• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 879 0

die. They emphasize it is precisely while we have a physical body that it is important to recognize our core nature as pure awareness or as the “ground luminosity.”18 Because the essence of who we are is so subtle, when we die we can become confused, disoriented, and unable to sustain self-recognition. To keep from becoming overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, colors, and visions that arise in the passage with death, Buddhists teach that we must attain some degree of stability in self-recognition in the here and now. If we pay attention to the natural wakefulness at the core of our everyday consciousness, we will be familiar with ourselves at the time of death.19 The Dalai Lama counsels that, because we don’t know when we will die, it is of great benefit to be well-prepared as, at the time of death, the total responsibility for awareness falls upon us. He writes, “The body is compared to a guest house; it is a place to stay for just a short time. . . . When the day comes for consciousness to leave, the guest house of the body must be left behind.”20

Turning from Buddhism to the wisdom of the fifteenth-century Hindu and Sufi master Kabir:

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

just because the body is rotten—

that is all fantasy.

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now,

in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.21

If we use our time on Earth to come to self-referencing awareness, we will have anchored the gift of eternity in direct knowing. We can then evolve and grow forever in the infinite ecologies of the Mother Universe.

If the universe is non-living at its foundations, it will take a miracle to save us from extinction at the time of death, and then to take us from here to a heaven (or promised land) of continuing aliveness. However, if the universe is alive, then we are already nested and growing within its aliveness. When our physical body dies, the life-stream that we are will move into the larger aliveness of the living universe. We don’t need a miracle to save us—we are already inside the first miracle of sustaining aliveness. Instead of being saved from death, our job is to bring mindful attention to our enduring aliveness in the here and now.

I do not view awakening to our participation in the Mother Universe as the end of our spiritual journey; instead, I believe it is only the barest beginning. As we learn the skills of consciously recognizing ourselves as flow-through beings of cosmic dimension and purpose, we are meeting the basic requirement for our journey through eternity. Once knowingness knows itself directly, then that knowing-ness can live and learn forever as a luminous stream of being in the deep ecology of the Mother Universe. Awakening is never finished: We will forever be “enlightening” ourselves—becoming lighter so that we have the ability to participate in ever more free, subtle, open, delicate and expressive ecologies of being and becoming.

When we die, we will not need to remember the material details of our lives because the knowing-resonance that we are embodies the essential wisdom of our lifetime of experience. In the words of the spiritual teacher Thomas Merton, “Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.”

As we cultivate our capacity for mindful living we lessen the need for a material world and a physical body to awaken the knowing process to itself. If 96 percent of the known universe is invisible, then, when our body dies (the visible four percent), that does not mean that the invisible aspect of our aliveness dissipates and dies as well. Ultimately, the physical body that provides the structure for aligning conscious knowing will die, and we can endure as a self-confirming body of light, love, and knowing-resonance.

Once grounded in our capacity to recognize ourselves as a body of awareness, we can be self-remembering without fear of forgetting ourselves. When we die the full responsibility