“Never the spirit was born; the spirit will cease to be never. Never was a time when it was not; end and beginning are dreams.

Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever. Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems.” Bhagavad Gita

Death

When I was a child, I often missed school because someone in our family had died. There was the long bus ride with my mum to her hometown.  It was always cold. I remember we had to change buses twice. When we got to the church, there were people dressed in black clothes, a somber, chilling and depressing atmosphere, and the stench of chrysanthemums.  I will never forget it. It was horrible.

Growing up, I thought about death a lot. What it was, and why it was…. and I pondered long on an Irish saying I had heard. “Shed a tear at a birth and sing a song at a death.” Or the Cherokee saying: “When you were born, you cried, and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”

The bundle of remembrance

Death is a taboo subject. Something we don’t want to talk about or explore. Something we’d rather forget until it comes knocking on a door that is close to us. And suddenly we are confronted by our own mortality. Humanity is a collector and spends a lifetime accumulating; money, property, power, experience, knowledge, titles, hopes and dreams etc.  And with a stroke, death wipes it all away. It is a personal apocalypse for the ego. The path of no return.

The stories we tell ourselves

Because man could not face his ending, his obliteration, he created gods and goddesses, saints, resurrections, heaven and hell and re-incarnation. Made up stories called religions to manage the terror of extinction, and in the face of death his utterly meaningless life.

Man made

Religion is the result of theory thinking. It is built by thought and thought worships itself through the symbols and rituals it created.  The word religion comes from the Latin verb religare which means to bind, to shackle, to tie.

Religion – A man-made doctrine that eclipses our personal spiritual evolution and distorts the very meaning of compassion.

And, as we look at the tragedy called life, the slaughterhouse, we ask ourselves is there anything beyond death? Is there anything that is sacred beyond space and time? Something real!  Something not created out of man’s fear, sorrow and spiritual loneliness, and his need to control.

Death – a different perspective

“The acceptance of the eternal nature of the soul/spirit is fundamental in the change of consciousness now taking place.  We are called on to re-think death and abandon the dread, gloom and fear associated with the word. We have no word in our language to express the wondrous process of release into light. The re-emergence of the spiritual world in our awareness leads to an inner certainty of the imperishable nature of the spirit.” Sir George Trevelyan.

Separation

In today’s world, human life is not looked at as a whole experience, a holistic event. Instead, life is broken up into fragments, compartments, divisions. We enter life as a child, we become adolescents, in our prime, middle aged, old aged and exit.

The continuum of life is a complete experience like night and day, sleeping and wakefulness. And from a death perspective when there is an ending, there is also the beginning of something else.

Do you see this?

Metaphysically, death is followed by life. But life of what?

The ego I am

Our personal consciousness is made up of its contents. The content of our consciousness is our life, our conditioning, our religion, our politics, disappointments and triumphs, likes and dislikes, sorrow and loneliness, etc. This bundle of remembrance is the accumulated ‘me’, the ego, the personality. And to the ‘me’ death becomes a terrible thing, the annihilation of all accumulated everything, a meaningless ending to its life.

Collective consciousness

No matter what colour, race or creed we are, mankind shares the same consciousness, the same set of programmes. Psychologically we are driven, anxious, confused, imitating, complying and conforming, fearful and uncertain.  Even when our body dies the consciousness stream of mankind goes on in the living physical world. It is as if this stream is mechanized to work in a certain way.

Stepping out

It is only when we can step out of self, free ourselves from the accumulated baggage of the past, and the hopes and dreams of the future that we liberate ourselves from the significance of death. Our mind is no longer cluttered. It is free to merge with spiritual reality and the One Life which is at the heart of All.

The heart of it all

The core of our being, and its connection to Source Creator has nothing to do with thought and its sandcastles. In fact, to feel this essence, thought must be still, the mind quiet. When we become the essence there is serenity. The presence is the true I and is eternal, the temporary body will go back to the earth. That is inevitable so it is now that we must live, love and Be. Experience every moment as it comes in the Now, the only moment we are truly alive.

“Death must be a very strange fact. As life is, with its abundance, with its richness, with its varieties, fullness, so must death be. Death, surely, must bring with it a newness, a freshness, an innocence. But to comprehend that vast issue, the mind must obviously be free from fear.”

“When we die, the mind is no longer accumulating. It is not dead. It is not static. It is no longer experiencing, it no longer cluttered by thought. It is so alive there is nothing to collect.”

To die implies having no continuity of thought | J. Krishnamurti (jkrishnamurti.org)

Is there something more beyond this body? Still the mind. Stop thinking and you will find out.

Until next time. Stay in love with your life.

 “Ah! Fill the Cup. What boots it to repeat – How Time is slipping underneath our feet.                       Unborn Tomorrow and dead Yesterday.                                                                                                 Why fret about them if Today be sweet? Fitzgerald.