Only in retrospect did I realize when I died.
It was during a VR experience. My demise, perhaps my murder, was neither painful nor personal. It was abstracted and colossal, on a planetary, or perhaps a cosmic scale. Yet this death was not an end, but rather a beginning.
I died during Second Chance, the first immersive experience of Bay Area art collective LavaSaga. The experience ran as part of San Francisco’s Reimagine, a week of art and theatrical creations dedicated to death. Second Chance strove to provide participants with a new lease on life predicated on an awareness of mortality. The experience was not theatrical; rather, it was a mélange of meditation, group therapy, and multimedia art installations. The focus throughout was on human connection and self-reflection rather than narrative.
Before I died, and before Second Chance began officially, I had time to spend in a twilit waiting room. One corner was draped with heavy, white, cabled yarn, through which were hung tags with writing on them. “Tell me you love me” and “Let me know you forgive me,” implored the little cards, speaking the heartfelt longings of people I did not know.
While I waited, I was invited to take off my shoes and quiet my mind in an area filled with cushions and ottomans. I sat down and closed my eyes and felt the ceaseless waves of my breath.
When the experience started in earnest, my group of seven was invited in hushed tones to drink tea from cups that were glazed with the ashes of deceased people—already a symbolically laden gesture. The woman pouring the tea explained the various herbal ingredients and elaborated their semi-mystical powers; I disbelieved in these powers, which unfortunately made the beverage seem less special than it otherwise would have been.
We were then guided onto individual mattresses on the concrete floor. We lay down, and a guide led us through a quick mindfulness meditation practice, the first of several. This exercise was truncated by an instruction to watch a VR video. I put the VR headset and headphones on, and I was taken on a floating tour of both natural and abstract black-and-white wireframe spaces. The video terminated in what I can only liken to a thermonuclear explosion on the Death Star, which vaporized me and everything around me. I was dead.
After my death and subsequent return from VR, I arose with my group and proceeded to heaven: we silently walked into an adjoining room, which had been decorated by another artist participating in Reimagine. Sheets of white silk hung banner-like from the ceiling. Dotting the room were electric candles and white lights garlanded with cotton balls. In the middle of this conventional heaven were two unconventional yet benign angels, one male and one female, dressed in torn strips of linen that were no longer pristine white.
The male angel invited the participants to feel the silk, so I gently stroked a sheet. As I wandered about the room, I walked through the fabric and let it slip over my face.
The male angel began an interpretive dance. While he fell and rose and swerved, he monologued about the pleasures of sensory experience, the wonders of attentiveness, the self-elevation of gratitude. The female angel for her part curiously echoed the last word of every sentence he spoke.
My group strolled through heaven, caressed the silk, traced figure eights on our own palms, and half-listened to the angels. There came a point when I had had my fill of tactile attentiveness, and so I stood still and awaited further instructions.
However, there were maybe fifteen more minutes to idle in heaven. I grew restless, and I sensed from the weary body language of my fellow participants that they felt the same. I had done everything there was to do. For want of another idea, I continued to touch the silk. In a way, this hinted at a problem of an afterlife in heaven: after you’ve reunited with all your relatives and had every conceivable conversation and sung every praise and read every book, how will you occupy yourself for the next trillion years?
Eventually we were escorted into an intriguing blend of an apothecary and old drawing room. We were divided into two breakout groups. I sat with two other participants on a lush couch, opposite a young woman who acted as our group therapist. She invited us to take several deep breaths together. Then she asked us about what we regretted in life, and what we were proud of, and what we would do differently.
I tried to respond with truth and vulnerability. I offered answers—about my family, my relationship, my thoughts about myself—that I wouldn’t admit to most friends. When I shared a cherished memory of my girlfriend, I shed a tear. And I was relieved to find, sitting to my left, a woman about my age who also answered from the quiet recesses of her heart. I nodded as I listened to her, and I was glad not to be alone in the far reaches of self-disclosure.
Contemplativeness and calm spread as we reflected. But while our moderator was in the midst of posing another question, a performer in the middle of the room jarred us out of our session by abruptly proclaiming he would squeeze a drop of liquid onto each of our tongues, signifying our second chances. Whereas the silk room stretched too long, the therapy room felt cut short.
After a final relocation, a series of small-group and private exercises culminated our self-reflection.
I found myself appreciative of the opportunity to introspect. While the power of my own second chance did not overwhelm me, I left the experience having recognized a habit or two that I remain committed to living differently. In that respect, LavaSaga provided a valuable service.
All the same, it did occur to me that there’s a conceptual incongruity in founding the loveliness of a second chance on the supernatural and eternal. If the goal of Second Chance was to elicit a lucid awareness of the preciousness of this life, why set that against the incalculable weight of an afterlife? Put another way, why should I care how I spend the next sixty years if they’re not even a grain of sand on the seashore of infinity? It would seem instead that my next sixty years glimmer with sapphire preciousness if they’re all that I have left.
When Second Chance had run its course and I was about to leave, I saw the woman from my breakout group. I put my hand on her shoulder and thanked her for sharing memories and reflections from a deep, private place. She smiled with her eyes. She thanked me in turn for sharing from a deep, private place. We embraced. Then we went our separate ways. As it had promised, Second Chance forged a human connection born of self-reflection.
To learn more about LavaSaga, visit their website or Facebook. Or check out our interview with the creative team here.
