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Well, my friends, good morning. I think instead of
beginning by talking about dying, we need to come to the essential question:
which is, before we need to concern ourselves with how to die,
I think the
essential knowing here is how to live. Because, if living has the quality,
depth and focus and magnificent joy, fun, and wonder in it, then when that inevitable moment that you have translated in human awareness as such a
terrifying moment, when it finally arrives, it will be very simple. It will
have about it
a spontaneous quality of Oh, boy! Let’s go! Oh, this is
exciting! What’s next?
When you begin to realize that ego mass
is mind first...Mind,
then in the form of thought, comes into the body. Body then has
a physical
response, because that is the only kind of response bodies have, physical
ones. Then with this combination of mind and body what is produced is that
which you call emotion and the emotion then translates into some kind of
action or inaction.
Do you understand the flow?
Because when you really understand the flow, you
know
how to return home. What you really want in order to begin
to live life in a dynamic, creative way is to spend as many moments
as you can with good humor, observing and being aware of the
ever changing faces of ego. As you become aware of its moving,
its in-and-out, its flood tide - here comes the tide and then out
it goes - you will begin to be aware of something
very interesting, which is that this seemingly solid self is full
of holes. You are full of holes. You are full of gaps. You are
full of openings. One of the most observable gaps is your
breath.
You are very aware, I hope, that you do
not breathe like this [makes labored breath sounds]. You breathe in, there’s a
pause, you breathe out. Breath likes to rest as well in self, deep Self. Breath is no different from the arising of thought,
the arising of emotion, the arising of experience in the body.
All of these things have
pauses - pauses that allow
them to relax back into the vast substance of the deep Self.
Let us say that you have a magnificent lake and arising by the
power of the lake itself. The momentum of the deep Self which
moves the currents of this lake, there arises out of the lake
seemingly separated waves and they move in certain patterns and
then they fall back. This is constantly happening. It is not something that happens when you’re
born and then you are an ever increasing wave, getting vaster and vaster until you are as large as the Himalaya and then you crash
when you die.
You see, this is the kind of imagery that becomes so
frightening. Do you understand? Here you are building, building, more and more, bigger and faster and all of a sudden, ego is so
immense and then, the fear of all this structure crashing in one
moment when it decides to fall back into what you call death. This is frightening! But it is not the reality!
You see something very clearly in the night when you
go to sleep. We have told you before that the best way to drive
anyone mad is not to allow them sleep. This is because (it has
nothing to do with the physical body)...it has to do with this
marvelous respite from the constancy of ongoing, unreal, temporary ego thought, feeling,
action. Everything
gets tired.
Then comes the night and
it goes
through different stages. There arises out of sleep a wave that you call
dream and you dream the sleep dream. The wave, then, is the sleep wave. All is
well. You have no concern when those dreams die and you fall into deep sleep
and awaken the next morning. Rarely do you spend days and days crying and
crying because a dream ended and you awoke.
But when I say to you that the dream of living in this world and being this
separated being who you are pretending so very furiously to be is just like
that, it’s just like waking from your dream...and when you awaken, it will
be just as easy as that. Do you understand? There’s this
identification that somehow you are the wave. If it ends and falls back Oh! My
dear! Terrible, terrible!
There is this tremendous relaxation into
what? You
awaken. Can you say what happens to you in all of that?
Yet, by definition, absolutely, all over the world, never has anyone ever
identified a pleasant night’s sleep with anything other than the fact that
this ongoing motion of ego has been suspended, so that there is no thing, no mind,
no emotion, no action, nothing. Finished.
Yet, when you arise in the morning, you
do not say, “Oh,
I died last night and I have recreated myself yet again
this morning.” You have a knowing, even though you cannot really remember,
you have no trace remembrances, you know that in the deepest part of the
night, for many, many stretches of the night, there was a state of non-being.
You feel better for having fallen back into this state of non-being. This is
death. That is the best visual, verbal idea-oriented way that we can discuss
it.
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fawn@journeyhome.com