top of page

A CULTURE THAT HAS FORGOTTEN HOW TO DIE


"An end is a beggining for each ending carries in its womb the possibility of a new beggining "


Azim Jamal, Sufi







Instead of relating with death as a process that lies in the distant future, as Seneca said death is a process happening to all of us , right now.


Death follows, claiming every moment that has passed.


Memento Mori its a primal spiritual practice in the alchemy of being, it help us to put things into perspective at any given moment, helping us to soften, like the softest layer of the earth, the hummus, allowing us to be humble, to soften and open into allowing ourselves to die in every moment, so that when our departure time arrives we simply through our familiarization with this supernatural process , can let go and there is no pain, because living in the moment has been complete and absolute.


“Wash yourself of yourself,” says Rumi “Be melting snow.”


In Kabbalah , this process is known as bitul hayesh, “nullification of one’s somethingness,” and is consciously cultivated through prayer

In Sufism, it is fana, where the soul attains complete unity with Allah. In every case, there is a dying of the false self into the truth of the Divine.


“God, whose love and joy are present everywhere,” said Angelus Silesius, the seventeenth-century german mystic and poet, “cannot come to visit you unless you are not there.”

-Mirabai Starr



In the tantric tradition it is said that chaos is ‘extremely good news.’ When you are willing to enter into your neurosis, your confusion, and your hopelessness, you approach the threshold of the sacred world.

No matter where you look, all you can see is path. All of your experience is utterly valid and a pure reflection of life as it moves through you – life longing to know itself, finally, to be met, held, and metabolized within the vastness of loving presence.

You are starting to see that what appears is not a mistake, but a clear expression of a long-forgotten aspect of awareness, of an ancient vow you have taken to practice intimacy with all things. Each person, each holy feeling, each consecrated emotion a portal dropping into embodied presence.

It is risky to let in the reality that nothing is missing, that you are not flawed, and are not in need of fixing – that you could fully step into the miracle of the unfolding here and now, without first demanding life conform to your old dreams. You need not ‘heal your past,’ become ‘enlightened,’ meet your soul mate, manifest a cool spiritual job, or arrange your life circumstances according to the dictates of your hopes and fears. The kingdom of presence is here now. There is no love coming in the future. There is no grace arriving around the corner. It is shining out of your very body, pouring out of somatic pathways, and emerging out of your holy nervous system… right here, right now.

The risk of entering the gates of the mandala of wholeness is that, once inside, you will no longer be able to hide from your raging natural perfection. The dream of the unworthy one, the spell of the unlovable one, and the trance of the broken one will be dissolved in the crucible of aliveness. While a part of you will always yearn for this dissolution, you must ask to what degree this is what you truly want. For it is the disorienting end of one world and the glorious beginning of another.

Yes, it may seem like yet another ordinary Monday and that you are in an ordinary situation. But things are rarely what they seem. Please do not postpone your participation and wild embodiment for another moment. Love is here now. And is longing for you to offer yourself as a holding vessel through which it may come fully alive here. Love cannot do this without you. For love is you.”


—Matt Licatta




Culture is a cultivation. At the basis of life and death our culture must be a fabric that hold us based on the truth of existence. The continuum of care must be the diamond at the center of this cultivation.


“Falling unconscious is a device we use against things we are afraid of.

Falling unconscious is our unique way of dealing with unbearable pain.

You only feel pain as long as it is bearable;

When the pain becomes unbearable, you are gone; hence you never feel unbearable pain. “


Osho


Accepting the dominant narrative where we fall into a hypnotic trance of unconsciousness to bear the pain of what we are losing as a culture by avoiding transcendental questions to be cultivated in community is the ultimate paradox.


“Our illusion of death is a social illusion.”


“God is not really


The center

Of religious enquiry,


Death is.

Without death there would have been no religion at all.


Is it death that makes man seek and search for the beyond,


the deathless.”






People involved in Bardo give anti-hypnotic suggestions to a dying man.

In Bardo,


People gather around a dying man and tell him,

You are not dying, because no one has ever died.

No weeping, no wailing. Nothing else will be done.


YOU ARE NOT DYING.

BECAUSE NO ONE EVER DIES.

You will depart relaxed and fully conscious. You will not die, because no one ever dies.

The person closes his eyes and the entire process is narrated to them:

Now their life energy has left their legs, now it has left their hands,

Now they cannot speak, and yet the people are told that they will still remain.


You will still remain.


Remember.




If you have even had a little experience of meditation, if you ever had a glimpse of truth that you were separated from your body.


If the feeling of dis-identification with the body should even for a moment go deep within you,

-you wont be unconscious at the time of death. In fact, by then your state of unconsciousness would already be broken.

No one can ever die knowingly, consciously, because he remains aware all the time that he is not dying , that something is dying in him or her but he or she are not.


He or She keeps watching this separation and ultimately find that his or her body is lying away from them , at a distance.

Then death turns out to be merely a separation; amounts to the breaking of connection.



But it is possible to die in a state of awareness only if you have lived with awareness. If you have learned how to live consciously, you will certainly be able to die consciously - because dying is a phenomenon of life. In other words, death is the final happening of what you understand life to be. It is not an event that occurs outside of life.


One society, the West, acceptance of sex, taboo on death.

East, acceptance of death, taboo is sex.

Whenever a society suppresses does it expresses death; whenever a society suppresses death they become expressive about sex. Because sex and death are the two polarities of life. Sex means life, because life arises out of it. Life is a sexual phenomenon with death at the end of it.


You cannot reconcile them, it is easier to forget one and remember the other one.

At the highest peak of orgasm, death and life exist both together. You experience life at its peak and death at its depth. The peak and the depth are both available at one moment.

A total culture, a holy culture, will accept both.

Each moment you are both life and death. To understand this is to transcend duality.


If you know how to receive death in great celebration, in greater joy and delight - almost dancing and in ecstasy- you will not be born again. Your lesson is complete. Now you are ready to move on for a greater mission, for a greater life and for more unlimited life. Now you are ready to be absorbed by the cosmos, by the whole. You have earned it.


-Osho




bottom of page