Awake in This Life

Die before you die and you shall never die.

—Sufi saying

Now when the bardo of dying dawns upon me

I will abandon all grasping, yearning and attachment,

Enter the undistracted into clear awareness of the teaching,

And eject my consciousness into the space of the unborn Awareness.

As I leave this compound body of flesh and blood,

I will know it to be a transitory illusion.

—Padma Sambhava

Loss is essentially the end of an attachment. The loss of a relationship to anything, while it may not be permanent, is the same thing: the end, or death, of an attachment. This may be a relationship to another person, to an opinion, to time, to your own body, to the world, to Enlightenment, or to any number of other things. Our relationship to these things will change whether the ego wants them to or not, and our acceptance of the constancy of change can be absolutely terrifying. This situation is an amazingly rich source of pain since ego fears the loss, or death, of its control over our circumstances more than anything else.

Death is inextricably tied to birth in that these two aspects of our conventional circumstance are never separate. No matter what we might like to think, death will come to everything that is born even though we rarely operate with this realization at the forefront of our consciousness. But when we do live with death as a full partner in life, always being aware that our ultimate end is getting closer and closer to us at every minute, we get the chance to live differently. At least our priorities often change. Yet we can watch how ego does everything it can to prevent any type of full recognition, let alone participation, in this fundamental truth.

Instead of allowing itself to deal fully with the implications of an imminent death that it can’t escape, the ego ignores and often denies death itself. This is exactly the behavior we see when individuals would rather not go to the doctor for fear of hearing bad news or when we would rather be in denial of the problems a loved one’s chemical dependency is causing. The minute the ego can’t control a situation, it senses its insignificance. To avoid this disintegration of all the structure that it has built over time, the ego seeks stability in denial.

Why does the ego deny the fact that it can’t control everything? Because denying the death of its reign is something it can manage. If the deep and full recognition of death’s eventuality were to accurately unfold in our consciousness and an appropriate reprioritization of our living ensued, the ego would start to lose the foundation of its existence.

An empowering relationship with death, on the other hand, means a deep change in business-as-usual. This shift from defense against change into total acceptance of change forces the ego to let go of its managerial and overt controlling tendencies. Here we die to the familiar and open to the unknown. Once this release happens, it’s as if we become ripe for the divine accident of Awakening.

While it’s true that we’re all going to die at some point, as will every other thing in the cosmos, this doesn’t negate the importance of any of life’s unfolding circumstances. Regardless of the temporary nature of all things, each and every single object that arises in our awareness offers us a direct Path to the Infinite, depending only on if we choose to follow it. Should we consciously approach our living through an intimacy with death? Or, should we generate pain for ourselves and others by denying that death is close? Should we continue the attachment to the status quo of life? Or should we look to see what is beyond it? The Path offered by these choices is always and forever ours to either take or avoid.

If we choose to climb higher by surrendering willingly to the Knowing that all things born into experience will also fall away from experience, we will be forced to look at everything in life as a chance for a serene death in each moment. This conscious and continual surrender allows us to experience, with tenderness, a conscious death of each moment before we experience the death of the body we temporarily inhabit. By truly allowing for this radical acceptance of impermanence, we die before we die and we are offered the chance to authentically experience the expansive and radiant Spirit that embraces and supports each part of our limited circumstance with an infinitely divine grace.