Life/Death

Eternity & the Bardo of life

Life, as Buddha told us, is as brief  as a lightening flash; yet, as Wordsworth said: The world is too much with us: Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” It is that laying waste of our powers --- that betrayal of our essence, that abandonment of the miraculous chance that this life, the natural bardo, gives us a knowing and embodying our enlightened nature --- that is perhaps the most heartbreaking thing about human life. What the masters are essentially telling us is to stop fooling ourselves: What will we have learned, if at the moment of death we do not know who we really are?

Glimpse After Glimpse,

Sogyal Rinpoche

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There was a time when I looked down my nose at the emphasis placed on death by all the spiritual disciplines. I believed that this was done because of its inevitability…the fear… the powerlessness that everyone breathing has over it. Most religions promise a life after death in one way or another: heaven or hell… reincarnation... or, in some Western faiths, life exclusively for the righteous. The very idea that one should deny life in order to prepare for death seems to be a morbid preoccupation.  In this regard I believe an atheist has a healthier respect for life because an atheist knows that this is it.... if there is a meaning it is in this life. The idea, that this bell rings, is about living life to the fullest, draws me. It compels me to desire life… life for the living… and it gives me a unique perspective on suffering. Fear of living loses its grip when I consider where I was before I was born… before the egg of life was fertilized and I began the grasping to have more of it. Isn’t that... that blank in consciousness... where I will go when the curtain closes? Now, this exciting prelude from non-existence is the motivation… I want to live life in its fullness in this moment… this eternity between breaths. In the words of Bob Dylan, we are either “busy being born are busy dying.” Between the past and the present is this place… this state of mind… this bardo… Om.

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