In the beginning of my walk I read a book about the path and words about embracing your death. I do not remember too much about it, but I remember I used to practice dying by imagining my body was burning and that I was losing all connections with life. But through the years I have realized it is not about imagining your death. Another part opened within me and I realized I needed to see myself so that I could consciously die in everything, consciously. Now, I was realizing that throughout all these years, even though I was consciously opening and dying in everything, in reality what has touched me was death itself.
At the time I was not aware of what was touching me because I was immersed in the experience of grace, which I now call death. But it is not about experience and when I let go of the experience I slowly continued to unfold in a much broader level and was dying more consciously, many times. This morning I realized what the difference was . . . I was aware that when I actually met death consciously, not immersed with its experience, that which we call God is actually death. There is absolutely no difference. It is just that what happens to many of us is that the experience is so overwhelming that we forget what the past moment was. The experience itself overtakes us. So this morning, in my increased level of soberness, I saw meeting with this death in a beautiful way.
Yesterday in the connections I was saying that everything is a belief and everything that we have heard from other’s experience becomes a belief. What is true to us as a human being is our birth and death. These two things, birth and death are not your belief; you are here and you are going to die. So from birth, because we are already in this consciousness, the form arises, and fear also arises. That fear will not let you meet your death. It is extremely simple. It is not a borrowed belief that you are here and that you are going to die. The person is always postponing death. We hear through spirituality that we must embrace death and so we try or pretend to meet our death.
We cannot pretend anything. I always say that it is important to see what it is that you do not want to see and to go where you do not want to go. What is ego? On the one hand it seems like it is your ego, but it is complete fear and the bigger the person, the bigger the fear. The person can pretend to not have any fear but that does not work. That will not let you meet your death. Physical death is not death. You must meet your death. You must open to whatever you are closed to. It is so simple, but we human beings get overwhelmed by what we have not yet experienced. Because I have experienced this death many times, it is sobering me.
In the beginning, every person who is awakening is loaded with immaturity and the only way to earn maturity is by letting go of your past experiences right away. The moment you want to hold onto an experience is the moment you are going to circle because the person wants to repeat the experience or have it stay a little longer. This is what I call immaturity. But, the moment that we let go of the experience we feel lost again because our memory is not helping us. This is why many people stay with one experience and believe they are okay. In order to earn maturity you need to let go of these experiences. When you are emptied from an experience, even on a personal level, it is hard to swallow that emptiness. When we are okay to let go, right in that moment, we are open. That is how we earn maturity. This enables us to earn the dying in the same moment we are living.
There is a big misunderstanding about how to be after a beautiful awakening experience. The person is trapped by constantly thinking about the experience and then feels lost as they struggle to relive the experience instead of living in the present moment. We easily forget to face ourselves. We want to live in a blissful state and therefore are constantly fighting with that preference. We easily get addicted to the good experiences but there is still so much fear in meeting your own death because the person has accumulated so many attachments. In the same way that the person has a superficial idea about death, the person also has a superficial idea about being detached, as I shared about an earlier time when I was practicing dying and practicing being detached.
You cannot practice anything. You actually have to go into what is there. Just because many things do not bother you does not mean you are detached. You must see the attachments. The moment you begin to see your attachments the fear comes and paralyzes you. This fear comes in a variety of ways and it does not allow you to see this endless attachment.
It is important to open up to the bigger picture of seeing the fear as consciousness. When something is happening somewhere in the world it is affecting you because we are not separate. If you allow yourself to be in this whole consciousness, as far as you can go, then you will see how deep this attachment is. When you see the bigger picture you will see that it is all you. Suppose somebody that you are not connected to dies and you see it on the news or someone tells you about it. This death affects you and actually rules you. Why? Because your person, as consciousness, has an original attachment to the person who died. When you allow your mind to open up as consciousness, you will see that everything is affecting you, even the wars that happened a long time ago.
If “I am affected” then someone else is also affected because that somebody else is also me. This means I am not yet empty of my attachments and I am still living on a personal level. Even if there is a hint of the impersonal, the personal level still becomes shaky, sometimes very subtly. We are not separate. We are all being affected because what is in you is also in the other person whether that person is near to you or far away.
If we see the attachment, we must open endlessly to it. That is how we, as consciousness, need to be emptied. When this vessel becomes empty, you will know, nobody has to tell you. You are this body. You are this self. You are these attachments. If you want to meet your death, you must open your book, little by little, to see how vast this attachment is. The gap between this birth and death is just fear. The attachment creates fear, even the attachment to our own misery. If we can open up as consciousness as much as possible, then we can see our worries and attachment to past generations and how old this consciousness is. We are attached to this oldness because it is familiar and makes us feel comfortable and secure. In the same way, we have fear for the future.
It is tricky how small things make a huge difference. I remember that someone told me that I was going to live until eighty-five years old and unconsciously that information was held in my thought. When this came into my awareness, I saw how this little thought was creating limitations and how other thoughts were created from it, for example, “If I am old, then who is going to take care of me?” Finally, when that thought disappeared, I was able to see the endless vastness because the future was now gone, although I had already died many times in different ways.
It is so tricky because we create these imaginations very quickly. The thought is there, and it is connected to collective thoughts because it is not just my thought, it is everybody’s thought. When you see this connection with the future, you see the attachment to the thought that our generation should be safe and secure and then we will be okay. Our imaginations are tricky, automatic and limited. They keep us in the limits of the future. On the other hand, intelligence is very different.
I see that when we talk about God, right away the personal connection with that word is still very emotional regardless of how the person is opening or being unfolded. When you directly know death there are no emotions because nothing is flowering. This itself is the truth, the undeniable truth. The problem is that we are thinking about physical death. This is not about physical death. Instead, you meet your death. That is why in the physical realm, even when the person is leaving the body, they cannot meet death because all the fear comes and completely overpowers the person. At that time, the person is so heavy because now it is time to go and the load of their whole life is there. Before this you were busy and didn’t realize how much you were carrying. But now, when you are helpless and everything is there, it is so hard to face your death, dying or being detached from everything. You cannot see and so you cannot meet your death. I was just seeing how this intelligence works in such a beautiful way but the person works in the opposite direction.