The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [68]
Only by facing death can you develop real passion for being alive. Passion isn’t frantic; it isn’t driven by fear. Yet right now, at an unconscious level, most people feel they are snatching life from the jaws of death, frantic with the knowledge that their time on earth is so brief. When you see yourself as part of eternity, however, this fearful snatching of crumbs from the table vanishes, and in its place you receive the abundance of life that we hear so much talk about but that so few people seem to possess.
Here’s a simple question: When you are a grandparent, you will no longer be a baby, a teenager, or a young adult. So when it comes time to go to heaven, which of these people is going to show up? Most people look totally baffled when they’re asked this question. It’s not a frivolous one. The person you are today isn’t the same person you were when you were ten years old. Certainly your body has changed completely from that of the ten-year-old. None of the molecules in your cells is the same, and neither is your mind. You certainly don’t think like a child.
In essence, the ten-year-old you once were is dead. From a ten-year-old’s perspective, the two-year-old you once were is also dead. The reason that life seems continuous is that you have memories and desires that tie you to the past, but these too are ever shifting. Just as your body comes and goes, so does the mind with its fleeting thoughts and emotions. When you are aware of being yourself without being attached to any particular age, you’ve found the mysterious observer within who doesn’t come and go.
Only witnessing awareness qualifies as that observer—it remains the same while everything else changes. The witness or observer of experience is the self to whom all experiences are happening. It would be futile to hold on to who you are at this moment in terms of body and mind. (People are baffled by which self they are going to take to heaven because either they imagine an ideal self going there or a self they have attached to their imaginations. At some level we all know that there was never an age that felt ideal, however.) Life needs to be fresh. It needs to renew itself. If you could beat death and remain just who you are—or who you were at the time of life you consider the best—you’d succeed only in mummifying yourself.
You are dying at every moment so that you can keep creating yourself.
We have already established that you are not in the world; the world is in you. This, the main tenet of the one reality, also means that you are not in your body; your body is in you. You are not in your mind; your mind is in you. There is no place in the brain where a person can be found. Your brain consumes not one molecule of glucose to maintain your sense of self, despite the millions of synaptic bursts that sustain all the things that self is doing in the world.
So when we say that the soul leaves a person’s body at the moment of death, it would be more correct to say that the body leaves the soul. The body is already coming and going; now it leaves without coming back. The soul can’t leave because it has nowhere to go. This radical proposition needs a bit of discussion because, if you aren’t going anywhere when you die, you must be there already. This is one of those paradoxes from quantum physics whose understanding depends upon knowing where things come from in the first place.
Sometimes I ask people a simple question such as, “What did you eat for dinner last night?” When they say “chicken salad” or “steak,” I then ask, “Where was that memory before I asked you?” As