"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have." ~ James Baldwin
Death is the key to life. Death defines life, gives it shape and meaning and context. Without a clear and honest relationship with our mortality, we live in a state of endless spiritual sprawl, a soupy gray fog that creates that hellish illusion of life stretching endlessly in all directions.
We’ve homogenized our lives by hiding the parts we’re afraid of, and in so doing, we’ve removed all sense of urgency from life. We have taken death out of life and that allows us to live unconsciously. Death never left, of course, we’ve just turned away from it, pretended it wasn’t there. If we wish to awaken - and that’s a mighty big if - then we must welcome death back into our lives. Death is our own personal Zen Master, our source of power, our path to lucidity, but we have to stop running from it in a blind panic.
We need only stop and turn around and there it is, inches away, staring at us with unblinking gaze, finger poised, every second of our lives. That finger is the one true thing in the dream-state, and it will, for a fact, come down.
Death-awareness is the universal spiritual practice. What we have sought in books and magazines, in teachers and teachings, in ancient cultures and foreign lands, has been breathing down our neck the entire time. It’s not just another mood-making spiritual technique that you dabble with for a few weeks and blame yourself when it doesn’t deliver. Death always delivers. Death is your only true friend, the only friend that will never abandon you and that no one can take away. It slices through every lie, ridicules every belief, mocks every vanity and reduces ego to absurdity. He’s sitting with you right now. If you want to know something, ask him. Death doesn’t lie.
The inverse of death-awareness is equally important. Learn to practice death-denial awareness. Anytime you find yourself sitting on the couch watching TV, shopping in the mall, or trying to find amusement in some pointless book or idle pastime, remind yourself that this is exactly the habit you want to break. Try to catch yourself in all the situations throughout the day when you are not awake, not aware, going through the motions of your life in a virtually somnambulistic state. Remind yourself constantly: This moment, right now, I am in the sleep-state. This is the mindlessness I’m addicted to like a drug. I am an opium addict living in an opium dream. This is the coma; this slow oozing of my life down the drain. Right now, my life is slipping away.
Another powerful thing about the practice and cultivation of death-awareness is that it provides an accurate barometer of your own spiritual sincerity, though you may not want one. Anyone can go sour on mainstream religion and adopt a less orthodox belief system to replace it, but how many people are really sincere in their spiritual aspirations?
Probably everyone thinks they are, but are YOU really? Are you willing to go wherever this leads? To do whatever it takes? Thousands talk the talk for one who walks the walk. The practice of death-awareness separates the walkers from the talkers. We can use this as a spiritual self-diagnostic to determine, once and for all, if spirituality is something we’re serious about or if we’re just tourists. Most are just tourists, but which of us are sincere and which are dabblers?
If you want to answer this question for yourself, here’s your chance. Your relationship to your own mortality tells the tale. Everyone is either facing toward it or turned away from it, it’s that simple. Toward or away. If you can’t face the most fundamental fact of your own existence, what can you face? This is ground floor, entry-level awakening. It doesn’t get any closer or simpler than this.
If, based on the posts in this thread, your life does not undergo major restructuring over the next few months, then you have your answer; you’re a tourist with no real desire or intent to wake up. What you do with that knowledge is up to you. Maybe you don’t want to know the answer to this question, but if you don’t want to know, then you know.
Kristopher
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