Is life after death possible, probable, more than the mystical, or the ravings of B-movies and pulp dreamers? Time. Reception reaches. Across the continent, over an ocean, up mountains to Tibet where life and death have been the hum of meditation for well over a thousand passing years. “In nature an embodiment of the ocean of buddhas/ With concentrated attention I call to you:/Send out waves of your compassionate energy.” 5 In 1933, after the 13th Dalai Lama wrote these verses, he passed away and the search was on to find him again.
Reincarnation is the path he follows. In the words of the Buddha of Compassion: “Both mind and body must have immediate sources…the immediate source of a body is that of its parents. But physical matter cannot produce mind, nor mind matter. The immediate source of a mind must, therefore, be a mind which existed before the conception took place; the mind must have a continuity from a previous mind. This we hold to prove the existence of a past life.” 6
So how could anyone discover, or rediscover this great man who returned to life? Lake Lhamo Lhatso held the answer. “The people of Tibet believe that visions of the future can be seen in the waters of this lake…Sometimes the visions are said to appear in the form of letters, and sometimes as pictures of places and future events.”7 Houdini’s ten word code come to life. The blue sky on water revealed the clues and in 1937, after four years out of sight, the 14th Dalai Lama was found, a two year old boy under a turquoise roof, who knew who he was.
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”
--John Keats’ tombstone
In the meantime, America continued. Only 18, while Harry Houdini was making his first movies, Seaman Humphrey Bogart floated the ocean aboard the Leviathan. The U-Boats let him pass back and forth unsunk and after the war he drifted, closer to where he would become. Trying his hand at directing a film called Life was the opening door for him to act. Parts in plays and early pictures followed, then it happened: from the stage production of The Petrified Forest his gangster character was projected over theater screens in 1936. Going rough through the Depression into the next war years, reflecting the time-culture in the roles that made him bright, Bogart was created. “To his cynicism, his own code of ethics, his hatred of the phoniness in all human behavior, he now added the softening trait of tenderness and compassion and a feeling of heroic commitment to a cause.” 8
Like Houdini’s water shows, Bogart seemed to truly glow when he was filmed on the ocean. To Have and Have Not (1945), Key Largo (1948), and The African Queen (1951) put Bogart on the waves and it’s real, he’s in control, steering the careening boat around danger. It’s that vision of him that is timeless. At his funeral services in 1957, a glass display case holding the model of his yacht The Santana took the place of a coffin and the whistle from To Have and Have Not was interred with his ashes. Director John Huston decided, “He is quite unreplaceable. There will never be anybody like him.” Sealing Bogart’s memorial was Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Crossing the Bar,’ tolling Time and sea: “But such a tide as moving seems asleep,/Too full for sound and foam,/When that which drew from out the boundless deep/Turns again home.”
Next page: Into the Bermuda Triangle
