Death is lifes only certainty. It is absolutely certain that you will die, plants die, animals die and people die. Every single living thing in the very ecological environment of life will die. Death is so certain because it remains an unpolluted, uncorrupted reality in life today. Everything else has been corrupted by the modern mechanical twists and turns of mans mind. A mind that separates man from his inner nature and severs the connection to outer nature. All uncertainty begins with separation from original nature. Separation from the life, death, life processes of existence itself. Separation from natural senses. How can we be certain that what we see is, as it is, when we have been trained not to look? How can we be certain that what we are hearing is true when we listen through filters filled with beliefs of right, wrong, good, bad, should and should not? How can we be certain that what we are feeling is real when we harbor so many old wounds in the heart? Our polluted senses prevent us from being certain. Death however is certain. There is no question, confusion or argument about it! The minute you are born, it is known; you will die.
How do our natural senses become polluted? It is because we refuse to acknowledge, accept and allow, life, death, life process. We see, hear , touch and smell only that which is permissible within the bounds of social airs and graces. It’s like there is an unwritten secretly coded operational charter of human behavior that says “don’t look deep, enquire or come too close to me and I will do the same for you.” Why is it offensive to maintain eye contact beyond a certain point? Why don’t we take time to listen, really listen to one another? Is it because we are afraid of our very own energy, our very own life force? Is it that deep down we know that energy has its own way of working, regardless of how hard our mind tries to control it? Is it because we are afraid of what is inside of us and don’t want others to see? What will happen if you really look at your neighbors wife and your heart is stirred by her beauty? If you stop to look, listen and feel you are in trouble. Better to keep moving. You may be bored, sick and tired with your old wife, habits and duties of your life, but you have much invested in it. Thousands of dollars, a whole lifes effort and work. You cannot conceive that you might have missed love, freedom and living itself. This neighbors wife reminds you, stirs you, she is dangerous, and so is anything else that threatens your safe, fabricated and false haven of ego. The life that stirs in that look, also stirs death. They are bed fellows, they wake together, one moves, the other moves, they co-exist; in fact life and death are one. To acknowledge that look, the truth of your senses, you know that much will have to die. You know deep down that the price of such awakening will be very costly. If you trust life, love, change and truth, you will have to let go of all that is false and deceitful and hypocritical in you. Your wife, your children, your friends, your religion, perhaps the whole society will be against you if you choose life. So when life comes knocking at your door selling freedom, love and truth, you send it packing, it costs too much! You say “not today” and you choose death. You suppress your life force, back into the basement of your being clinging to security, comfort and the known. Your dreams at night will fly into the unknown and you will wake in the morning sad, separated and lonely. You are separated from your nature, lifes nature; clinging to false securities of “the known” that feed the emptiness of your soul.
The whole mind of man/woman has been educated to be against death. Death is perceived as the enemy. It is interpreted as the end of life. It takes away all and gives nothing. This collective training about death has polluted the very roots into the earth of humanity. The roots of man are filled with fear. Fear of death. This is the primary cancer of all illness in the life of man. With roots corrupted by fear based beliefs of death, how is it possible to relax, let go and celebrate life? People who can’t sleep at night are haunted by it, people afraid to love or experience orgasm are scared of it. In these acts you die....for a few seconds...a few hours... but death is there. The fear of dying is also the fear of living.
Western thinking is in the grip of an inner terrorism far worse than any effort of Saddam Husein. Collective mental patterning of Western mind arrests life force and holds to ransom the multi-dimensional potential of human consciousness. The attachment to mind, imprisons the soul. It’s insistence to believe that there is only one life generates the chaos in the cosmos of present day living. Chaos caused by incessant rushing and fussing against time. How to fit all this living into these 70-80 years of life? When one third of it is spent sleeping, another 3rd working and the other 3rd divided into eating, relaxing and enjoying, it is any wonder many of us constantly feel we are missing life. That our life is one big race against time that we seem destined to lose. We desperately try to control it and cling to it. In doing so we are missing it! The very fear of death and missing it, ensures that is exactly what happens. Unable to relax, unable to accept death we remain half alive, a part, incomplete. The irony is we die in our non acceptance of death. We live a lopsided, unbalanced life, never knowing what it feels like to be whole or complete. Death haunts us. It leers over our shoulder; even if we do manage to pull together a loving partner, happy family and comfortable home surrounded by the perfect white picket fence. In fact it would seem that attaining to such feelings of completeness or wholeness only serve to magnify and intensify the fear of losing it all in an instant.
Each death reminds you of your own death. Death is a door, it reveals truth. Death makes you seek and search for something that is deathless. It demands you find something in yourself, that cannot die. That something is your soul, your nature. Thank God there is something in life still that ignites the search for the unknown. The world had a taste of entering into the wide doorway provided by death when September 11 happened. What happened to peoples personalities, identities, egos, when that door opened? Who was inferior, superior, right, wrong, good or bad? Who was higher, lower, richer, poorer? What happened to the world? What happened was that we had a taste of deaths doorway and how all so called differences, between men and women, nations and religions can dissolve in one instant of total death. The individuality and uniqueness of our circumferences , that we all pride ourselves on developing, disappeared. We were thrown to the very center of sameness in the cosmic heart of all. The center of sameness that is the same in all of us regardless of our cultivated periphery; the center of the heart. Imagine to be there and experience death and destruction like September 11. Do you think your boss would be any different to you or you to him? Do you think the millionaire and the beggar would even recognize each other? I don’t think so. I don’t think the differences that we allow to control our lives would have been there at all. Sameness, oneness, connectedness would have been there. Pulling together to survive, support and strengthen would have been there. Co-operation and not competition would have been there. This is the door that death opens. It opens to life. It reveals great truth.
The East knows about the door of death. It has known for thousands of years about the wheel of life, death, life and reincarnation. It says death is an eternal incarnation. The East accepts death as part of life and has experimented with the science of meditation which is the key to unlock the door of life and death. Meditation is the art of dying consciously. Meditation teaches you how to die to all that is false in you. How to discover that which is deathless and eternal within you. It teaches you how to die before you die. It says let all attachment , all that is false die in you before you leave this planet. It says don’t wait; why wait, death is needed so that you may live!
It teaches total acceptance of what is, as it is. Meditation is the death of the mind. It says you are not your mind you are a pure awareness. It facilitates the death of the mind that separates man from his nature. It is dying to the past and being reborn in the present moment. It is the art of living and unpolluted, uncorrupted life, free from hypocrisy and politics. Meditation is freedom from attachment, freedom from thoughts and feelings. It is the science of the inner. The science of transforming human energy into consciousness. It opens to life. It reveals truth via awareness development. It is the art of dying.
To answer the questions raised by this world café conversation:
IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH?
Yes there is always life after death. It is the very nature of every present moment. Every time you are jealous or possessive you are challenged by death to die to it. Every time you are locked into pride, in spite of yourself, you must die if love is to live. Every time you choose bitterness and unforgiveness, death knocks on your door inviting you to let go. Every time you are challenged to let go of an attachment or identity you die to your past. Refusing to let go and denying death shrivels your life force, dries up the existential juice that flows in your veins. Many make motions and gestures as if they are alive but their total lack of luminosity suggests otherwise. For those of you interested in whether or not there is life after death; forget all about it! Ask yourself is there LIFE BEFORE DEATH? This is the real question to ask. Am I really living, being authentic, according to my truth in the here and now? The greatest sadness a person can experience upon their death bed is not contemplating the fear of death, it is reflecting upon the fact that they have not lived yet and death is here. The realization that they have failed to really live life to the full weighs heavy on the heart when death knocks on the door.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO DISCUSS DEATH?
It is important not only to discuss death. As well as discussion we need to live it, breathe it, practice it in everything we do. It is like breathing. Every time we breathe out, we let go, we enter a gap. There is a gap between the in breath and the out breath. This is death. There is also a gap between each thought. One thought follows another continuously. When one thought ends, there is a gap, before another starts. This gap is death. The possibility of disappearing for a moment is there. Disappearing into the void. For a few seconds time and mind can stop. The known disappears and the unknown is there, in the gap. Discussing death will not lead to your transformation. Entering into, participating and experiencing is the way to know it. How can you discuss love? How can you explain to someone what love is unless you have participated and lived deeply in it? It is the same with death. Few things in life remain existential. Discussion is not the way of inner exploration or transformation. Death needs an existential approach, an inner direction. There is so much information available to promote outer health. Diets abound, facts on nutrition, research, instructions about exercise and health everywhere. The art of dying and letting go needs to be right up there with all of that! It should be taught in every school as part of the education system. It has much to offer. It involves communication, interpersonal skills, relationship, how to self manage mind and emotion. I can’t think of anything more valuable than this and I am amazed that humanity has come thus far without it!
IS DEATH SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF? DOES DEATH NEED TO
BE A COMMUNITY ISSUE?
Death is “nothing” to be scared of; however most of us are petrified by the great “nothing”, or “emptiness” at the very center of all beings. It surfaces every time we are alone in the very private depths of our inner sanctuary. Death is a part of every community. It exists regardless of whether community decides to make an issue of it. Do you think death is concerned about communities approval or not? It is not! It simply is. Collective past patterning of community goes on trying to avoid and deny death. The real question should be “why is community scared of death?” “Why do people go on denying death?” “Why does it need to be made an issue?” It is an existential fact! Death is not something objective. It is not something outside of yourself. It is subjective, a part of you, it is inside. Any questions about death need to be subjective. Death is not the issue.....community is....in fact community is not the issue......individuals are community.....you are community.......it is your question about yourself......but we go on pretending that it is community.....collective....it is not. These are the ways we go on avoiding death.
Individuals need to gather courage to enquire into the positives of educating people about death. The most valuable outcome of such education would be an expanded conscious awareness; a new depth and sensitivity towards living itself. Life death life process is pure science. Just as there is an outer science taught at schools, there can be an inner science also taught at schools. Death is about the inner and outer environment, it is an ecological issue upon which life and survival is dependent. A certain climate is needed for this ecology, it is subject to environmental influences.
It is part of a psychic and metaphysical human blueprint that exists in all. Some call it soul.
SUICIDE, DEATH AND DEPRESSION
It is my understanding that a huge percentage of people suffering from depression, mental illness and suicide are simply unaware of the inner ecology of natural death process. They are living in a misunderstanding of death. Our collective paternal and past patterning has created a left brain, logical, rational and intellectually minded civilization. This mind of modern day dominates the multi-dimensional aspects of human metaphysical and spiritual nature. So much so that most of
us believe that we are the mind. That the mind is all there is. We have forgotten the language of the heart. Our intuition, innersense and instinct remain dormant, suppressed by the ruthless rule of intellect alone. Living in the mind has become hell on earth. Of course people are depressed, of course they long for death. They are conditioned to interpret “desire for death” as “desire for physical death”, death of the body. What they don’t understand is that the desire to die is a natural impulse of their very own metaphysical mechanisms. That in fact, their natural existential psychic blueprint is sending a clear message to their consciousness. “Let go, die to this rubbish in the mind, that kills your life force.” They don’t understand the art of meditation which is the art of allowing the mind to die. Mind has its own evolution, its own ripening phase. Once it is ripe it begins to die. Just like the ripe fruit of a tree. This is life, death life process and this is the ecology I am talking about. The desire for death in this first instance of ripening is natural. The problem is without knowing the inner science, there is no obvious way out. Death of the physical seems to be the only way. There is another way, however there seem to be so few interested. Maybe it is because once deaths doorway is acknowledged, all hypocrisy, lies, false dogmas, beliefs and politics will be exposed for what they truly are. Who is prepared to let go? Who is prepared to pay the cost of dying? It is very costly. It will cost you everything that is inauthentic, rotten and ill in yourself. It will cost you all your beliefs and ideas of right, wrong; all your attachments and false identities. Who is prepared to pay the price for living a life of truth, love, beauty and freedom? Are you? Deaths door is always open. What stops you from entering in?
By Sadhana Kay Needham (Inner Fitness Services Sunshine Coast.) PH: 54791143
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