ja_mageia

We are so used to thinking of death as being the moment when life-as-we-know-it ends, that we rarely consider the possibility of other meanings and instances of death.  In this reflection I want to ponder on the various real and anticipated deaths that I experience recently.

It seems to me that there are a least three experiences of death in my life:

1. The most accessible is ‘le petit mort’ – the dying of that moment of blissful awareness that occurs with each ejaculation or orgasm;
2. The dying of the ego-mind - as spiritual awakening takes hold and each of the false identities is stripped away, however temporarily, to reveal the immanent soul; and
3. The dying of the physical body – as illness, trauma or and decay of the physical body take hold and this conscious life is extinguished.

I have been familiar with ‘le petit mort’ for over forty years.  As the Tao and Tantra practitioners have known for millennia, the physical, mental and emotional process that we call orgasm leads to a moment of sheer ecstasy.  We are brought inescapably into the present moment – we have no choice.  (You cannot be reviewing your finances, nor planning your holiday, when you orgasm!)  But no matter how much we might want to prolong this moment of bliss, it dies.  Tantra practice teaches us how to sustain it, through ‘edging’ in a wave-like process, but ultimately is dissipates and dies.  For most people, this death is immensely pleasurable; we seek to repeatedly orgasm several hundred times or more in our lives.

The death of the ego-mind is more challenging and painful, although ultimately of great relief.  Many of the greatest teachings describe human life on earth as an experience that is filled with inescapable and unpredictable suffering.  Different traditions explore such suffering as arising from attachment of people/objects, from past life karma, from human sin, from our flawed nature.  From childhood onwards, our minds evolve to “protect” us from such suffering by creating strategies for self-control, self-preservation, and perhaps self-delusion.  This is the mind at work.  And we come to identify our self with our mind; we belief we are who are mind says we are.  We develop complex personas full of labels: professional, attractive, fat, black, straight, male, middle-aged; as well as self-defeating ones – poor, hapless, unlucky, weak.  We become our ego-minds.  The process of spiritual awakening, of enlightenment, strips away these delusions to reveal aspects of the true, unchanging Self that lies at our core.  We face our truth.  Over recent months and years this has been immensely painful, stripping me of my deluded security in relationship, money, work, and home.  Yet who-I-am, or more accurately what-I-am remains: I survive; I am unaffected; I am whole.  The dying of the ego-mind is a liberation.

What I have yet to experience is the death of this physical body.  I cannot know when or how that will occur.  Neither do I know whether it has happened before in past lives.  And yet ... biologically, our bodies are dying all the time.  Each physical organ and tissue is constantly renewing itself.  Almost nothing that I was born into this world with physically, remains in my body today.

Buddhist dharma teaches that everything is “arising and ceasing” in a ceaseless, natural and timeless manner.  This is true in each of these three manifestations of death.  Each of these deaths brings us to an awareness of the present moment as the only time there is.  The first two deaths also take us to renewal and potential re-birth.  Orgasm is a life-creating force.  Spiritual awakening is a re-birth into the Divine.  Both are joyous.  So why do we fear bodily death so much?  It is our greatest attachment: an attachment to health, to our bodies, to life, at all costs.  We perpetuate it medically and we avoid it socially.  Yet, “all of life is but a preparation for death”.  What do we have to fear?