Cosmic can of RAID

A quick interlude here.... This week, there have been four people, unrelated to each other but all related to me in some way, that have passed away. When it rains, it pours.

I thought I'd take this time not only to pay respect to those who passed, and to show and express my sadness for them, but also to remember what death really is.

Death is a realization.

When most people think of death, they think of some scenario where they are whisked away to a far away land of clouds and light, where they get to see their old relatives and pets.... or maybe a different sort of land of green fields and glorious warfare... or some type of harem... you get the idea. Others may just think that when you die, you die. The only thing on the other side is deep dark oblivion.

This ties very strongly into Beliefs and Identity! Everyone has beliefs about death, and in the early stages of death, you do in fact go into your beliefs! People have come back from these stages of death and described exactly that. If you think that after you die, for example, you go see Jesus, well, then guess who you're gonna meet as you're in that stage.

One time I was walking through an old battlefield from the Revolutionary War with one of my teachers, and right near that site was a graveyard we also passed. As I was talking to my teacher, I noticed that many of the spirits of the dead soldiers from the war were still lying on the ground, wounded, and that many of the spirits in the cemetery were were still lying in their coffins. I pointed that out to my teacher who nodded.

I asked, "What are they all doing there? Why don't they get up?"

He answered, "They're waiting for The Ressurection from the Bible. They don't believe they CAN get up....and they'll do that forever."

Beliefs can really screw you.

Identity, however, plays the biggest part in death. All these things I described just now are done by people who identify with their bodies, minds, and egos as themselves. They think that they are those things, and their identification with the Oneness of everything is weak to nil.

When you die, those things die. Your body goes, obviously. Your mind goes, i.e. your conscious thoughts. Your ego... caput. Gone. Those things that people most identify with all die. They may or may not hang around a bit after the physical body has passed, but that's the subject of other posts. Eventually, they dissolve completely.

What's left after that is the REAL you. This part of you was never born and will never die. It exists beyond time, so any discussion of when it came into being and when it will cease is irrelevant. Those words are time words.

People who identify with that Real part know that they will never die! As Tolle puts it, "you have to die before you die and realize there is no death." That means that you have to understand that things like body, mind, and ego all come and go, but they are not you. You have to "die" to your identification with them, and instead arise to identifying with the Real you. When you do that, you realize that death is irrelevant... a silly concept even.

That's why I say that death is a realization, because if you die well, meaning when you die you conciously understand that it is only the body, mind, and ego that are dying and they are not You, then you realize that you are not dying. You aren't really doing anything.

Here's to all my friends and relatives that have recently passed. I pray that their realization was complete.