TERENCE STAMP

Terence Henry Stamp (born 22 July 1938) is an English actor who, since starting his career in 1962, has appeared in over 60 films.  He is in the current film "Unfinished Song" opposite Vanessa Redgrave.  He was asked on National Public Radio (NPR) this past weekend whether playing a person whose wife is dying of cancer makes him think about his own mortality.

Stamp said, "Oh, I mean, I think about it all the time. It's not just something that's with my increasing age (now age 74). I've always thought about it. But, to be frank, I just regard it as--death is the price of having been an individual, really.

Does he have any clear thoughts about the afterlife?

Stamp said, "I think of it as a kind of the bare awareness, as it were. It doesn't really have any sort of characteristics. But it knows thought, it knows feelings, but thought and feelings don't know it. (It's a kind of) spacious silence. . . I'm just assuming that when the breath leaves the body and the body dies, there's just more of an abstraction, you know.  I think one is--one is back in the state that one was in before one got a body."

(If there is a slight Indian ring to these words, it may be explained by Stamp's moving to India in the 1970's.  There, he spent time in Pune at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, meditating and studying the Bhagwan's teachings, and dropping out of society for several years.)