“All is subject to mental nature, and is real only to the extent that its nature is real… If you are oppressed by some fear, do not try to drive it away; instead, try to cultivate courage, and you will see it vanish!” (Kybalion)
What would life be like without death? It would probably lose the very meaning that belongs to it, that characteristic intrinsic to it, that motivation that drives it to feed itself. Death cannot be well understood without deeply understanding life, or at least trying to, and it is only by analyzing and writing about life in all its hypothetical facets that we can venture into a perception of the idea of death, without, however, having any certain answer! First of all, by “life” here we mean the incarnation of a so-called Soul, an Essence, a Spark of a Higher or Divine Self, whatever one wishes to call it, in a physical body on this planet called Earth. And should we also consider the life of the Universe, the life of planets, of galaxies, of black holes themselves, and of “dark matter,” which is still a quality and quantity of “energy” absolutely unknown to human beings? Doesn’t that life also form part of a circular process of “birth-death,” or rather, of “beginning-end,” where “death-end” is understood, of course, as the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next? It is well known that in order to understand how the Universe works, we must study the human being on its most infinitesimal scale, because we are literally “stardust,” like everything around us, at least on a physical level. But let us go beyond the physical level, and even beyond the energetic one: let us venture further inward, passing through the etheric level to reach the spiritual one.
Leonardo Da Vinci said: “Immerse your soul in the Divine unconscious, sinking into it, until it yields to your Soul its secret.” We all have God within us, that is, the “Truth of all things,” independent of our consciousness, and through our consciousness – some more, some less – a great drive to know; but are we truly meant to know the secret of Creation? Any inquiry we undertake toward discovering this “secret” could bring us ever more questions and ever fewer answers! But let us not be discouraged. We could begin by thinking that death is not our worst enemy, but rather our friend, just as birth is, because the reason behind these two moments of passage could be the same: putting ourselves on the line, fully living the divine in every instant of our existence, in continuous surrender, constantly striving for our evolution. And here is where the doubts begin. As soon as we are born, or rather, as soon as we “descend into an embryo,” we are potentially perfect, we should be Pure Divine Consciousness, a spark of the Universal Superconsciousness. So why “descend”? If we are already Pure, Perfect, what is the point of returning to the physical body “in this vale of tears”? The answer to this question deserves an article of its own; we will simply note that what makes us evolve in this physical body is the awareness gained through firsthand experience, in the physicality of matter. And that, in order to perfectly integrate opposites, the Soul’s infinite perfection needs to live the limitation, the finiteness, the transience of the human body in each of its incarnations, in order to strive for maximum expansion even within the constraints of physical flesh, allowing for what we have repeatedly called “the spiritualization of matter.”
What we now ask ourselves is: why are we so afraid of death? The great sages teach that two things should be contemplated continuously: our Divine nature – that is, the Essence within each of us – and our death. But the fear of death is part of man’s natural instinct for survival and self-preservation. Once attention is shifted, as we will see, from the energy centers of survival to those of spirituality, death no longer frightens us.
“If in this moment I am truly living, why should I be afraid of death?” Fear of death and fear of life, in the end, aren’t they two sides of the same coin? In fact, life often frightens us more than death does. It is far more conscious to accept the idea that death is not the end of life, but an intrinsic aspect of life itself! If we could speak directly to Death, still at the height of our vitality, in a kind of deep dialogue through which She would confide to us all Her Truths, what would we say to Her? What questions would we ask Her? We are certainly spiritual beings temporarily having a human experience: what is all of this for? There could be infinite answers to these questions, but we will never have absolute certainty that any one of them is the right one! On one point, however, we should have no doubts: the highest and most appropriate state we should try to maintain as constantly as possible should be a state of deep, absolute Gratitude for the condition we are living, because it is the best condition we can allow ourselves to live in the very moment we are living it. Everything is fine just as it is! Deep down, we are aware that everything depends on Need, first and foremost that of Universal Consciousness, the Supreme Self, and secondly that of our inner Universe, our Essence (although, in these cases, we could define it as a “tendency toward continuous expansion and evolution”). The Universal God (external) and the Spark of God (internal) are the same thing: the I AM. The only difference is that no human being will ever be able to perfectly know all the reasons behind the Divine Design, but it is instead the task of the human being, during their existence in this physical body, to know their own Essence, the God within each of us, and this is truly its ultimate purpose! This is because what we lack is the “big picture” that belongs to the Omniscience of Higher Consciousness: human beings are not given this cosmic vision, also because they are limited and could never grasp it.
What we can try to understand instead is that everything tied to Time is momentary and is NOT TRUE. Or rather, it is relative to our personal view of the known within the immensity of the unknown. It is our own projection, and for this reason NOT TRUE. Only when we do not live off memories do we come closer to a more fitting perception of the world around us, that is, a momentary appearance within our consciousness! What is lasting? Neither the body, nor the mind… so what is? We must shift our search elsewhere, to what is not changeable! To what is infinite, and therefore TRUE! Realization is nothing other than the opposite of Ignorance. When we consider the world around us to be true and the sole source of fulfillment, while completely disowning the Self, considering it unreal, distant from us, or unimportant, we live in ignorance, which is a source of pain. Instead, when we deeply know the Self and consider it the only Truth, while everything around us is a mere illusion, temporary and transient, we live in peace and joy, and we are free from pain and suffering. Including, therefore, the suffering of death. So-called “death” is nothing but a change in the life process of a given body in this dimension. It is a passage from a process of integration to one of disintegration, for as long as this is necessary in the journey of our Soul. A moment will come when this is no longer needed, and another “passage” mode will instead be necessary, always in service of the continuation and renewal of LIFE. In this sense, death does not exist, and there is only Immortality: LIFE and DEATH thus become two aspects of a single existence.
In any case, the passage of death differs according to how well one is prepared for it; what matters is not to die without realizing it! Like everything in our existence, it too is an opportunity, perhaps the most important moment of our transformation, and it should be lived with great awareness, openness and connection: it is nothing but a particular and specific application of the wonderful law of renewal, of evolution, and of the abandonment of one form for another. Consciousness, in the “form” of the Soul, even though still bound to the limitations represented by the “subtle body,” abandons the physical body. It returns “home,” to where It comes from, but only in terms of energetic connection, free from physical constraint, because just as time does not exist, likewise space does not exist for the “principle of displacement.”
So it is all a matter of perspective! It is not death that is the terrible event, it is the mind that believes it to be so!! What is terrible is not dying, but it can be the fact of ceasing to live in this physical body while still carrying so many unfulfilled desires, so many unresolved fears, so many frustrations or regrets. When one feels unresolved, incomplete, not only because one did not receive what one wanted to receive, but also because one was unable to give what one would have liked to give, in any area of life. Buddhists advise: “Think of your death every day, and meditate on how you would like to die.” In nature, “nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed.” What dies on one level is born on another level, even though we know, in truth, that absolutely nothing is born and nothing dies! All of this is the human, limited vision of the Mind, which does not contemplate the Infinite. And it does not contemplate continuous transformation, infinite transmutation. It is, as always, the Ego that seeks fixity, “stasis,” that does not accept change. In fact, it is downright afraid of it! Human Fear is, above all, ancestrally, fear of death, which is change par excellence. But on a deeper level, it is we ourselves who instead desire change; it is our Essence that feels its absolute necessity, aware that change is always positive! It follows that it is the Ego that is afraid of death, not our Essence, which simply IS, in any situation. So, for the superstructures of the Ego, what awaits us “afterward” is based on “disintegration,” or rather, on the “fear of disintegration.”
But any concept we have learned only in a rational way will be of little use to us at the moment of our death! To be truly useful, it must reach deep consciousness, as with everything of which we wish to gain true Awareness, through long practice and a long habit of introspection, first psychological, then spiritual. Living in the Present, then, this introspective practice allows us to realize the purpose of our life, which is then exactly the same as the purpose of our death: the pursuit of the integration of opposites and the manifestation of the Absolute. And in this regard, it is worth noting that we live the dream exactly as life truly is, always in the Present. We should always live as if in a dream in order to have true contact with Truth – not Reality, because Reality is subjective, created by the observer! – so that at our death there will be no traumatic passage, but rather a fluid path toward a new “Life.” The principle that man can draw upon the “Field of all possibilities” runs through every wise tradition, right up to the very latest quantum physics.
According to the “Egyptian Book of the Dead,” after crossing the threshold of the Duat (the world of the afterlife), or the Bardo of becoming of Tibetan Buddhism, the Soul encounters the region of absolute possibilities, where nothing is determined, fixed, or established. Everything is subject to the laws of movement, and everything that manifests is a pure projection of one’s own possibilities. All of this closely resembles the “Quantum Field,” but only after life in this physical body, and not during it. And what if we anticipated this process of choice and transformation? If we did so while still occupying our physical body, how would the moment of passage change? And further, what if we were living the same “Life” over and over until we understand its Essence and resolve all the knots tied to existence in this physical body? It is possible that this is exactly the case, but lives differ, if nothing else, because the characters change, as do the knots to be resolved as we face a new incarnation and become aware of some lack or need of our own, until we finally reach the state of “samadhi,” Enlightenment for Buddhists, Liberation; yet True Life is only one! Uninterrupted, and it is that of the Spirit, which, once incarnated, takes on the definition of Soul. Change, then, is the only constant in this infinite life, in all its forms.
We should never forget that our Creation is born from an impulse to know the divine, and for this we make use of our human body, which, being perishable, will make us live the experiences we need in a physical, material, and often painful way, in order to understand and follow our “dharma,” our Path, or, if you will, our Mission. Plato already knew this, four hundred years before the coming of Christ: “Life is born from death, just as death is born from life.” Death, therefore, is of course nothing but another birth, and birth is nothing but another death, within the cycle of “samsara.” When will this cycle end? When we have “learned” everything the material experience of human life has allowed us to learn! Obviously, the Spirit’s journey in “Soul-form” represents only one of countless moments of its existence, since It is eternal. By experiencing Life, the Spirit enables Knowledge, and this is transferred to the Soul, which thereby evolves. The Spirit’s experience of Life takes place on every level: the level of theory, that of mineral matter, that of the physical body, that of emotion and that of the mind, up to the highest level of Consciousness and the Transcendent. Finally arriving at divine experience as the acquisition of glimpses of cosmic consciousness, through which one learns that one shares the very same nature as the divine.
Any situation we allow ourselves to live, as we have seen, depends fundamentally on our need for evolution, and death represents the most important evolutionary passage we can make as the crowning achievement of a life in our physical body, which longs for nothing other than this! If the Spirit chose the physical, material human body, it is because it precisely needed to intervene at this level for its evolution, and therefore physical experiences should not be sublimated at all – as some Eastern doctrines would claim – but rather lived intensely in their full material entirety. This allows the Soul to send its evolutionary experiential signals directly into the Field, that is, into the way all human emotions are managed, the reactions of our human mind to our experiences, and the acquisition of Awareness of our true nature and of the task we have come to carry out in our physical body.
The mental state at death – what ties us to matter – is therefore of crucial importance. But it is simply a matter of putting into practice everything we have learned in life, and letting go. This is the moment when it is absolutely necessary to enact the so-called Surrender, for which we have had our whole life available to become aware of it and direct our life energy in that direction! Buddhists state that at the moment of death, usually, the attitudes we have long been accustomed to take over and direct our rebirth; for the same reason, a strong attachment to ourselves is generated, because we fear entering a state of non-existence. And this is precisely one of the most emblematic characteristics of the Ego: attachment. If we do not attach ourselves to things, we do not suffer for having them, we do not suffer defending them, and we do not suffer if we should lose them. Having no attachments: this is the path of Liberation. It is like “dying while alive,” but the death is not that of our Essence, nor even of our physical body, the trusted vehicle for this incarnation, but that of our Ego! The spiritual path has never been easy: the Upanishads compare it to a razor’s edge. It must be pursued with great commitment, “for a long time, without interruption and with love.” And it is absolutely worth it, because the Ego is an immense obstacle to a peaceful death and to Liberation from “samsara.” For Buddhists, the Ego is represented by the “three poisons”: Anger, Desire and Ignorance, which, however, contain within them our “seven deadly sins.” In the original Indian tradition, according to Maharishi Patanjali, the “poisons” are five, and they are called Klesha, meaning “passions” or “afflictions.” They are: ignorance of our true nature, egoism, attachment, hatred, and finally fear of death! In the Catholic tradition, however, besides the seven deadly sins, there is also the damnation of Hell awaiting, in the Afterlife, those who have not been “pure and just” in their lives! So, in this tradition, after death, what we cannot avoid is “judgment” and the resulting “punishment”! It is understandable that this view generates tension and fear in those who, for a whole series of reasons tied to their own need to believe in one religion rather than another, accept these predictions as dogmas or absolute rules. After all, each of us, on some level, believes in some “religion,” given that the ancestral fear of death has been the engine behind the birth of most religions! But religion, from “religere,” meaning “to bind together,” gathers all the beliefs, rites, and experiences that always involve human beings, trying to give them a sacred garb. It is therefore always a “human construction,” one of the countless needs of human beings, who, frightened by the unknown regarding the end of life, use it for their own support. Obviously, there is no hell where souls pay for their sins and suffer unspeakable, endless torment! And the Catholic purgatory is represented already by our existence in this physical body!!! Those who have committed acts that go against Universal Love for themselves and for others will be “condemned” to isolation – through psychophysical experiences in the body they have incarnated into – in order to become aware of their own actions, their motivations, the suffering they caused, and what they need for their “purification.” It will depend, as always, on us and on how we carry out our task, and we will have to do this on this Earth, or on whatever other planet we choose for our incarnation. This is true justice. And there is only one Truth. Every human being is Atman, the Supreme Self. Every human being is God, is Pure Divine Light, and the only task, the most important mission for oneself in this life, as in each of one’s incarnations, is to discover this Truth. We must add nothing to our Divine Essence. The only thing to do, in fact, is to remove, cleanse, eliminate all the residue that all our lives, all our incarnations in this physical body, have produced, and that our Soul, our Essence, is here to “heal”! How? By becoming aware that, if we chose this situation, this particular pair of parents, and this precise “moment in history,” it means that it was exactly what we needed!
Our only attitude, then, must be one of absolute dedication to this existence and of deep gratitude, also and especially for whatever suffering will be of benefit to us, along with the complete abandonment of judgment toward others and toward ourselves. And, obviously, toward death as well! The solution, then, lies in beginning to “feel” as much as possible our human experience within our body, and in considering suffering, too, as absolutely necessary! Our earthly life is a continuous creation of fictitious hells and paradises, according to our need and our level of consciousness. As long as we continue to search within the “relative,” without managing to look in the eye the fact that trials and situations beyond our control, which could bring suffering, will always await us, the true path cannot begin. But as long as we continue to think that painful situations are necessarily tied to suffering, we will not be engaged in a true spiritual path, which is the true road to knowledge of the Supreme Self.
The way out would consist in dissociating the painful event from the suffering itself. Suffering is painful only if it is rejected. The Greeks held that there is no meaning in pain and that, when it comes, one must simply bear it. It is more likely, instead, that pain is our own very personal decision, within our “structural” limits, of course, and that it serves no purpose. What is useful, and indeed fundamental, however, is suffering, which is the only path to transformation, to the ascent of the Spirit, to the so-called Enlightenment of Buddhists and Eastern mystics of every age. Whether it be loneliness or illness, inner destabilization or the abandonment of our physical body, more commonly called death (assuming this can even be called “suffering,” and it can only be perceived as such if the dying person has misunderstood the reason for our incarnation in this physical body), we owe suffering an immense gratitude, since it provides us with an opportunity to detach from an otherwise useless life, one that is therefore of no use to any deep “transformation.” Fundamentally, without suffering, one cannot take part in what is a process of integrating the physical with the spiritual, of becoming aware of our limits so as to accept, once and for all, that it is Humility, Compassion and Love for ourselves and for others that makes us “divine,” and that we will be able to welcome death for what it is: a reunion with the Divine.
God, obviously, is not a thing or a person, a form-entity separate from us waiting to judge us at the crossroads; God is Higher Consciousness, Super-intelligent Creative Energy, a way of observing “reality” and finding Truth within it. It is the “Absolute State of Being” in every dimension and in every infinitesimal part of our dimension: and so we, too, are God, to the extent that we have our experience in matter, within the integration of our Shadows!
Artwork by etreart.com