michaelsharrington (Hridayam)

What if you realized the greatest adventure of your life awaited you?

What if you were just informed by a medical doctor that a previously unrevealed medical condition had infiltrated your body with serious and disabling effects?

The body is dying, your body. There’s no treatment. Your remaining life expectancy is 3 to 6 months.

Or perhaps you’ve had cancer for some years and now the treatment options have dried up. You’ve tried everything. Maybe you could disregard the prognosis, and try by sheer force of will to overcome this newest forecast and obstacle to body longevity.

It’s worked before, you thought. It might work for some time longer if that’s your destiny.

It might not.

One day willfulness surely won’t work any longer. All bodies perish; that’s the deal. Even the Jokers have to eventually leave the deck.

You could still try one last round of experimental chemo. The doctor told you “It might give you another few weeks”…

What would you do?! Maybe follow the advice of the latest best-seller: “Six Months to Live”-and take that trip to the Bermuda Triangle, you know, the one you always wanted to take… Oh, wait, the latest news- delivered hot off the medical press has put you smack dab in the middle of Bermuda’s lovely Triangle already!

You could spend your time researching alternative and natural treatments for your condition…and try to completely change your lifestyle. Maybe that will fix it.

Maybe not.

Taking a flight to the Canary Islands might be tried. Walking on the sand, letting the waves lap against your feet—if you can still walk. Maybe you might stare out the window from your wheelchair, imbibing some topical oxygen while watching the birds fly passed the island oasis…What’s that you say: it’s Covid-19 Pirola Variant, aka BA.2.86 which is “highly mutated and has evolved from the endless variants before it and international travel is now banned.

That option’s out.

I guess you could spend your last weeks and months watching sports on TV or highlights on the internet. How about checking out a death-themed movie…you know an upbeat one, like The Notebook or The Leisure Seeker, where the lovebirds depart together on their final earthly adventure?

It’s also possible you could get furious with God. Cuss out the Big Dude, become rebellious, and turn angry and resentful, or cry uncontrollably for hours, days, or weeks. What about getting drunk for a week and smoking weed until you laugh? Maybe you could let fear run amok, have panic take over, and just succumb to the raving lunatic takeover.

You might just try to keep yourself busy, totally preoccupied, and let the restless mind go wild with anything but the idea of your earthly demise. Perhaps you will stay fully focused on all the things you must do, without a break, even while you eat and evacuate, constantly planning, strategizing, and working on a never-ending to-do list of ridiculous space fillers that have imaginary importance only to the fictitious identity you have created within your mind.

Beyond all that, there might be better options: Use your gifts and resources to help someone other than yourself, or make amends with those you may have hurt, or forgive those that might have hurt you. Go out of your way to reveal and heal any threads of discontent in your relationships and life.

Deeper than that: get to know who and what you are, at the deepest level, beyond appearances of name and form.

Have you anything more important to do? The hourglass with the built-in timer full of sand has been invisibly dropping into the abyss below…suddenly it’s in the front windshield. Not even denial will make it go away. Your body is preparing to leave the earthly sphere.

Any number of scenarios like this could be thrust upon you. And at some point, they will be.

What if a mass extinction event played out but did not take your body instantaneously? Over several weeks you begin to experience severe radiation poisoning from a nuclear accident or are injured by a cataclysmic earthquake or volcanic eruption, while trapped under rubble and debris?

You have no time to prepare. How do you respond? If you have not investigated who and what you are in Reality, what death is, great fear and panic would grip your final weeks, days, hours, and minutes.

The truth is: You’re dying, or are you?!

Death is the great unknown, the mystery shrouded in the darkness of ignorance, which means we ignore the light switch of our awareness. Turn that switch on and the darkness fades. There is nothing to fear.

The Tibetans, those following the Buddhist tenets, have been spending days at the graveyard, meditating, while others sleep inside the cemetery at night. Their mattress is the bodiless spirits; their pillow for the night is a tombstone on top of decaying corpses.

They face death; and see beyond appearances.

The Tibetan Buddhists know that death is one of the most precious opportunities of life. This opportunity is best-taken advantage of through the practice of surrender, which is wiser than attempting to control life circumstances. And by equanimity, balanced in the center, like a climber on a knife-edged ridge, full of exultation, yet fearless, knowing death could come at any moment, but living life to the fullest.

The body temple will end; it’s on the way, soon to be wiped off the map.

The Tibetan tradition is enriched by illumined Masters who have given us a roadmap about the journey that our subtle luminous and eternal Being takes in the transition-phase of consciousness we call: dying and death.

The Tibetan Buddhists have investigated this no man’s land, what is called the bardo of becoming- including the actual moment of death and then a state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth, where consciousness is not connected with a body form-wherein over 49 days, they tell us, the newly-deceased realizes they have passed on and begins a reflective review period of their past life. The Tibetans believe that in the bardos it is possible to see and experience various happenings and rapid spiritual progress can be made.

Dia de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, is celebrated in Mexico. During this multi-day gathering, the living embodied beings meet with their formless friends and relatives, those who have died. They help each other on the Spiritual Journey. This gathering is not a space for unrelenting grief and sadness but a celebration of eternal life. (By the way, this is brilliantly depicted in the 2019 animated movie: Coco. In the Vedanta tradition of India, death is looked at through three angles of vision.

Vedanta distinguishes between gross and subtle body, you could say between body-form and the formless soul. The formless or soul aspect reincarnates and continues after the death of the body and is then transferred to the next body.

The body dies, decays, and disappears. The soul or subtle body containing the “I-Consciousness” and subtle psycho-emotional elements and latent tendencies of the mind not yet manifested called agami karma, continues.

The word “death” is not real in Vedanta. A better word is transition or transformation (shifting of form), implying continuance of consciousness.

Those are the first two angles of vision. They are only useful in the relative sphere, to tame the mind and calm those that question the Ultimate Reality.

According to Vedanta, the only true angle of vision is this:

All is ONE, Brahman, the Absolute and Eternal SELF, some might call GOD.

These three angles of vision as they relate to death are summarized beautifully by Ramana Maharshi, a great Indian sage of the early 20th century.

Depending upon the point of view of the questioner, their spiritual depth, and understanding, Ramana would answer at times through one of both of the two relative viewpoints, at least at first, but then move the questioner to the deepest viewpoint or Absolute angle of vision, through his potent words, silent presence, and by advising them to use Self-inquiry a method of investigation of reality, where the mind is seen as a phantom and simply a bundle of thoughts. So Ramana would say:

“The thoughts are only latent tendencies of mind (which he called vasanas or samskaras) accumulated in innumerable births before. Their annihilation is the aim. The state free from these latent tendencies is the primal state and eternal state of purity.”

Then Ramana would guide them to the Ultimate viewpoint of the Self:

“If a man considers he is born he cannot avoid the fear of death. Let him find out if he has been born or if the Self (as Absolute Consciousness) has any birth. He will discover that the Self (his Real and True Existence) always exists, that the body which is born resolves itself into thought, and that the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find where thoughts emerge. Then you will abide in the ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth or the fear of death.”

In Vedanta, when one consciously departs the earthly realm without the least vestige of memory or thought, it is called mahasamadhi, the completion or conscious final departure. There is no more return to reincarnation in the earthly sphere.

So you have 3-6 months left in the body garb, the human frame of flesh, bones, and skin, the temporary holy temple.

Time enough to discover and directly experience the Elixir of Infinite Peace. Time to get sincere and dead earnest, to realize that only the ship sinks, the mortal body, but YOU survive as SPIRIT.

You can take nothing with you on this Final Cruise but have the choice to switch your light on and be conscious and watch the body drop, witness the dissolution which reveals the truth of Eternal Essence or Formless Being.

This will require you to remain still, watching with full awareness. Do not succumb to sensations, feelings, thoughts, pains, pleasures, fantasy, or imagination for even one instant and that will be enough to glimpse your Eternal Existence.

You must remain fully in the now, the continuous moment. You cannot miss this Rocket Launch. It’s coming 10…9…8….7…

So get busy- not in doing- but in falling into Being.

Begin to see the dissolution which is always taking place. Slough off the thoughts, say goodbye to the thinker, step off the hamster wheel, and see through the pleasure and pain game, how it keeps going, and what perpetuates it.

Watch closely, begin to die now to all the old decaying concepts, beliefs, and ideas. They’re all going and cannot come with you. They were worthless to begin with.

You might as well start now. Waiting until the final weeks and days when the mental, physical, and emotional resources have dwindled, your life force wavering will allow fear, panic, and dread to enter.

You must turn all your attention, full awareness, to the Source. That Source might feel empty of substance or the mind will tell you that the effort is ‘a waste of time’.

Still, you must persevere, return Home by crumbling the walls your mind has built around you, and realize the radiance that has always been.

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