The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [74]
The fullness of my lif e—
The sweet wine of autumn days and summer nights,
My little hoard gleaned through the years,
And hours rich with living.
That will be my gift
When death knocks at my door.
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE TENTH SECRET
The tenth secret says that life and death are naturally compatible. You can make this secret personal by shedding the image of yourself that belongs to the past—a kind of exfoliation of your self-image. The exercise is very simple: Sit with your eyes closed and see yourself as an infant. Use the best baby picture you can remember, or if you don’t recall such an image, create one.
Make sure the baby is awake and alert. Catch its attention and ask it to look into your eyes. When you’ve made contact, just gaze for a moment until you both feel settled and connected to each other. Now invite the baby to join you and slowly watch the image fade into the center of your chest. You can visualize a field of light that absorbs the image if you want, or just a warm feeling in your heart.
Now see yourself as a toddler. Again, make contact and once you have, ask that version of you to join you. Proceed in this way through any past self you wish to bring to mind—if you have particularly vivid memories of a certain age, linger there, but ultimately you want to see every image fade and disappear.
Continue up to your present age, and then go on to see yourself in stages older than you are now. End up with two final images: one of you as a very old person but in good health, and one of you on your deathbed. In each case make contact, and then let the image be absorbed into you.
When the image of yourself dying is gone, sit quietly and feel what remains. No one can actually imagine his or her own death because, even if you go to the extent—which may be too gruesome for many people—of seeing yourself as a corpse being lowered into the grave and decomposing to its elements, the witness will remain. Visualizing yourself as a corpse is an ancient Tantric exercise from India, and I have led groups through it. Almost everyone gets the point, which has nothing to do with gruesomeness: When you see every earthly vestige of yourself vanish, you realize you will never succeed in extinguishing yourself. The presence of the witness, who is the ultimate survivor, points the way beyond the dance of life and death.
Exercise #2: Dying Consciously
Like every experience, dying is something you create as much as something that is happening to you. In many Eastern cultures, there is a practice called “conscious death,” in which the person participates actively in shaping the dying process. Using prayer, rituals, meditation, and assistance from the living, the dying person shifts the balance from “this experience is happening to me” to “I am creating this experience.”
In the West, we don’t have a tradition of conscious death. In fact, we leave dying people alone in impersonal hospitals where the routine is cold, frightening, and dehumanizing. There is much to change on that front. What you can do personally at this moment is to bring your awareness to the dying process, ridding it of excessive fear and anxiety.
Think of someone close to you who is elderly and close to dying. See yourself in the room with the person—you can imagine the room if you don’t have actual knowledge of where the person is. Put yourself inside the mind and body of the person. See yourself in detail; feel the bed, see the light coming in through the window, and surround yourself with the faces of family and