Dying Into Life

Dying Into Life

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you.  

The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.”

-Eckhart Tolle

I have been spooked by death since my first initiation into the nature of life.  While I like to pretend that I have made progress in my relationship with death, all it normally takes is the latest near-death experience to remind me how much work I have still to do.  I realize that my right to speak on death is as hindered by an attachment to life as anybody’s, but in the last few years, I have developed a great fascination with death — the process, the nature, the essence, etc.  A fascination that I can’t imagine ever having considered without the influence of Indian culture on my perception.  Yet, here in America, we have developed a very different relationship with death — one which seems to go unquestioned and unobserved, while limiting the essence of “life” and causing great suffering at the hands of attachment and aversion.  Acknowledging death, analyzing it, internalizing it, figuratively “dying” into life, is the side of the coin we have yet to turn over.  It is the essence of Tolle’s message — the hidden gem, the key to maximizing our lives.  In accepting death, only then can we realize our immortality.  Only then can we take refuge in the part of us that pervasively “is” rather than simply residing in the part of us that simply lives and dies.  Only when we bring death into our lives does the limitlessness of life begin to unfold.

It is not uncommon in India to be swept into a “funeral procession” out of the blue.  In Hindu cultures, when someone dies, they are wrapped in a white sheet, placed on a platform, and carried through the streets to the burning grounds (the public crematorium).  The parade is a mix of mourning and celebration, as, in the Hindu religion, the death of the body does not signify the death of the soul (the Atman).  The bodies are burned, publicly, as the smoke emitted signifies Brahma (the God of creation) and the release of the soul for the next generation.  Taking in a Hindu crematorium (literally and figuratively) was unbelievably strange for me, as it penetrated the essence of death in a way our culture simply does not do.  India is a place of extended family, without great hospitals.  So people often die at home, and thus, most people have been around death much more intimately than the typical American.  In our culture, it is far less common to have such an experience.  I know I haven’t had anything even remotely close at home to what I experienced in India…  The Indian culture has embraced death in a way we have not — a symbol for a whole Astral plane of consciousness that they seem to be much more in touch with than us.

The pervasive theme of Western culture is that we have bought into our “fundamental ignorance” — the mental affliction leading us to believe we are separate from the world, and that attachment and aversion are innate and should be obeyed as governing agents for our beings.  In this way, we have clung to the thinking mind — the part of our beings that preaches these laws.  And in doing so, Westerners have really limited ourselves to the physical world.  In this way, we have really succeeded in harnessing the physical world to suit our desires in a way other parts of the world have not.  We have created, through the governance of our thinking minds, a physical, scientific, conceptual playground for ourselves — and it is really quite extraordinary what we have done.  But as soon as we step out of our domain, which is strictly limited to the physical world, we lose everything.  All of our effort is wiped away and we freak.  We freak from the figurative death of things, the literal death of others, and, most significantly, the prospective death of our own bodies.  This is the ultimate breach of domain, our version of “untouchability,” as it symbolizes  the end of the only thing we know.  We have imposed limits on our ever-expansive nature by associating strictly with our physical bodies and the fear of their inevitable decay.

In this way, we really do “scare ourselves to death.”  It is our own confabulated fog of fear and stubbornness that kills us, as beyond these delusions lies identity-less immortality.  Our thinking mind, which clings so heavily to ‘life,’ pushes death away in the hope that it will disappear, even amidst the logic that death is inevitable.  This fog cloaks the ubiquity and inevitability of death — the critical role it plays in all of life.  From the millions of cells dying in our bodies each moment to the nurturing forces of decay on the Earth and other organisms, we have bought into an illusion of human exceptionalism that does not actually exist.  Free of the interruption of the thinking mind, we are part of a vast system that’s very functionality revolves around birth, decay, and death.  A profound, sobering, and liberating realization.

Discovering our soul, spirit, awareness, God, or whatever you like to call it, means freeing ourselves from the confines of death.  As long as we identify with “that which dies,” we will continue to be scared of death.  But as we extricate ourselves from a solid identification with body and personality and materiality, we can begin to have the spaciousness to allow for the possibility that death may be part of the process rather than an end.  In this way, being born into “truth” or “freedom” is really what we are referring to when we talk about death.

In awakening to new levels of consciousness and a reinstating ourselves into the natural flow of the universe, our thirst for freedom will seek out our greatest aversions as impediments to this freedom.  It’s time we learn to die in the interest of assuming our rights to life.