Is not most, if not all, religion and spirituality either an
attempt to escape death, or at least come to terms with it?
My father died when I was 14.
He died in bed in the arms of a woman who was a stranger to my mom and I, while
supposedly on vacation with some of his airport buddies in New Jersey.
I remember being in the front yard of my house when a man dressed
in black with a reversed collar,
carrying a black leather briefcase, walked past me heading towards my
house. He glanced at me for a moment and
I knew he was the messenger of death. A
few minutes later I heard my mother crying out and sobbing from inside the
house and I knew my father was dead.
Such horror I felt, like a black veil coming down around me cutting off
all air and light.
I remember every morning I repeated the same process. I woke up, happy and unburdened, for maybe a
second or two, and then I remembered that my father was dead. Suddenly the dark gloom once again descended
all around me, cutting off my Life force.
This period of severe grief lasted the longest time, and I hardly dare
remember how long. What is going to
happen now that my father and protector was dead? What will happen to all of us? These were my constant ruminations.
I remember getting the Tibetan Book of the Dead from the library,
reading it, and talking to my dead father about the Bardo states he would pass
through on his way to rebirth. But
inside, I myself was dead. I felt no
Life force, no ambition, no hope for the future, no hope for the present. My mother, who was always somewhat depressed,
became despondent for a time, before finances forced her to get a job working
as a retail clerk in a hardware store where I later worked as a stock boy.
My father’s death tore a hole in my soul. There was no peace anymore, the thought of
death, the thought of impermanence, and the constant state of feeling
unbearable loss changed my life forever.
Aristotle, in his Nicomean Ethics stated, “We ought not to listen
to those who counsel us, mortal remember your mortality. Instead, in so far as In us lies, we should
put on immortality and act in such a way as to always act in the highest, so as
to elevate our soul.” But is this not
also with religion and spirituality are, an avoidance of confronting our
inevitable death?
In most forms of Buddhism, we escape death by attaining Nirvana,
which is the state of release from all desires, all needs, all caring. We can do this either by looking into our
desires and do practices to end them, or go to the root, and end our identity
as a mortal human being, as a spirit encased in a physical body.
This is precisely also the aim of Advaita Vedanta, especially as
taught by Nisargadatta Maharaj. First
you disidentify with the body and reidentify as consciousness itself, then you
see, feel or apprehend the total extension of consciousness which contains
everything in our inner and outer worlds, and finally you disidentify with
consciousness, leaving only the knower, which cannot itself be known, and
therefore cannot be identified with.
This is exactly the same mechanism or maneuver of the Buddhists, forget
your mortality, and reidentify with that which does not change and is immortal,
and thus gain freedom from death.
Huang Po, the Sixth Patriarch, stated, “if you die, before you
die, then when you do die, you will not die.” This means if you die to your identity as a
mortal being, then when you do die a physical death, you will not fear it, you
will have beaten death to the punch.
This is how I see all of spirituality now really, an inability to
accept one’s own mortality, and the driving need to disidentify with the body,
and with mortal spirit, substituting universal consciousness, the absolute, or heaven
as escapes.
But there is a different way to deal with death, and that is by
embracing it, knowing at every moment, the next moment may not come.
What happens when you first think this way? Well to me it means becoming incredibly
vulnerable, realizing I have very little power in this world or even over my
own body. What happens then? Well, instead of seeking the absolute, or
seeking universal consciousness and identification with it, and realizing how
essentially helpless I am being carried along by the forces of life, and the
ebb and flow of the Life force within me, just accept it. Just accept your own inevitable death.
With this stance of just being in the present and now, feeling my
body totally, every quivering muscle, every passing breeze felt on my cheeks
and my hair, every moment of arising bliss or the descent of deep grief is
gratefully received as a gift in the moment.
Merely to be held in the arms of someone you love, and to wake up in the
morning next to her or him, is a gift.
Watching my cats play or argue with each other, and to be awarded
the gift of being able to feed them twice a day, play with them, have them
sleep next to me or on top of me, brings momentary joy, even though minutes
later I will worry about the health of each of them if they throw up too much, cough,
or appear to be walking with a limp.
Every moment is up-and-down, and I can either take the position of being
the witness, or of being the affected total owner of this body mind, which
itself is not under the owner’s control.
It is sort of like being captain of small ship with no control over the
rudder, because that control lies entirely elsewhere.
Every moment is a small miracle being completely immersed in the
mortal life. Emotions become more
real. Hearing becomes more acute. Body sensations, hunger, sexual pangs, one’s
own bowel sensations center one’s attention.
Then there is the recognition of other persons, the one you love, the
one you hate, the one you desire, the one you resent, the one you fear. All become very real to you, although the
stories you tell yourself about them, the endless stream of consciousness thoughts,
become muted and no longer the center of attention.
Sensual experiences, emotions, love and the need for love, totally
dominate thought, and you sink into your heart, getting away from the brain
which has sought escape mortality in the fear of death. Now that you have embraced it, your center of
consciousness drops from the brain into your heart, and you realize everyone
around you is in the same boat, and your choice is either to help them, or to
help yourself, or both. And you have to
find your own way through this decision.
At the center of the recognition of your own mortality what you
find? The desire to make others happy,
or the desire to make yourself happy, or the desire to escape altogether? What do you find when you look and feel inside?
Do not get me wrong. In
pursuing spirituality and knowing yourself, you find whole new worlds which
most people never know. You get to know
the great Void; you get to know the all pervading light of consciousness, with
all its shades and colors; you get to know endless bliss and flowing energies;
you get to know yourself as the totality of consciousness with no separation
between your sense of self, your body, or the world around you; you get to know
your sense of presence, as an energy body that pervades your body and extends
beyond it; you get to know the great Causal Body, the body of the void and of
forgetfulness of body and world. Most
importantly, you get know yourself as love through the act of loving others. Eventually
you get to know yourself as the absolute, where the absolute cannot be known
because you are it and it is the end of the line of experience. The buck stops there. That is you seek the absolute then you get
closer and closer to it, until you become it, and when you become it, you turn
around so to speak, and become the knower knowing your body and the world, but
you have realized you are altogether outside of consciousness.
Yet when you take the position of a human being is through
identification with the body mind, as an incarnation of spirit, of the divine,
but in that incarnation, you forget your divinity, and become an ordinary
mortal once again. You have traveled
360°, you have known emptiness, you have known the fullness of energies and
bliss; you have known yourself as love; you have known the totality of
consciousness, you have known the absolute, and now you know all of that and
can set them all aside, and once again become a mortal having coffee in the
morning, feeding the cats, and holding your partner close by while you listen
to chanting or watch television, and together share a deep silence, a deep abiding
in each other’s presence.
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