By Martin LeFevre
Have you stood in wonder during the liminal moment when the stars first appear, so faintly that you have to look away to make sure they are really there? You feel the boundary not only between day and night, but also between life and death timelessly conjoined and inseparable.
The movement of the sun across the sky (more accurately, the rotation of the Earth) is not a function of time, but of the cycles and ongoing creative unfolding of the universe. During liminal moments, one feels that timelessness is enfolded within the movement of the Earth and the universe itself.
What is the relationship between timelessness and death? Is death the core actuality of all existence, the unknowable ground from which the universe sprang, and the ground to which life perpetually returns in the cycle of life and death?
Death will always be at infinite mystery. However must death remain distant from us until we take our last breath, at which point it’s too late to understand it? Can we understand death and integrate it into our lives while vitally alive?
One doesn’t have to have a near death experience to experience the actuality of death. Insight into death occurs every time thought falls completely still, the ‘me’ dissolves, and one enters the immeasurable unknown.
Is fearlessly being in touch with death the door to the sacred? Death is inextricable from life. Can one gain deepening insight into it and directly experience its actuality, which is occurring inside and outside us every moment?
Something I read recently sticks with me: “Sacredness is not recognizable by thought, nor can it be utilized by thought.”
Of course people have believed for millennia that sacredness could be recognized and utilized by thought, which is why there are organized religions, with scriptures, rituals, churches, synagogues and mosques. But since sacredness is beyond words, images and symbols of any kind, it cannot be recognized by thought, much less captured and held in a text or a building.
The separation between life and death was probably the first separation humans psychologically made. Our alienation from nature clearly began with separating life from death, and from then on, we’ve feared death.
The great religious teachers of the East and West have said that we must die to truly live. They don’t mean we must physically die, but psychologically die – a much more difficult thing to do. After all, we’re all going to die, and we more or less accept the fact. But to truly end the ‘I’ is a different matter.
I once heard it said, “Reincarnation is a fact, but not the truth.” I understand it to mean that though some kind of returning of the essence of a person happens in human consciousness, the point is to end our reincarnations, which occur because we haven’t completed the journey of learning and unlearning.
Apparently we are meant to incarnate, not reincarnate. Then why is it so rare? Is it because we deeply cling to continuity, when to completely surrender is essential?
The first time one totally loses the continuity of memory and time is often quite frightening. The fear and question that came up within me was, “Am I losing my mind?” In remaining with the question however, I saw that I wasn’t losing my mind, but gaining Mind. Tremendous unity, love and ecstasy ensue.
An avowed Buddhist and famous American actor has spoken bitterly about death. He said that he loved life, but that death made absolutely no sense to him. Death, he said, was some kind of cosmic calamity, a terrible joke played on us that made life meaningless.
Though I’m not a Buddhist, it struck me that it’s totally the opposite. The full awareness of death is what gives life meaning. In deeper states of meditation, when the observer ends in passive awareness, and thought falls completely silent in non-directed attention, one inwardly reaches the door of death.
If one stands there, and doesn’t run away, the door opens, and one enters the vastness of Mind. Therefore experiencing the actuality of death not only gives life meaning but is also the door to freedom, creation and love.
Our minds have been conditioned for thousands of years in positive movement, toward an outward goal. But meditation is the movement of negation, what’s been called “via negativa.” And when passive watchfulness gathers sufficient unwilled and non-directed attention, the movement of negation becomes self-sustaining.
If one completely lets go, attention ends the continuity of thought as memory, self, and time. In the stillness and silence, emptiness and nothingness that ensue, one feels that death, creation and love have the same source, and are the same thing.
