Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 9: Recasting Death As An Ally

Sooner or later on the spiritual journey,

We are called to explore death.

In this episode of Into the Mystery,

We will examine physical death,

Ego death,

And the prominent role that death plays as an ally to our awakening,

As an ally to truly living.

You want to talk about death?

Let's talk about death.

Let's talk about death.

I can't wait.

I don't know how that's going to go.

I can't wait to talk about death.

I'm one of the few people who can talk all day long,

Just about every day,

About death.

Can you?

Okay.

What's the first thing you would say about it?

Well,

I remember.

I had a couple of weeks ago,

I met with someone for lunch and they were saying that they had brought a friend to yoga and I spent the whole time reminding folks that we're going to die and this is all temporary.

The gal left feeling pretty depressed afterwards.

We don't like to talk about it.

To be reminded of our mortality,

To be reminded that all of what we know and love and cherish vanishes,

This is not a comforting subject.

No,

Not at all.

In fact,

It's something we actively avoid.

It's not just because we don't want to deal with it because it's uncomfortable,

Because there's almost a taboo,

At least in Western society.

Not only do we not want to talk about it,

But we go to such extraordinary lengths to prevent it.

I'm thinking of people who become ill.

You remember the case of Terri Schiavo.

I think that was back in the 90s.

She was a Florida woman who she had,

I forget what her illness was,

But she had been in a coma for years and years and her husband felt that her wish would have been to be disconnected and allowed to pass.

I think her parents were convinced that because every once in a while she would have these spontaneous muscle movements or something that it meant that there was still consciousness locked in there.

They were waiting for a cure or for some kind of therapy to bring her back.

Anyway,

It became a big political grandstanding opportunity.

It was in the media for a while.

At any rate,

She finally was allowed to die.

I think that sort of points to an idea that I'm familiar with from a Catholic upbringing,

That all life is precious and that you are not to end it prematurely under any circumstances no matter how much the individual is suffering.

And I think that's,

I don't even know how to think about that,

Whether it's misguided or,

But it speaks to me as like not really being a reverence for the cycle of life,

The cycle of existence and creation and destruction.

It's just kind of this desperate holding on.

Patanjali speaks of the five kleshas,

The five obstacles,

The five hindrances and Abhinivesha is that final one he mentions in describing the fear of death,

The clinging to the body.

It's our most primal impulse.

It's our most,

Well not impulse,

It's our deepest instinct to preserve the health and safety of the body and we turn that into an art form,

We turn it into an obsession.

Because the basic belief within all of us is,

I am a body and when the body goes,

I vanish.

I am no more.

When we speak of self-realization,

We speak of an antidote to death because we speak about realizing what doesn't come and go,

What doesn't die.

But as long as we are housed within an awareness that we are our body,

We are our personality,

There's always going to be this fear of death which means there's always going to be some defense from it,

Some hiding from it,

Some need to escape it and run from it.

When I was in India,

It was quite remarkable how close the Indian people lived to death in certain places whereas in Western civilization,

It's hidden from us in every level,

Every level possible,

It's hidden from us.

I was about to make a similar point about Mexico.

One thing that I've noticed being here,

Mexicans at least in my observation tend to be a little bit more fatalistic than Americans who assume that they can manage everything and control the course of their lives and deaths even.

Whereas here in Mexico,

Like in India as you describe it,

Death tends to be more immediate.

The roads are poorer and the society in general is a little bit poorer and if you are over the age of 60 and die,

They won't even do an autopsy on you generally unless for some reason to suspect an unnatural death because it's just the age at which people start to die here.

The newspapers will print photos of gory car accidents or if there's a shooting or something like that,

They will go ahead and just print the photo of that without blurring it,

Without warning you.

It's kind of in your face in the way that it's not in the US because we tend to be just so kind of sensitive about people's feelings around death.

I found that a little shocking at first when I started to visit down here but after a while I thought,

You know,

It's more honest.

It's a much more honest way of encountering our emotions around things.

Rather than kind of maintaining this aura of invincibility and sort of adding to the sense of tragedy when that goes horribly wrong and someone does die,

Because you've built up this expectation that life just goes on and on and suddenly that's disrupted and it actually increases our suffering I think if we don't come to terms with that.

Yeah.

Well,

We can see how much investment there is in not only our personal lives but in society and insulating ourselves from the discomfort,

The fear of death,

The ugliness of death,

The decay that's present and that insulation is we regard it as something that serves us when in fact it doesn't at all.

Right.

It just postpones our discomfort.

Yeah.

It's a buffer.

Until such time as we have no choice but to deal with it.

We kind of dilute,

It's funny the ways we dilute ourselves into thinking it's never going to come for us as we get older and there's all kinds of ways to preserve the body now that can sort of trick your mind into thinking,

Oh,

I'm not old yet.

This is never going to happen to me.

I'm just going to be 35 forever,

Whatever it happens to be.

And it's so delusional.

And we know it is.

That's the funny thing about it is we know that this is not really the right way to go about it and yet we do it anyway because we have this sort of cultural obsession with youth and self-preservation.

I actually met a guy who was in his 50s and was researching some sort of life extension technology that he thought was going to keep him alive until 250 or later.

I thought,

Well,

Okay,

But wouldn't you just rather die and start over in a new body?

Well,

Most of us are trying to prevent death without even ever having lived.

That's an excellent point.

You know,

Because in one sense,

Just a moment of real living,

Real contact with the heart and core of love and meaning and life is enough to satisfy us against this fear of death and yet we spend so much of our life energy refusing to die rather than being willing to live.

It's so observable that we're not really afraid of death.

We're afraid of living because to live truly in a sense is to die to all that we thought we were and all that we thought was important and all that we thought was real.

And to open yourself completely to the experience of living in any given moment,

You can't do that if you're simultaneously trying to protect your safety at all times.

If you're trying to keep yourself insulated from any danger that might or might not be coming at you,

There's no surrender.

There's no surrender to life.

And I agree with you.

What you'll find after you've learned to truly surrender to an experience or whatever it is,

Whether it's pleasurable or painful or somewhere in between,

If it's sheer boredom,

That is the real fabric of life,

Of a life experience that once you touch that,

As you said,

You mentioned to me one time that,

I think it was Gangaji,

One of your teachers had said to you that,

You know,

If I never see another sunset,

It'll be okay.

I think that kind of encapsulates it is to plunge deeply into something so that you almost become it,

Is a way of absorbing that experience into your soul in such a way that you don't need to go chasing it again or you don't need to go chasing something better and higher every time because you already contain it and you intuitively know that.

Yeah,

To live with such intensity and intimacy that there's nothing left undone.

When I was with my first teacher,

David Medicine Man,

Occasionally I would ask him,

How are you doing?

And occasionally he would respond,

Hoka hai,

Which he told me meant,

Today is a good day to die.

And that's what we can say when we've lived fully.

The reason we fear death is because we know somehow that we haven't lived yet.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Like it's too soon.

I can't go yet because I haven't done X,

Y,

And Z.

I actually had an experience like that in my 20s when I was managing a restaurant and a gunman came in and robbed me,

Locked me in a freezer.

I don't know if I told you this story,

But I had a gun held in my head.

Yeah,

So I won't go through the whole story,

But for a period of about 20 minutes I thought it was the end.

And that was my big complaint in my head was I haven't done everything yet.

I haven't experienced these things.

I'm 27 years old or whatever it was,

And you can't take me yet.

Yes.

Wow.

And it changed the course of my life.

I had thought at that point in my life that I was never going to have children,

But I subsequently went ahead and did that anyway and some other things.

So on the one hand,

I embraced risk after that in a lot of ways.

I became a lot less afraid of myself and a lot less afraid of the world around me because I knew it could all change in an instant.

It also made me really neurotic in a lot of ways that we don't have time to describe here.

But I think I just want to say that having confronted the reality of death in such a way does kind of make life more vivid after that.

I mean,

I can recall staring at birds on a lawn and just being moved to tears because I was able to still see those things.

And you don't get that if you're just holed up in your house all the time trying to avoid danger.

You know,

You brought to mind as you were sharing,

I had a similar teaching.

It was different,

But when I was 10 years old,

My grandmother,

Who I'd been very close with,

Had a brain aneurysm and after that spent the rest of her life incapacitated.

She had worked so hard in her life and gave herself so little room to enjoy,

To live.

It was so sad because after finally retiring in her 60s,

She had decided to go visit her sister in Arizona,

Which she had never done.

She was so excited for it and we showed up the night before to visit her and say goodbye.

We found her,

Not too far from death and it was a huge teaching as a 10 year old because what was spoken of was,

It's such a shame.

It's such a shame that she worked so hard and that she struggled so much and that now that she had this gift to be able to live somewhat,

It was gone.

I remember as a 10 year old vowing to myself,

I'm never going to live that kind of life.

I'm never going to live stuck in a job where the idea is when I'm 60 something,

I'll be able to live.

How much we do,

We postpone life for when I have fill in the blank.

You make very different choices when that's not your orientation.

I like the way you're saying.

Maybe it was my having this experience in my 20s and subsequently years later,

This experience of almost dying of an illness that reinforced the idea that you can take risks and experience things that are not conventional in your life and they probably won't kill you.

I mean,

Something else might,

But there's no law written that says you have to work in an office 9 to 5,

40 hours a week your whole life and never experience anything until,

Like you said,

It's time to retire and you've got your nest egg and let's go on a cruise or something.

That's a safe way to live and there's nothing wrong with it if that's the way you choose to go about your life,

But there's so many other options and so many other ways to just dive head first into things that you wouldn't have experienced otherwise.

Yes,

Absolutely.

There are so many ways to die that seem like life.

To me,

We're turning the bend and to me,

We're beginning to address something else besides death now,

Which is what is it to live?

What is it to live?

Really,

Really,

What is it to live truly,

Fully?

What is it to discard the narratives that tell you what it is to live and then find your own way in the world such that dying becomes an acceptable risk as long as you're following a path that's satisfying?

What is satisfaction?

What do we need?

What is life?

What is it to be life,

Like in the way when Jesus says,

I am the way,

The truth,

And the life?

What is it to be as we really are?

What is it to be crucified within everything that we have created and to resurrect ourselves within a true form of life,

A true life,

True living?

You just sent a chill through my body when you said that.

That's what it is,

Right?

I mean,

We have expectations that we have applied to ourselves and there is a point where you make that transition from sort of living,

Going through the motions,

To really embracing,

Really making love to life,

And you have to go through that dying,

That putting yourself and your whole self-concept up on the cross.

I don't mean this in any way to dishonor Jesus.

I hope it doesn't sound that way,

But to just feel that suffering and then let it go and then free fall into whatever comes next.

Is that blasphemous?

Sure,

It's blasphemous,

But we can be blasphemous here.

We're not tied to any punishment schemes,

I don't think.

But your story reminded me of,

After being held up at gunpoint,

It reminded me,

I think it was Terrence McKenna.

I remember sharing a story about,

I think he had a brain tumor and had gotten to the point where I think it was no longer treatable and spent an afternoon on a park bench and saw,

I think he saw an ant carrying just a little tiny bit of leaf and he said it was enough to just send him into the deepest kind of ecstasy and tears were streaming down his eyes and it was just,

It was evident that when all the filters were removed,

When there was no hope of continuation,

No hope of maybe living tomorrow as a possibility,

No postponement,

It was like the richness of life was there in such full vibrancy and I think we crave that without even knowing that we crave it.

We crave that intensity and intimacy of life so deeply and we long for it and don't even know that we're longing for it.

When I had the gun to my head,

Everything superficial evaporated.

There was nothing,

My brain completely stopped in that moment or those moments and I mean in a way I suppose it was an ego death because I was just simply awareness in this moment waiting to see what happened.

I was on my knees,

He had a gun to the back of my head,

I was looking at concrete and he was yelling and I was saying things and when it was all over and I was kind of emotionally recovering for weeks afterward,

It was that same sort of experience,

That clarity that my true nature had been so drowned out by all the distractions around me and there is a piercing through or a way that your vision becomes so attuned to the immediacy of life.

I like the way you said that,

The immediacy of life.

It's right.

That life is immediate.

It's right here.

We're not there to be grasped but we're busy drowning it out all the time and we're busy using our brains to create a lot of noise and add layers and layers of meaning and implications and narratives on top of things and that's not what it is.

That's not what it is at all and when that is removed from your vision,

All of a sudden what's left is just life.

It's as though we're walking through a beautiful garden full of gorgeous flowers and incredible bugs and sweet fragrances and walking through the garden looking for,

Where's the end?

Where's the end of the garden?

Where's the destination point?

Where's the gift shop?

Right.

Where's the gift shop?

Right.

It's like,

I think you're missing the point my friend.

That's what we think of spirituality as all sorts of different things,

Evolution of consciousness and refinement of body and opening of chakras and all these things and there's truth to all that but finally it comes down to the immediacy of life.

If you can't be alert and available to the flower in front of you or to the boredom you're experiencing or to the child who's looking into your eyes or to the pain you feel in your back,

Then you're missing the point.

We can't connect to life that intimately without the contrast of death to sort of put it into sharp belief.

Yeah,

Right.

That's what it means to live with death as an ally or a companion.

If you run from death,

It's no longer a companion.

It's your enemy.

You're hiding from it but when it's your ally,

It's there to inform you of the immediacy of life.

I think there's also a way that we can reconceptualize death in our minds as a welcome respite,

As a destination that we will embrace happily when it comes for us or when we arrive here.

Death as silence.

Yeah.

Death as stillness.

Death as stillness.

Death as coming home and that it isn't fearful.

This is the interesting thing about death is that we crave the dying experience.

We crave it through our adventures.

We crave it through our entertainment.

We crave it through our pleasures where you have an opportunity to lose yourself.

It's the most joyous,

Peaceful thing we know in this life and yet we run from death as though it's something different than that.

But to embrace death as peace,

To embrace it as the bliss of silence,

The bliss of stillness,

What could be wrong with that?

And to have that awaiting you at the end of this life experience frees us up to release the demands of the narratives and the culture and all the things around us because ultimately those things will add up to nothing anyway.

And so why wouldn't you commit to this moment and dive in as deeply as possible?

Yes.

So you bring in another very important point which is that with death as an ally,

With the immediacy of life,

We also recognize what is valuable,

What is meaningful.

Yes.

Very much so.

That's a great point.

I love the fact that you brought up bugs because I love looking at nature photos and you know the macroscopic ones where you're looking at,

I don't know,

Like a ladybug or something very tiny and noticing what beautiful art there is on that level of experience.

You know as humans we're large kind of relative to everything else.

And meanwhile these beautiful things are dying all around us at this macro level and yet while they're alive they're such exquisite little specimens of the creativity of God.

And you know that's just one more thing that you can begin to encounter when you get out of taking your own life so seriously and look at the fact that you're all life,

You know,

And that life exists on all these different levels.

There are all these journeys that we can take.

Yes,

To experience the life through the contact with the bug or the flower or the.

.

.

It's funny you mentioned bugs because just the other day I had a phone call with a friend of mine who's a mystic and it was such a sweet and simple phone call.

It only lasted maybe 10 minutes.

A good portion of that conversation was just trying to decide if what she was seeing was a weevil or a tick.

She shared a couple of.

.

.

I've known a few ticks in my day so I thought maybe I could handle that question.

So she sent me a picture and you know this is very unmystical that we're sharing pictures of ticks or weevils and trying to decide and trying to decide if it needed to die or not.

There was this.

.

.

But there was something in it also that was just so simply profound in that here we are with God in our awareness just having the most delightful little exchange about weevils and ticks.

Yeah.

Well,

I mean,

To live a great life doesn't mean that you have to achieve some,

I don't know,

Stature as a career person or stardom or.

.

.

It's those tiny little moments.

I mean,

And this is just such conventional wisdom anyway but it's true.

Yes.

Well,

It's something that we as American or Western civilization need to hear deeply because our narcissism and our vanity keep us striving for greatness,

Missing the greatness that is around us all the time.

Yeah.

And you know that reminds me of something I wanted to say earlier which is that our attachment to narrative like,

You know,

We come into adulthood thinking I'm going to make something of myself.

I'm going to be somebody in the world and I'm going to create this ego that will be recognized and maybe attain great fame or something.

And not only do we want to do this while we're alive but we want to somehow extend that into the future indefinitely and be a great person.

Sure.

Well,

If you can build a great tower with your name on it then you live on.

Yes.

If you can have a statue made,

A book published,

You live on and yet how long?

Maybe a thousand years,

Two thousand years,

Five thousand years,

How long?

Right?

Ultimately it all dissolves.

Yeah.

The universe itself.

But what doesn't dissolve is that immediacy of life.

Right.

The beauty of a night of diamond-like stars in a black blanketed sky,

You know.

Yeah.

The graze of a fingertip against the hollow of a throat.

All those precious glimpses of life and yet impossible without this knowledge and intimate dance with death.

When we talk about death we're usually referring to the end of the viability of the physical body but there are other kinds of death that we experience all the time that I think deserve to be mentioned here as well and one of them of course is what we all encounter on this path which is the death of the ego which in my mind can almost be a more frightening thing than contemplating the death of the physical body.

I mean I think in terms of thinking about the body dying most of us kind of compartmentalize it and think of it,

You know,

We dilute the sting of it in a way because we think of it as a way of just kind of going to sleep and not waking up again and there's a certain comfort in that because we go to sleep all the time and we're not afraid of that or maybe we go under anesthesia or something like that so that's an experience that's familiar and we can kind of assign death to that and at least temporarily feel good about that.

But when the ego begins to die that begins to take away things that we rely on when we think about who we are.

It's almost a more intense form of death I think if you're really encountering it directly.

Daishi Yeah,

Absolutely.

You know my first experience that even started me toward this path on towards self-realization was based in a dying experience and what was so evident in that experience was that the only thing that dies is the imagined separate self.

And you know of course,

Well let's concede that the body dies of course but the idea that who we essentially are dies is,

You could say it's one of our primary errors.

It's like the deepest mistake in our consciousness to think that what we are really at our core can die and as soon as we begin to believe that we can die there's a fear of non-existence and there is a deep fear of the unknown,

What lies beyond that.

But you know it was so remarkable in my experience when I could see that Paul and all that I thought Paul to be vanished and yet there was something which remained and it became clear to me that death is completely misunderstood by our mind.

That it's not associated just with the body but it's this notion of this false center,

This false separate self and its possibility of dying which because it's what we believe ourselves to be,

It seems like when that goes everything else goes,

That there's nothing left.

Yeah.

I had not a dying experience but maybe a similar disconnecting from my imagined self in a lucid dream that I have described to you before where I was in what seemed to be in the dream a parallel reality and I began testing that reality by touching things and feeling them because I was aware that something was off but I really thought that I was in default reality and I was unable to find any difference between that reality and the one I subsequently woke back up into here.

And in that transition it was absolutely clear to me that my consciousness can localize itself anywhere in any dimension,

In any sort of a reality and that I am not tethered to this one.

And whether this one was more real than that one or vice versa I don't know and it doesn't really matter but the idea that consciousness is fluid and that it is not ultimately identified with any particular physical form really kind of hit home for me.

There was definitely an unsettling aftermath to that as far as the way I experienced myself but it also felt very freeing.

I mean the idea that your consciousness will just flow somewhere else and reconstitute itself or not.

Well,

There's a couple of levels there that you're articulating that I think would be good for us to extrapolate.

You remind me of Chongzhu.

You've heard this one about Chongzhu has a dream that he's a butterfly and wakes up and thinks am I Chongzhu dreaming of being a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming of being Chongzhu?

But there's something here too,

The yogic path speaks of four states and it speaks of waking,

Dream,

Deep sleep and then it speaks of the fourth state,

Toria,

Which is that all-encompassing consciousness which holds all the other three.

So we can have this experience of living in different realities.

I mean we can have one reality at 9 a.

M.

And a totally different one at 12 p.

M.

And we wonder which one's real.

We can be depressed at 9 a.

M.

And elated by noon for some reason based on how our circumstances change.

So even in that we see that there's these deaths of states,

Deaths of experience,

Deaths of what these apparent realities seem to be and yet there is presence and the consciousness that remain always throughout all of them.

And when we talk about death of the ego,

What we're really discussing or what we're really alluding to is it's the death of our narratives,

It's the death of our anchors in time or to people or to certain aspects of ourselves that we've relied on,

It's the death or the end of our goals maybe,

Our grievances,

Our delusions and all of those things put back together are essentially what we thought of as quote unquote me or quote unquote I.

When we're talking about death of the ego,

Would you agree that what we're then confronting is the abyss that we speak about?

In the death of the ego?

Yeah.

Well,

I would say that at the core of every ego is a black hole,

An abyss,

A deep emptiness which is not to me the final story of who we are but it is at the core of the ego because you know I look at the ego somewhat like a donut where you know it's got its substance but at its core it's nothing.

There's nothing there.

It's hollow.

It's empty.

So to face ego death in my experience absolutely entails facing the abyss,

Facing the void and the nothingness that is at the core of our ego which we ordinarily experience as a deep sense of deficiency and inadequacy because there's an inherent knowing within egoic consciousness that as an ego what I am isn't real,

That it has no substance and so we experience that on an emotional level as a sense of deficiency,

Inadequacy,

I'm not enough,

I'm not significant because at the core of the ego those things are all true.

What death entails is passing through the doorway,

Passing through into the abyss where the ego isn't or I shouldn't even say passing through,

That would entail an entity that passes through to consciously experience that abyss,

To find the core of the ego as empty and nothing is in fact,

That is ego death.

I'm playing with this thought here of why ego death is so traumatic,

You know,

Why it's something that we,

I mean I realize that there are people who occasionally and it's pretty rare in my understanding will have such type of an awakening where the ego immediately vanishes but for most of us it's more of a,

You know,

Drips and drabs kind of a thing where pieces of the ego we become aware of them over time and then must dissolve them individually and there's a lot of disorientation and fear around that and I'm trying to maybe articulate that particular fear because we do end up,

You know,

Looking at the abyss in the middle of the donut of the ego versus the fear of the physical dissolution of the body.

Or am I just way out there?

Well,

No,

I think you have some relevant points here.

I think it's not ego death that is so terrifying,

It's the resistance that we put up to it.

You know,

In one sense,

Like we said in our ego episode,

That in one sense you could look at the ego as a set of resistances and defenses and those defenses of the ego,

The false self,

Are constructed to avoid this inner core of emptiness,

This inner core of non-substance.

And so along the way to discovering the non-substance of our ego,

The hole in the center of the donut,

There's a great deal of resistance that is placed and even for one who has an experience of ego death,

There are still the emotional and energetic residues of that false self that will have to be cleared,

Purified,

Released in order for that full expression of our divine nature to be lived and known.

Even in the case of someone who experiences an instantaneous ego death,

I've never heard of an example of anybody who didn't undergo a sadhana following their ego death experience,

Their awakening experience.

So there's always that integration period regardless of the intensity of your initial life?

Well,

I would say it happens one in two ways.

Either a person goes through gradual purification and then has the experience of ego death and self-realization or they have an experience of self-realization and the sadhana and path that follows is one of gradual dissolution.

But I would say I've never encountered a story anywhere of someone who had a sudden experience of self-realization and it was absolutely stabilized.

I mean it's posited with Jesus,

I'm not certain of that.

I can sense that it's probably true and of course I never met Jesus in the flesh.

Just as in the death of the physical body,

When the ego dies there is similarly a grieving period because we really are saying goodbye to ourselves as though the person that I thought that I was has left,

Has left the building.

Well,

I'd say the grieving period is part of those residues because if we really realize what ego death means,

There's nothing to grieve for.

Nothing's been lost.

From an awakened standpoint,

Sure,

But I mean from the standpoint of someone who has suddenly had.

.

.

Well,

I guess let's say this,

That we begin with an ego shock that leads to an ego death and maybe it's that shock that's so disorienting.

The idea that all the stories that I had made up about myself,

All the connections I had made to people,

None of these things that I used to define myself,

None of those anchors I had in physical reality were actually real.

Well,

I mean this still is a problem sometimes is who am I supposed to be now?

Well that's the disorienting part,

Yeah.

I mean it's self-realization,

Whether it's minor or major,

Always has a disorienting component to it and that tends to produce anxiety in our being.

The uncertainty.

.

.

But there is also a very real sense that this hologram of myself that I had created has simply walked away.

You know,

Maybe this is just a way that my mind works with images and things,

But it's almost as if someone stepped out of this body and has left me and I'm left here with the aftermath.

Well,

What's left with the aftermath?

Well,

That's a good question.

Residue of the ego,

I suppose.

I mean I do understand what you're saying and I can understand how it's as though what we had acquired and took to be our self vanishes or leaves.

I think that might be part of what feeds into dark night of the soul,

Which we should probably do another episode on.

Definitely it does,

Yeah.

Yes,

Because the dark night of the soul is the soul's traversing that territory of emptiness and desolation.

But it's not the final result,

Of course.

It's not what,

When we say ego death,

We are implying not only the process of dying,

But also the result.

I do still grieve that old self at times.

You know,

And maybe it's not the self itself.

It's more the certainty that I miss of thinking that I was a thing and this disruption of that illusion coming out of that,

You know?

It's what makes it very hard to bear.

Yeah,

You know,

There's a security and we look,

We attach not just to other humans for our security,

But to these ideas about ourselves that we hold so strongly.

And you can see that anytime you talk to somebody and you question or somehow,

You know,

Unintentionally threaten some aspect of their identity that they took to be really important,

You know,

Or something they're very proud of.

You lose your center.

You lose your center and that center provides a false security and ground that we are usually busy maintaining for a sense of a stable self.

That's not a light endeavor.

That's why this path of self-realization,

It's not for the lighthearted.

It's not for children.

I mean,

It's for a person who's really ready to undergo a radical transmutation of their being.

But as with any,

I mean,

Just as with physical death,

With an ego death,

Then something else is made way for.

I don't want to say reborn because I would imply an object,

But.

.

.

There is a resurrection.

There's a resurrection of what is truly present at our core.

That's the whole symbol of the crucifixion is as a personal journey,

As a personal experience.

That's something that we are recapitulating is that we undergo a voluntary ego death and that leads to a resurrection of the true light of our being.

Death is hard to talk about.

I keep self-censoring here because I don't want to be flippant about it.

But there is something that happens on the spiritual path where it becomes much less of a boogeyman.

When you know that that's not the end and it's simply a transition,

You do sort of start whistling past the graveyard in a way.

And I'm really conscious of not wanting to offend someone who has maybe lost someone close to.

.

.

You know what I mean?

I feel myself tiptoeing around this.

Well,

That's a good.

.

.

That's our general attitude toward death is to tiptoe around it.

Yeah.

Our mind is scared of it and we tend to tiptoe around things we're scared of.

It's not death so much that I'm scared of.

It's other people's.

.

.

The magnitude of their response to death that I'm trying to be conscious of here.

Why?

Just because it's such a tricky topic and we never know what to say about it.

Well,

Let's just be honest about it.

Okay.

Well,

You know,

I mentioned my neighbor apparently died the other day and I keep thinking I should go by and say something but I don't know how.

I don't know if it's appropriate.

I mean it was a rumor still at this point.

I haven't seen it confirmed in any real official fashion and how do you address that?

You know,

I'd like to be supportive.

So that's a good.

.

.

Okay,

Good.

That's a good different position for us to take is like how do we relate to death?

How do we relate to those who are experiencing death or how do we relate to those who have lost?

And I think,

You know,

We do so with heart.

We do so.

.

.

I mean if we can do so with the light of presence,

We do so without fear and we do so with total love because we do have this deep association between death and fear and annihilation that makes us,

Whether it's our own death or another's,

It makes us skittish and afraid but when we proceed forward in presence and in love,

We realize there's nothing to fear,

That we go boldly toward it and we can be there for others in that way that we can support them to be with their grief,

Be with their fear,

Be with their loss and yet maintain that space of total love and presence.

You know because we're all so uncomfortable with the topic and there's all kinds of opinion pieces you can read online about how to approach a dying person,

What to say,

What not to say and I'm the kind of person who just sort of reads these lists and goes,

Oh my god,

I can't possibly be a human and remember all of this.

Yeah,

Yeah.

No,

It's very anti-human to create a formula.

But you know then I think back to when,

For example,

My brother died and people came up to me and offered me condolences and I just like,

I had nothing for them.

I had no,

It's like yes,

He died and I didn't really need anything.

There wasn't anything anybody could have said to help it.

I appreciated someone saying I'm sorry but I really didn't want to talk about it and so I think,

You know,

Because we all have a different way of approaching these things.

I don't think we should worry about offending anybody.

I think we should just concern ourselves with approaching with love.

You're absolutely right.

So my brother and I were not close at all,

Not since childhood.

We were completely different personalities.

You know,

We kind of had that bond from growing up in a dysfunctional family but beyond that,

I mean,

After high school we went our separate ways and never encountered each other but he went through a several year battle with cancer which he hid from most of the family.

So it was only maybe a couple of months before he died that I kind of got wind of what was happening and we only spoke every few years really under normal circumstances and yet when he died,

My grief was so theatrical and overwhelming that I had to kind of stop myself and question it.

Like what is it that I'm grieving here?

What am I,

What have I lost?

You know,

I remember some things from childhood but it's not like he was my closest confidant.

It's not like we shared a lot of things in common or had all these experiences that we had enjoyed together.

And I came to realize that what I was grieving was some projection of myself I had put on him,

Aspects of my own story that would not play out as his story because I had this whole story about him that I related to and now that was over and somehow that seemed like an affront to me.

And I'm just trying to be honest here.

I know this sounds really narcissistic probably but— I think it's actually real,

It's what most people probably go through.

I already had an understanding of death as being a transition and not some tragic ending and I assumed that he was fine and would continue and yet there was just this upwelling of energy of things that yeah,

I just felt like swamped in it,

Swamped in grief and it made no sense.

Now from,

You know,

The distance of seven or eight years I can look back on that and say that,

Ah,

That's what all that was.

It was all these projections of my own ego that I had superimposed onto him and all these stories of my own that now seem to have been,

You know,

Unfairly cut off at this early age that were so upsetting to me.

And so I wonder whether our experiences of grief could be mitigated if we better understood them.

Oh,

Definitely,

Yeah.

Yeah,

If we were to dive into them a little bit more honestly from a spiritual orientation,

Psychological orientation.

Grief is obviously a very complicated subject because there is something that is fundamentally affected in us when we lose someone we love and the loss of form and all that it meant to us and what it means in terms of our own form and our own death.

But at the core,

Grief is love.

That's all it is at its core.

And we grieve for the loss,

But that grief is only a symptom of the love.

You know,

Whenever I work with someone who is experiencing grief,

My constant suggestion is be aware of the loss,

But to place your consciousness in the love because in that love nothing has gone anywhere.

That's good advice.

And I don't mean that in some kind of like metaphysical trip to soothe yourself with.

I mean,

Actually in love,

Nothing has gone anywhere.

But grieving is hard.

I mean,

I love Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grieving and all that we go through.

I think they articulate not only what one goes through when they lose someone they love,

But it also articulates what we go through in ego death.

Same thing.

Yeah,

I was just going to say that.

I had noticed that in fact.

Yeah.

How does it go?

Denial,

Anger,

Bargaining.

I know acceptance is the final one.

I think it's denial,

Bargaining,

Anger,

Depression,

Acceptance.

Depression.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the depression part of that is the dark night of the soul,

If you will.

Right.

Right.

And every ego will go through those stages.

It's like at first,

It's like the denial of,

No,

I am this person and this is who I really am and this is what my life is really like.

And then there's a bargaining period where one tries to negotiate one's own dissolution and then there's a frustration and absolute anger and rage toward – it's spoken well in Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas.

He says,

One should not stop searching until one finds.

When one finds,

One will be enraged.

After being enraged,

One will be elated.

And it sort of articulates that same journey as when we realize we've been duped,

There's this deep anger and then the deep depression that follows when we realize we've been living a false life.

Yes.

So much.

And then we're going through into acceptance,

You know,

Acceptance that leads to,

In this case,

Self-realization.

Whether we travel through that with someone we've lost or our own process,

It's the same process.

It's the exact same process.

Beautifully stated.

And it brings about grace.

I think one thing that's really relevant to this conversation on death and ego death is we automatically,

In some sense,

Evoke a conversation about hope.

Because in the spiritual or religious traditions that teach eternalism,

There is a hope that,

Okay,

After I die,

Whether that's ego death or physical death,

There will be something of me that continues.

And that provides us with a sense of hope.

And I'm not saying that there's not truth,

That something in us continues,

But I don't know that that hope is all that useful because it insulates us from experiencing a real total dissolution of what we thought we were.

And that hope becomes a clinging.

I mean,

As one of my teachers said that at a certain point,

Hope is actually torturous.

We talk about the wave in the ocean,

That every human being is simply peak of the wave for a while and then it dissolves back into the ocean and then the ocean goes on.

And I think combining that awareness with everything I've learned about non-duality and my experiences of non-duality have almost made death,

I mean,

It's still something that I'm concerned about.

I would like to control the circumstances of my death.

You know,

I'd rather it were not some traumatic event.

But the actual reality of facing oblivion and then dissolving into the silence,

Into the oneness and reemerging somewhere else.

When I get in touch with this understanding,

It's almost as though I can immediately flow out of my body and into everything and understand that my consciousness is already everywhere.

And therefore the dissolution of this particular form of it is,

You know,

Like a hair falling off my head.

It's no more significant than that.

Yeah.

Well,

That's what's revealed in ego death is like the wave that I thought I was vanishes entirely and yet because the wave was always only made of the ocean,

Which we could call consciousness,

We could call love,

We could call God,

We can call it whatever we want,

Is nothing's died at all.

Nothing has died.

It was only the appearance of what I thought I was that died.

Why are we so scared of that anyway?

Why are we so scared of this winking out,

This idea that we can just like poof,

Be gone?

Because we seem to place our relevance,

Our significance in being a separate self rather than the all.

When we recognize that we're the all,

There's no more,

Like you said,

It's like a hair falling out of your head.

Not that any of us should court death or seek it or,

You know,

It's not a macabre,

It's not a masochistic thing that then we run forward into death and pain,

But there's a fundamental recognition that there's nothing to fear here.

And that's what all the teachings talk about is that the attachment to the physical form,

The attachment to the flesh,

Is what reinforces our idea of being a separate self,

Separate from God,

Separate from existence.

And so it's the very core and essence of our fear of death as well.

What do you think of,

You've read the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

The procedures that are described in there as far as,

You know,

Helping the consciousness eject out of the crown of the head.

And is that something that someone should be concerned with?

When you study the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the traditions,

It's not just a ceremonial text that's read upon the death of the physical body,

It's actually treated as a sadhana that you work with during your life.

And the actual name of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is bardo todos,

Which means liberation through hearing in the bardo.

And if we want to make that,

Put that in simple English terms,

It means a chance to liberate yourself when there's a space to do so.

What the Tibetans are very skilled at,

And part of I think that comes from their shamanic bone culture is they have an understanding of the subtlety of mind,

Which is not located in a physical body.

It's played out through a physical body,

But it's not located in one.

So the Tibetans in a sense treat the mind as something that will need healed even after the death of the body.

So whether you're working with the Tibetan book in your life or with the idea of after death,

The whole possibility is to,

In a sense,

Release attachments to all that you are not,

All the things that define you as separate and finite and all the things that give you a self nature,

A self character so that you can make that return to your oceanic existence clean.

There's almost a sense here,

And I think this is reflected in the Christian tradition too,

Where by purifying your wave,

Your return to the ocean adds to the ocean.

And the Tibetans describe that as the capacity to consciously reincarnate,

But not as another dirty wave,

As purified oceanic awareness.

The teachings in that book are so complex,

So we can barely say anything about them here.

Yeah,

I just wanted to point out one facet that kind of leaped out at me,

Which is that when they speak of the bardo,

We think of other bardos as being kind of like a nether region or a purgatory or a span of uncertainty between one thing and another.

But in the Book of the Dead,

They're talking about life as being the bardo.

Well there are different bardos they speak of,

Yeah.

After death,

In between two thoughts,

During a lifetime,

They speak of different.

But I like the way you said it because you articulated it really well.

It's the space of uncertainty.

It's a period that follows chaos or catastrophe.

It's where not everything is established in clarity and structure.

It represents a possibility for a change or transformation.

Yeah,

And strictly speaking,

Bardo is where we naturally dwell as consciousness,

In silence,

In possibility.

In a sense.

In one sense,

We could look at it as a pattern that underlies the fabric of material existence.

It's like awaiting potential for uncertainty and chaos.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And that's what we fear.

That's what we fear when we fear death.

We fear that pending uncertainty and chaos.

Exactly,

Because we're so committed to clinging to things,

To attaching ourselves to things that feel safe,

And death is the ultimate release of all of that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Many times I myself,

And I've guided people into a space where they felt,

Not just imagined,

But felt as though they were existing in a wide open black space,

As if in outer space with nothing they could see,

Nothing they could hold on to,

Nothing they could grasp,

Even as a feeling,

Nothing.

Nothing was tangible.

And these experiences are available to us when we refine our consciousness to experience them.

And we have these possibilities to enter that gap,

That potential space for a deep revelation.

Okay,

This is totally kind of on a tangent,

But I was in a yoga nidra class one time and dropped into such a space where my body had disappeared and it was just me as this point of consciousness in inky blackness.

And it was peaceful and calm and perhaps warm and loving in a way.

That was pretty subtle.

But I remember,

To the extent that I thought at all,

I just recognized that,

Oh,

So this must be what it's like to be dead.

This is okay.

My next thought was,

But how will I entertain myself?

What is there to do here?

You should come back and play the game all over again,

Won't you?

I guess I would have to.

That's why the Buddhist tradition,

They tease,

I say tease lightly,

But they tease about desire being the cause of reincarnation in the sense that you can taste,

As you're describing here in your own revelation,

You can taste the absolute peace,

The love that is present in the dissolution of self.

And yet there's almost this pull to entertain oneself by creating difficulties,

Struggles,

Suffering.

Well,

Hopefully not too much suffering,

But there's just that sense of possibility that wants to be satisfied,

That need for some kind of a creation to arise out of it,

That that state can't be eternal,

Even if it ultimately is.

Ajahn Chanti has a beautiful poem about this.

Something like,

Why does anything exist?

Because emptiness dances because it endlessly gives birth?

Yeah.

It's a nice way of separating it,

Yeah.

Because ultimately it's energy.

Your consciousness is energy.

And so that state of nothingness,

While necessary to counterbalance the state of manifestation and form,

It needs to be answered with something.

And that's what the Tibetan Book of the Dead sort of works with in the more esoteric sense,

Is that there's a way of that dissolution of self into the pure space of emptiness and the way in which something dynamic can come forward that is not a repetition of the past.

Because what most of us do is that in encountering that space,

We regather,

We recollect ourselves,

We reify ourselves so as to maintain some semblance of familiarity with who we think we are.

But there's a brand new potential that's born out of that space that we are to merge our consciousness with.

It's not unlike what the Christian mystics call the cloud of unknowing,

This passing through this almost like a purgatory,

A state of absolute uncertainty in order to achieve unification with God.

And that unification is dynamic.

It does give birth,

But it gives birth to something new,

Not a repetition of the old.

Yeah.

God just riffs on itself over and over and over again.

The ocean can churn in infinite ways.

Yeah.

Anything else,

Or should I read my poem?

Everything else,

But that's enough for now.

So today I have a poem from Khalil Gibran.

This is from the prophet,

And in the prophet,

The prophet's name is Al-Mustafa,

And he's surrounded by followers who are asking him questions about things.

So that's the context for this passage called On Death.

Then Al-Mitra spoke,

Saying,

We would ask now of death.

And he said,

You would know the secret of death,

But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.

If you would indeed behold the spirit of death,

Open your heart wide unto the body of life,

For life and death are one,

Even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond.

And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow,

Your heart dreams of spring.

Trust the dreams,

For in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honor.

Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling that he shall wear the mark of the king?

Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides,

That it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountaintop,

Then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall claim your limbs,

Then shall you truly dance.

Ah,

Yes.

Pretty good,

Huh?

Oh,

Yes.

Yes.

About as well as it can possibly be said.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Into the Mystery.

We hope you gained something useful.

Questions or topics you'd like to hear about in future episodes,

Be sure to drop us a line.

We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for listening.