Death and Eternity

You know, of course, that you will die, but it remains a mere mental concept until your first meeting "personal" with death: a severe illness or injury happens to you or a loved one afflicted, or the death of a loved one. Death then enters your life in that time awareness of your own mortality.

Most people turn away from fear, but if you do not stumble and face the impermanence of your body that could dissolve at any time, you reach a certain degree of misidentification, however slight, of your physical and psychological. When you see and accept the transitory nature of all life forms, a strange sense of peace settles in you.

In facing death, your consciousness is freed to some degree of identification with form. Therefore, in Buddhist traditions, the monks regularly visit the morgue to meditate sitting among the remains.

Western culture maintains a general denial of death. Even older people are trying not to talk or think about it, and we hide the bodies. A culture that denies death ends up being superficial, concerned only with the outward form of things. When we deny death, life loses its depth. The possibility of who we are beyond name and form, or to obtain the dimension of the transcendent, disappears from our life, since death is the gateway to this dimension.

People tend to live an end with discomfort, because every end is a little death. Therefore, in many languages, the term used when one leaves means "goodbye. "

Each time an experiment is nearing completion - a gathering of friends, a holiday, the departure of children - we saw a little dead. A "form ", that experience has shown in your consciousness, dissolves, and it often leaves an empty feeling that most people try not to feel, not to confront.