Death. The core idea that fuels a perennial sense of condemnation. Whether we do good, or whether we do bad, anyway we die. Whether we succeed or whether we fail, anyway we die. Whether we are world famous, or whether we a random point amid 7 billion flickering faces, anyway we die. It’s inevitable. It’s a certainty. It’s entirely unavoidable. Yet anyway we invest vast amounts of energy in the attempt to avoid, or deny it. Why?
Please don’t be afraid.
Death is a word loaded with terror and pain. The association of helplessness and loss can be so extreme that we build battalions of belief and superstition to circumvent that naked, formless ‘threat’. These include beliefs about transformation, heaven, one-ness, consciousness and more. A belief is a belief.
Death is Now
“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” Steve Jobs
Experientially, living insight into death is available now, as there is no other time. Our future death is now. Our past deaths are now. In the moment, we are already, also ‘dead’.
It could sound shocking, but that is only because we forgot who we are. The subtle quest for concepts, notions, and transcendental stories can support us in meeting the inevitable, but will not replace the inevitable. The inevitable reveals that all that could die within us, and all that can never die, is present at the source of you, in this instant.
Just as every possible configuration of time depends on the timeless, so does the very concept of death depend on the deathless.
All that comes into being comes to pass, this is the nature of form. Yet that which never becomes, or passes, proliferates and is inseparable from every moment of consciousness and each second of experience – of any nature.
The fear of death is more generated by a survival anxiety around aspects of form or hidden personality that we don’t want to experience. In an attempt to block our worst nightmare, we unconsciously create a casing of resistance. Both the resistance and the nightmare will come to pass, but we will not.
The source of all we are – and of the timeless dimension of consciousness that witnesses our bodies as children transforming into adulthood and old age – doesn’t itself age and doesn’t pass with (human) time.
Nothing Happens
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Mark Twain
Death doesn’t ‘happen’. Death is a cessation of ‘happening’.
Through out your physical life, you can witness every happening in the inner and outer worlds of experience. Stuff moves, comes, goes and changes. The happening itself depends on your witnessing it. Yet you are not the happening.
Through all stages of physical or psychological transformation, there is happening. Yet between the milliard spaces in every action and re-action, we are still here, as a persistent presence. This deeper source of ourselves can be revealed when we agree to refrain from grasping or pushing away, and just let the happening happen. In death, the clarity revealed through the cessation of ‘doing’ brings a freedom to be even more your self – not the self with qualities, agendas, likes and dislikes -but the deeper self behind and before that.
Physical movement and activity, psychological holding and rejection stops happening. Where there was noise, there is silence. Where there was light, there is darkness.
That which was the great receiver of physical sensation, in a manner revolves inwards. The organs of sense perception close down and what remains is that which has always been behind them – the infinite receiver of the information of sense perception. Yet sensing doesn’t entirely stop, as experience was never totally dependent on its physical machinery. We also have inner senses and inner feeling, inwards, towards the universal source. This sensory field revolves into the dominant sensory field, as the physical senses of the body close down.
We implode, deeply into the source of who we (all) are.
Death is Here
“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” Leonardo da Vinci
In a similar manner, location becomes liberated of habitual mental and physical frames. We don’t go anyway (we were always ‘here’). We simply expand more deeply into the ‘here’. Here becomes boundless, beyond any concept of threat.
There is no ‘other’. In death, there is the collapse of the gross sense of ‘otherness’.
Although we’re programmed to believe that death is a transition to another space, a better place, another dimension or another universe. Even if we believe that death is the end (non-existence is as the ultimate concept of ‘other’), in death we truly don’t go anywhere.
You can check it now. Are we ever somewhere other than where we are? When we travel the body, or when we change experience in our mind or heart, are we not always, undeniable still ‘here’?
Death is not elsewhere. Perception changes, and the windows of perception transmute, but we actually expand into the core of here. We’re not going anywhere ‘else’.
The Miracle
In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not. And the life is never so alive as after death.” Nisargadatta Maharaj
For a short space of physical time, we inherit a body and mind which grows through its own cycles and completes them. This body-mind is a great Window of perception into this dimension. Every moment of consciousness, each wave of awareness, every understanding beyond duality, each felt experience of the energies of feeling and emotion, is a marvel of manifestation. Each second is a tiny sampling of the physical miracle within the endless of ocean of stillness and peace.
For better or worse, physical life is precious, but it’s not private. It always was and will always be an inextricable part of the its own source, inseparable from it’s own negation, perpetually participating through the whole.
The death-less way is also the way which allows the transformation of death to take place within the vast, unfettered expanse of a much deeper source of who we are, beyond even intimacy, at the depth of the living.
It truly is OK.
