***
    My misfortunes had turned me into a quasi-atheist—if gods exist, I thought, they are too powerless, too indifferent, or too autistic to help us—but I was not prepared to deny the afterlife.
    Most atheists, of course, believe there is no post-death existence. If there is no god, they argue, humans simply share the squalid death of animals.
    I was certain, however, that the constipated logic of the atheists was flawed. If natural life does not require gods for its existence—if the first organisms, the ancestors of all flora and fauna, emerged spontaneously in the primordial mud— why should afterlife need gods?
    Yes, I thought, if life does not require gods for its existence, neither does afterlife. Both are engendered by nature.
    Afterlife may not be forever—perhaps a soul lingers only for a time, like the smoke outlasts the fire—but I believed it was a natural process. It was real.
    Of course, it may be the exception rather than the rule in nature—like the phenomenon of a mongoloid baby, perhaps afterlife was a rare occurrence—but it still was real.
    ***
    George Gurdjieff taught that survival was the fate of an elite. Ordinary people perish with their bodies, he argued, but extraordinary people lived on after death. Could that be correct?
    And if—as Gurdjieff argued—some special people did survive, what made them endure? Was