A big part of living a conscious life means that we are living fully at every moment, aware and accepting of the fact that at any moment we might die. At this point of experience, everything simultaneously becomes a gift and a mystery. But there is a common spiritual confusion with this carpe diem attitude. Some practitioners feel that conscious living means that we should “go for it, because nothing matters.” The fearlessness that comes with the go-for-it attitude can be helpful along the Path, but any fixation that “nothing matters” is dangerous unless the mindset is met with a clear sense of ethics and responsibility. This is why an enlightened recognition must be also met with a purposeful relationship to an ethical code. The Precepts arose out of Zen and other Buddhist practices for this very reason. The Old Testament offers us the Ten Commandments, which provide similar guidance, and other traditions do the same. Allowing a deep intimacy with these rules, rather than attaching to them, prepares us for embodying the equanimity that comes with an Awakened perspective.

This embodiment, which we’ll discuss in greater detail later, comes from an appreciation for the mystery of life. Consciously participating in this mystery means that we continually look at everything we do as an ongoing rehearsal for our eventual physical death. In this context, every inhalation is a birth, and every exhalation a death. Each moment, like every other thing, is born from a vast and divine Emptiness, lives for a while, and then dies back into the same vastness.

Meditation becomes the conscious enactment of this rehearsal of death, one where our separate sense of self dies to our recognition that we are in fact nothing less than the entire Universe manifesting in this experience at this moment. With sustained awareness, we begin to let go of our tightly held story that we are somehow separate and special. In fact we see that we are all things. Our perspective on death changes as this process shows itself. So, too, does our perspective on life. Suddenly the stuff that we used to cling to and crave, avoid and resist, is truly meaningless when viewed through enlightened eyes that are no longer limited by the lenses of the small self. Uncovering this new clarity, we die to the contracted, ego-driven panic that governs our conventional circumstance. We are thus awakened to all that we truly are as we begin to lead an Ultimate Life.

And yet the losses associated with death can be so very painful. Awakening won’t take away this pain. In fact, Awakening never insulates us from life’s challenges; it allows these to be expressed more fully in our awareness. Awakening relentlessly forces upon us the grandeur of each experience, and opening to this grandeur gives us each a chance not to get caught by anything. Awakening reveals the inner spaciousness and courage that let us experience everything more completely. We get to meet life’s intensity with even more sensitivity, care, intention, and fearlessness. Awakening offers the use of a mind that is neither ossified nor closed, but one that is soft, flexible, present, and open. Because of this, an Awakened mind experiences life in the most dynamic and undefended way imaginable. Tears of grief might flow more freely. The intensity of fear, anger, and passion that we feel in our conventional circumstances might be much more powerful than before we started to meditate regularly. But this enlightened relationship to each birth and death in our experience allows us to meet each circumstance with even more presence without succumbing to any grasping or resistance.

This kind of Freedom is probably best seen in the faces of people who can face life’s temptations but aren’t necessarily compelled to give in to them. This isn’t to say that there is anything wrong with temptation, but when any of us is no longer internally obliged to take temptations on or when we are no longer caught by what they might offer, we are Free.

I noticed this quality in a monk that I knew in Thailand. In his speech, his walk, and the way he ate, there was what could best be described as total ease with it all. He seemed to glide through his days. Nothing seemed to catch him: the local lay female practitioners who thought he was so handsome; the other monks who were in many cases oddly competitive with him; and even what he regarded as the “misrepresentation of the Dharma” by one of the monastery’s senior teachers. He simply was free of all of it, and yet totally engaged in living. Like Christ, he seemed to be, “in the world, but not of it.”

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