If there’s anything we humans do not like, it’s death.

Death of others comes with tears and loss and pain and guilt up the wazzooo.

Death of our selves is terrifying, menacing, and horror-filled.

We really don’t like any of that.

After all, we’ve spent years cultivating this existence, this sense of Me, this image and personality and individual. Decades have gone into improving it, calming it, evolving it. All that organic kale. All those sit-ups. Suntan lotion. Satsangs. Therapy.

And then death comes along and says, “Ok honey, time for the heart to stop now. Buh-bye.”

And we’re disappeared.  

So much time has gone into pretending this Self exists and that it's the center of everything, and then in the end we disappear anyway.

Sheesh.

So naturally we fear death. We're terrified of losing this carefully maintained Self. We reject anything that shows so completely and unarguably how powerless, unimportant, and insignificant these Me thingies are.

We hate that we’re not the center of existence. We hate that there doesn’t seem to be a center of existence.

Dammit.

And then, Life has the gall to go on. Without us. Without the Me.

Noooooo!

Although…

It could be that even though the individual appears to be gone, something remains.

Because while the personality does seem to leave, along with our particular story, stories aren’t alive. They’re fiction. Fiction can’t die.

Which means the stories don't really die.

Besides, is that what we are? A personality? A story?

Maybe we’ve had it all wrong, all this time.

Maybe we don’t actually die.

Like, ever.

Yes the body dies. But whatever it is that makes us what we are, whatever it is that animates the body… does it die?

That, whatever-it-is, is not physical. It's not biological. It's not a thing, not living, not breathing, not locatable.

How would that die or disappear? And where would it go, that it isn’t already?

So, in terms of what we really are, whether it's an alive body or a dead one- maybe it's all the same either way.  

Which makes death a non-event. Since what we really are has never been alive to begin with.

There is amazing peace in surrendering to the truth of this.  

Without the lie of This-Body-Is-My-Self, without the limitation of constant Self-maintenance, what’s left is diffuse, quiet, connected to and as everything, steady, everywhere, and infinite.

There's nothing left to protect or package or improve. There's nothing left to be afraid of.

And there’s nothing left to be unhappy about that.

What freedom.

Plenty to not hate in that.


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