posted September 04, 2007 12:17 PM         

Hasidic Stories

The Art of Dying

‘Death and life are two polarities of the same energy, of the same phenomenon - the tide and the ebb, the day and the night, the summer and the winter. They are not separate and not opposites, not contraries; they are complementaries. Death is not the end of life; in fact, it is the completion of one life, the crescendo of one life, the climax, the finale. Once you know your life and its process, then you understand what death is.’

When Mulla Nasrudin was dying he called his son, told him to come close and said to him, 'My son, I have one thing to say to you - even though I know you will not listen, because I didn't listen to my own father when he was dying. He told me, "Nasrudin, don't chase women too much." But I could not resist; the temptation was too much. And I got involved with one woman, another woman....' He married nine women - the maximum that the Koran permits.
And he said, 'I have created a hell. I suffered much. I know you don't listen but still I am saying it, because now I am departing and there will be no chance to say it to you. I know you will fall in love with women but at least remember one thing from your old man: My son, one at a time, one at a time. At least do that much.'

I have heard about a very great Sufi mystic woman, Rabia al-Adabiya.
One evening, people found her sitting on the road searching for something. She was an old woman, her eyes were weak, and it was difficult for her to see. So the neighbors came to help her. They asked, 'What are you searching for?'
Rabia said: 'That question is irrelevant, I am searching. If you can help me, help.'
They laughed and said: 'Rabia, have you gone mad? You say our question is irrelevant, but if we don't know what you are searching for, how can we help?'
Rabia said: 'Okay. Just to satisfy you, I am searching for my needle, I have lost my needle.'
They started helping her - but immediately they became aware of the fact that the road was very big and a needle was a very tiny thing.
So they asked Rabia: 'Please tell us where you lost it - the exact, precise place. Otherwise it is difficult. The road is big and we can go on searching and searching forever. Where did you lose it?'
Rabia said: 'Again you ask an irrelevant question. How is it concerned with my search?'
They stopped. They said: 'You have certainly gone crazy!'
Rabia said: 'Okay. Just to satisfy you, I have lost it in my house.'
They asked: 'Then why are you searching here?'
And Rabia is reported to have said: 'Because here there is light and there is no light inside.'
The sun was setting and there was a little light still left on the road.
This parable is very significant. Have you ever asked yourself what you are searching for? Have you ever made it a point of deep meditation to know what you are searching for? No. Even if in some vague moments, dreaming moments, you have some inkling of what you are searching for, it is never precise, it is never exact. You have not yet defined it. If you try to define it, the more it becomes defined the more you will feel that there is no need to search for it.

When Rabbi Birnham lay dying,
His wife burst into tears.
He said, 'What are you crying for?

My whole life was only that I might learn how to die.'

LIFE IS IN LIVING. It is not a thing, it is a process. There is no way to attain to life except by living it, except by being alive, by flowing, streaming with it. If you are seeking the meaning of life in some dogma, in some philosophy, in some theology, that Is the sure way to miss life and meaning both.
Life is not somewhere waiting for you, it is happening in you. It is not in the future as a goal to be arrived at, it is herenow, this very moment -- in your breathing, circulating in your blood, beating in your heart. Whatsoever you are is your life, and if you start seeking meaning somewhere else, you will miss it. Man has done that for centuries.
Concepts have become very important, explanations have become very important -- and the real has been completely forgotten. We don't look to that which is already here, we want rationalisations.

I have heard a very beautiful story.
Some years ago a successful American had a serious identity crisis. He sought help from psychiatrists but nothing came of it, for there were none who could tell him the meaning of life -- which is what he wanted to know. By and by he learned of a venerable and incredibly wise guru who lived in a mysterious and most inaccessible region of the Himalayas. Only that guru, he came to believe, would tell him what life meant and what his role in it ought to be. So he sold all his worldly possessions and began his search for the all-knowing guru. He spent eight years wandering from village to village throughout the Himalayas in an effort to find him. And then one day he chanced upon a shepherd who told him where the guru lived and how to reach the place.
It took him almost a year to find him, but he eventually did. There he came upon his guru, who was indeed venerable, in fact well over one hundred years old. The guru consented to help him, especially when he learned of all the sacrifices the man had made towards this end. 'What can I do for you, my son?' asked the guru. 'I need to know the meaning of life,' said the man.
To this the guru replied, without hesitation, 'Life,' he said, 'is a river without end.' 'A river without end?' said the man in a startled surprise. 'After coming all this way to find you, all you have to tell me is that life is a river without end?'
The guru was shaken, shocked. He became very angry and he said, 'You mean it is not?'

Nobody can give you the meaning of your life. It is your life, the meaning has also to be yours. Himalayas won't help. Nobody except you can come upon it. It is your life and it is only accessible to you. Only in living will the mystery be revealed to you.
The first thing I would like to tell you is: don't seek it anywhere else. Don't seek it in me, don't seek it in scriptures, don't seek it in clever explanations -- they all explain away, they don't explain. They simply stuff your empty mind, they don't make you aware of what is. And the more the mind is stuffed with dead knowledge, the more dull and stupid you become. Knowledge makes people stupid; it dulls their sensitivity. It stuffs them, it becomes a weight on them, it strengthens their ego but it does not give light and it does not show them the way. It is not possible.
Life is already there bubbling within you. It can be contacted only there. The temple is not outside, you are the shrine of it. So the first thing to remember if you want to know what life is, is: never seek it without, never try to find out from somebody else. The meaning cannot be transferred that way. The greatest Masters have never said anything about life -- they have always thrown you back upon yourself.

The second thing to remember is: once you know what life is you will know what death is. Death is also part of the same process. Ordinarily we think death comes at the end, ordinarily we think death is against life, ordinarily we think death is the enemy, but death is not the enemy. And if you think of death as the enemy it simply shows that you have not been able to know what life is.

Death and life are two polarities of the same energy, of the same phenomenon -- the tide and the ebb, the day and the night, the summer and the winter. They are not separate and not opposites, not contraries; they are complementaries. Death is not the end of life; in fact, it is a completion of one life, the crescendo of one life, the climax, the finale. And once you know your life and its process, then you understand what death is.
Death is an organic, integral part of life, and it is very friendly to life. Without it life cannot exist. Life exists because of death; death gives the background. Death is, in fact, a process of renewal. And death happens each moment. The moment you breathe in and the moment you breathe out, both happen. Breathing in, life happens; breathing out, death happens. That's why when a child is born the first thing he does is breathe in, then life starts. And when an old man is dying, the last thing he does is breathe out, then life departs. Breathing out is death, breathing in is life -- they are like two wheels of a bullock cart. You live by breathing in as much as you live by breathing out. The breathing out is part of breathing in. You cannot breathe in if you stop breathing out. You cannot live if you stop dying. The man who has understood what his life is allows death to happen; he welcomes it. He dies each moment and each moment he is resurrected. His cross and his resurrection are continually happening as a process. He dies to the past each moment and he is born again and again into the future.

If you look into life you will be able to know what death is. If you understand what death is, only then are you able to understand what life is. They are organic. Ordinarily, out of fear, we have created a division. We think that life is good and death is bad. We think that life has to be desired and death is to be avoided. We think somehow we have to protect ourselves against death. This absurd idea creates endless miseries in our lives, because a person who protects himself against death becomes incapable of living. He is the person who is afraid of exhaling, then he cannot inhale and he is stuck. Then he simply drags; his life is no longer a flow, his life is no longer a river.
If you really want to live you have to be ready to die. Who is afraid of death in you? Is life afraid of death? It is not possible. How can life be afraid of its own integral process? Something else is afraid in you. The ego is afraid in you. Life and death are not opposites; ego and death are opposites. Life and death are not opposites; ego and life are opposites. Ego is against both life and death. The ego is afraid to live and the ego is afraid to die. It is afraid to live because each effort, each step towards life, brings death closer.
If you live you are coming closer to dying. The ego is afraid to die, hence it is afraid to live also. The ego simply drags.

There are many people who are neither alive nor dead. This is worse than anything. A man who is fully alive is full of death also. That is the meaning of Jesus on the cross. Jesus carrying his own cross has not really been understood. And he says to his disciples, 'You will have to carry your own cross.' The meaning of Jesus carrying his own cross is very simple, nothing but this: everybody has to carry his death continuously, everybody has to die each moment, everybody has to be on the cross because that is the only way to live fully, totally.
Whenever you come to a total moment of aliveness, suddenly you will see death there also. In love it happens. In love, life comes to a climax -- hence people are afraid of love.

I have been continuously surprised by people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier. and when you want to drop the barrier the ego says, 'This is going to be a death. Beware!'

The death of the ego is not your death. the death of the ego is really your possibility of life. The ego is just a dead crust around you, it has to be broken and thrown away. It comes into being naturally -- just as when a traveler passes, dust collects on his clothes, on his body, and he has to take a bath to get rid of the dust.
As we move in time, dust of experiences, of knowledge, of lived life, of past, collects. That dust becomes our ego. Accumulated, it becomes a crust around you which has to be broken and thrown away. One has to take a bath continuously -- every day, in fact every moment, so that this crust never becomes a prison. The ego is afraid to love because in love, life comes to a peak. But whenever there is a peak of life there is also a peak of death -- they go together.

In love you die and you are reborn. The same happens when you come to meditate or to pray, or when you come to a Master to surrender. The ego creates all sorts of difficulties, rationalisations not to surrender: 'Think about it, brood about it, be clever about it.' When you come to a Master, again the ego becomes suspicious, doubtful, creates anxiety, because again you are coming to life, to a flame where death will also be as much alive as life.

Let it be remembered that death and life both become aflame together, they are never separate. If you are very, very minimally alive, at the minimum, then you can see death and life as being separate. The closer you come to the peak, the closer they start coming. At the very apex they meet and become one. In love, in meditation, in trust, in prayer, wherever life becomes total, death is there. Without death, life cannot become total.

But the ego always thinks in divisions, in dualities; it divides everything. Existence is indivisible; it cannot be divided. You were a child, then you became young. Can you demark the line when you became young? Can you demark the point in time where suddenly you were no longer a child and you had become young? One day you become old. Can you demark the line when you become old?

Processes cannot be demarked. Exactly the same happens when you are born. Can you demark when you are born? When life really starts? Does it start when the child starts breathing -- the doctor spanks the child and the child starts breathing? Is life born then? Or is it when the child got into the womb, when the mother became pregnant, when the child was conceived? Does life start then? Or, even before that? When does life start exactly?

It is a process of no ending and no beginning. It never starts. When is a person dead? Is a person dead when the breathing stops? Many yogis have now proved on scientific grounds that they can stop breathing and they are still alive and they can come back. So the stopping of the breathing cannot be the end. Where does life end?

It never ends anywhere, it never begins anywhere. We are involved in eternity. We have been here since the very beginning -- if there was any beginning -- and we are going to be here to the very end, if there is going to be any end. In fact, there cannot be any beginning and there cannot be any end. We are life -- even if forms change, bodies change, minds change. What we call life is just an identification with a certain body, with a certain mind, with a certain attitude, and what we call death is nothing but getting out of that form, out of that body, out of that concept.

You change houses. If you get too identified with one house, then changing the house will be very painful. You will think that you are dying because the old house was what you were -- that was your identity. But this doesn't happen, because you know that you are only changing the house, you remain the same. Those who have looked within themselves, those who have found who they are, come to know an eternal, non-ending process. Life is a process, timeless, beyond time. Death is part of it.

posted September 05, 2007 11:58 AM         

quote:

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but at least remember one thing from your old man: My son, one at a time, one at a time.

To this the guru replied, without hesitation, 'Life,' he said, 'is a river without end.' 'A river without end?' said the man in a startled surprise. 'After coming all this way to find you, all you have to tell me is that life is a river without end?'
The guru was shaken, shocked. He became very angry and he said, 'You mean it is not?'

---

posted September 05, 2007 04:42 PM         

The Art Of Dying!!!

Thats just great, I already thought I was Dead??? LOL!!!

I've deaded so many times!!! Too only be born again!!!

Will read when I get home tonite!!!

Thanks Mirandee!!!

posted September 05, 2007 11:59 PM         

Along the same lines:

The Opportunity Aging Offers, Ram Dass

One of the best parts of aging is entering the "don't know," learning to be someone who can rest comfortably in uncertainty. There are as many ways of embodying wisdom as there are people on this earth. Each of us brings his or her own particular temperament to the project of his or her own conscious aging. Just as there is no right or wrong way of doing this, there is no optimal picture of how you will look, live, or love, as you wake up in this new phase of being. You will simply be more of who you've always been. [...]
One of the reasons that old age is so disconcerting to many people is that they feel as if they're stripped of their roles. As we enter old age and face physical frailty, the departure of children, retirement, and the deaths of loved ones, we see the lights fading, the audience dwindles, and we are overwhelmed by a loss of purpose, and by the fear of not knowing how to behave or where we now fit in this play. The Ego, whose very sustenance has been the roles it played in the public eye, becomes irate, despairing, or numb, in the face of its obsolescence. It may harken back to roles in its past to assert itself, but these strategies bring only more suffering as the Ego fights a losing battle.
As we learn to distinguish between our Egos -- marked by our mind and thoughts -- and the witness Soul -- who's not subject to them -- we begin to see the opportunity that aging offers. We begin to separate who we are from the roles that we play and to recognize *why* the Ego clings as it does to behaviors and images that no longer suit us. Stripped of its roles, the Ego is revealed as fiction. But for the person without a spiritual context, this is pure tragedy, for seekers of truth who are aware of the soul, it is only the beginning.
Rather than wonder what new 'role' we can invent for ourselves in the world then, the question that concerns us might be better put this way: How can we, as aging people, make our wisdom felt in the world? By embodying wisdom.
--Ram Dass