Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know of avoiding the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
What would it be like to fall asleep and never wake up? Now, this poses the next question: What is it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born. And when you’re ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. And if you’re not, you’ll stay pretending that you’re just a poor little me. Not all seek meaning but those who do will find it. And it will disturb you because you never imagined it was actually seeking you. Fierce grace feels like fear oftentimes so let it pass. The experience you’re having which you call ordinary everyday life — pretending you’re not it — that experience is exactly the same as it. There’s no difference at all.
Who are you? Who is the one who can die and live to speak about it? Who died and is now living within you? There could be absolutely no fear whatsoever of death if there wasn’t already within you that willingness to feel the fear even a second longer. And what possible good could fear have? Well, none that you have intellectually thought to see. For you don’t think and then see. You simply see and awareness makes it so. Thinking makes everything merely conceptual. As a child you also did see but without what your mind terms thinking. You were then fully conscious. There were no airy abstractions, labels, theories or words to obstruct that one immortal sense that your reasoning relinquished and yet will recognise upon being like a child. What is the obstruction? You will know and when you do you will be willing. Surround yourself with no conclusions.
Sailing Click HEAR God refuses to be known by the intellect but is even now known by the heart. Who is the one who can die and live to speak about it? One who is never born and who can never die. The cause of death is birth. The cause of birth is life. The mother knows her baby is within her alive. The father knows the baby is alive without. The baby is alive and growing while both her mother and father are asleep. Who sustains the mother, father and the baby voluntarily while all three are involuntarily asleep? The One who keeps each heart beating and each lungs breathing? Who provides the oxygen? The electricity required for the neurological impulses to fire? It is a foolish thing for a fish to complain of thirst as it swims here and there in the ocean, isn’t it? The baby is unaware of when it is born but the mother certainly isn’t. And so it is with waking up from being insidiously lulled asleep sometime after childhood. It’s like climbing a staircase and after humbly accepting that the climbing is also part of the necessary descending, before we know it we’re aware that, all along, the way down is up and the way up is down. Falling upwards. Heaven was never a matter of distance. And here and now, we see dimly as though peering through a darkened glass. Yet before we know it, we’ll know as the baby is known before one leaves the womb.
He suffers most who suffers before it is necessary. Rehearsing tragedy is not tragic; the thought that one cannot stop however most certainly is.
