Preparing

Human beings spend all their lives preparing. Preparing, preparing… Only to meet the next life unprepared.

Drakpa Gyaltsen

from, Glimpse After Glimpse,

Sogyal Rinpoche

ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ

    How do I prepare for the next life without preparing for this one? All the spiritual paths involving reincarnation and religious concepts of an afterlife leave my brain numb. I can’t honestly believe them; otherwise, why do we mourn the dead? Still, I know that these are essential to most religions. This does little to salve the fear of death in most of us. I can see it as being absorbed back into the cosmos but even that is too cold and difficult to wrap my brain around.
    Then I see it. It is now. Now is eternal and eternal life is in this moment. Preparation for anything other than now is an exercise in futility and an evasion of sorts. Even the Carpenter is said to have spoken of it (replacing the word God to words more to my liking) in Matthew 22:32; “The Heart of Compassion is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Being in the moment, open to compassion, and able to act spontaneously is what takes the sting out of death and whatever physical pain I suffer. I can’t do this scurrying about looking for solutions or gathering beliefs that have little or no foundation in personal experience.
    I believe in the Heart of Compassion because I experienced compassion when the obsession to drink was lifted and not because I have created opinions to explain that experience; especially not the opinions of the experience of others and this is true about whatever the next life is proposed to be about.

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