Archive for the 'who dies?' Category

Dress rehearsal for dying

Published
by
Ken
on April 6, 2007
in death, stephen levine and who dies?
. 3 Comments

You can really learn a lot from a one year old. My daughter has a cold — runny nose, juicy sneezes, etc. Occasionally she will get a little fussy or cranky but for the most part she acts the same as when she is not sick. I can still make her smile and laugh. She still listens to stories. She still crawls around on the floor and plays.

Unlike me! Most of us shut down when we are sick or have headaches or other pains. We don’t smile or laugh. We want to be left alone. We want the world to know that we are miserable. And if we do allow any interaction it must be perfectly clear that we are allowing it at great sacrifice to ourselves.

Stephen Levine, in Who Dies? talks about sickness as a dress rehearsal for death. From the chapter titled “Be Also Ready” (emphasis mine):

In a way, it seems strange that we are so unprepared for death, considering how many opportunities we have to open to what is unexpected or even disagreeable. Each time we don’t feel well, each time we have the fly or a kidney stone or a pain and stiffness in the back, we have the opportunity to see that sooner or later some pain or illness is going to arise that won’t diminish but will increase until it displaces us from the body. We can use each such situation as an extraordinary opportunity to practice the death chant, to practice Gandhi’s closeness with God. We are reminded again and again of the process we are. Continually opportunities arise to practice letting go of this solidness, to tune to the ongoing process, to sense the spaciousness in which it’s all unfolding.

Why wait until the pain is too great to focus the mind? Why not use each moment of sickness, each flu, each cold, each slight injury, as a reminder to let go, to open to the intenisty arising?

When pain or sickness arises I see there is the option to open to it, not holding or pushing it away, not blocking it, not intensifying it. When I open to it as a teacher it no longer reinforces identification with “the sufferer,” “the victim of circumstances,” It’s just what is. And as I try to open to it, I see how it is a perfect preparation for whatever might come next, a deeper letting go. It shows me how I hold to any expectation that life has to be any way at all. Being sick or accidentally hitting my thumb with a hammer becomes preparation for the impossible, for dying, for living in the next unknown moment of life.

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Merging of the heart and mind

Published
by
Ken
on March 27, 2007
in quotes, stephen levine and who dies?
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The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning of things is not understood
the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

—Hsin Hsin Ming by the 3rd Zen patriarch. Translation by Richard B. Clarke

from Who Dies? by Stephen Levine, p. 69.

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I can’t get no satisfaction

Published
by
Ken
on March 26, 2007
in quotes, stephen levine and who dies?
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Your search for “the perfect mango” or “the hottest sports car” has at its core a feeling of unsatisfactoriness. Then there comes the moment of satisfaction. The moving from not having to having that comes as you catch a glimpse of that longed-for mango. You become exhilarated. “Oh, it’s yellow. Oh, what a beautiful mango!” And the mango is in your hand and there is a moment of peace. For a split second there is no desire in the mind and the body feels very light. Peace is experienced not because of the object in our hand but because for a moment desire does not obstruct the joy and quietude of our underlying nature. What we call satisfaction is the momentary experience of the vastness which lies beneath. All of a sudden the clouds part and the sun shines through. The painfulness of desire does not exist. The mind for a moment experiences its wholeness. In that moment of nonwanting, the mind becomes like a clear pool no longer ruffled by the prevailing winds and we can see through the still water to what lies beneath. We experience a moment’s participation in the joyousness that arises as we approach our true nature.

In a split second this satisfaction disappears as other desires arise to protect what it has just acquired. To hide the mango, to plant its seed, to get as much out of it as possible. Freedom is lost in the density of yet more wanting, of yet more protection and self-interest.

—Stephen Levine, Who Dies? (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982), pp. 44-45. (Emphasis mine)

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… and the pursuit of happiness

Published
by
Ken
on March 26, 2007
in quotes, stephen levine and who dies?
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What we usually call happiness is the ability to re-create previous pleasures. The pursuit of happiness is the attempt to satisfy old desires. The very nature of desire is a feeling of unwholeness, of being incomplete. We see that this thirst creates what could be called the “if only” mind. The yearning that says, “If only I could get my sports car, I’d be happy.” “If only I could get that job, or that date, or that money I need, then everything would be O.K.” But to the degree the mind wants that object yet unmaterialized in its world, the less it can be present for what is happening. It is drifting off in future pleasures or musing on satisfactions past. The whole world narrows to just that desire, just that sports car, that prize, that pretty face. The whole world disappears into expectation and life is missed once again, traded off for a mirage floating in the mind. We seldom make direct contact with reality, but instead live only in the flat silhouettes that it casts in the mind.

— Stephen Levine, Who Dies? (Anchor Books, 1982), pp. 43-44.

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Just a thought … on being born (again)

Published
by
Ken
on March 26, 2007
in born again, christianity, jesus, just a thought ..., stephen levine and who dies?
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From chapter 2, “Being Born,” of Who Dies? by Stephen Levine:

The body dies, the mind is constantly changing. But somehow, behind it all there is a presence, called by some “the deathless,” that is unchanging, that simply is as it is.

To become fully born is to touch this deathlessness. To experience, even for a moment, the spaciousness which goes beyond birth and death. To emerge into a world of paradox and mystery with no weapon but awareness and love.

When I read this, I was struck by its similarity to “born again“? Deathless. Beyond birth and death. A dying body but a living presence.

But Levine is not talking about Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus from John chapter 3. Earlier, he says:

Discover yourself. Because you are the truth. And no one can take you there except you. Buddha left a road map. Jesus left a road map. Krishna left a road map. Rand McNally left a road map. But you still have to travel the road yourself.

No. Levine is talking about the essence of things that is everyone. “Being” itself. Our bodies, our minds, our joys, our fears, all that we attach to are not “us” but are outside “us.” This essence is the church or the body of Christ or the kingdom of Heaven or … One body but many members. One body of which we all are a part.

God is not “out there.” God is “in here.” After all, Jesus said that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” and what’s closer to us that our Self, our Being?

Just a thought …

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“Who Dies?” by Stephen Levine

Published
by
Ken
on March 20, 2007
in carl jung, shadow, stephen levine, who dies? and wholeness
. 0 Comments

I just started reading Who Dies? by Stephen Levine. Tim Freke recommended this book and I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj to a mutual friend and I am deeply indebted to him. Tim is an amazing person and if you ever get the chance to attend one of his events I highly recommend doing so. Here are a few paragraphs from Chapter 2 of Who Dies?:

There is so much of ourselves we wish not to experience. So much fear, guilt, anger, confusion, and self-pity. Sop much self-doubt, so many weak excuses. Is it any wonder, considering the bizarre insistence of our conditioning — the conflict of one value system with another in the mind — that we feel so incomplete. One moment the mind is saying. “Take a big piece,” and then the next it says, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you.” No wonder we are all crazy, so fractured, trying to protect ourselves from who we fear we are. We dare not share out minds with anyone, even ourselves. We are so frightened of who we might , of not being loved or lovable for the convolutions of our thoughts.

But states of mind, though uninvited, are constantly coming and going, and some we wish would ever come again. They do, and we find ourselves scrambling for leverage to keep our fear down, experiencing the nausea of our immense insecurity and self-loathing.

This persistent elimination from awareness of unwanted states of mind leaves us constantly feeling threatened as we look and say regretfully, “That can’t be me, that fear isn’t really who I am. Anger isn’t me. That self-hatred, that guilt, can’t be who I am.” But there it is. And you wonder who you really are. How do you open to that which you deny? That which you think somehow shouldn’t be there even though it is?

We wish we were otherwise and that is our hell, our resistance to life.

It is almost as though we have become a fractured image of our original being. Our experience with the world has become like looking into a mirror that a great stone has fallen on and shattered into hundreds of pieces, broken from a single unified reality into some splintered reflection of what is seen, of what is imagined to exist. As we look at this fractured reality, we notice with dismay certain parts of the reflection are not what we wish to see or want to be seen. “I don’t want anyone so see my lust; that’s not such a good thing to have. I’m not supposed to be like that. No one’s mind is as crazy as mine.” So we take a piece out. “Oh, there I am really sorry for myself. If they only knew what my life had been like! Ah, but they don’t.” And that piece is removed as well. You notice your greed and self-interest, the sexual fantasies, the competition and confusion of the mind. And you start picking these pieces out. Because these are unacceptable parts of who you think you are supposed to be.

But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it “the mind” instead of “my mind.”

Because when you call it “my mind” you start removing so many pieces that when you look down at this fractured mirror it reflects back very little of what is real. It only displays those qualities you wish to project as being who you are, eliminating all the rest, eluding your wholeness. We thing we have something to hide. Yet this self-protection is our imprisonment. Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear “your” thoughts and fantasies, “your” dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgemental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?

To be whole we must deny nothing.

What Levine is saying here really fits in well with the Jungian idea of “the shadow” and how we must integrate our shadow into our lives instead of continuing to repress and deny it. Robert Bly has a marvelous book called A Little Book on the Human Shadow. It truly is “little” — you can easily read the whole thing in one short sitting. In it, Bly compares our shadow with a bag that we drag around behind us and into which we put all the things from ourselves that don’t “work.” All our “negative” traits that we are not “supposed” to have or that are not “socially acceptable” or that are not “religiously acceptable” are shoved into our bag. The problem is that when something happens that triggers the release of one of these emotions — and that inevitably will happen — it comes roaring out of the bag like a sumo wrestler on PCP. If we don’t integrate our shadow it reacts out of our control and that’s not a pretty sight.

As C.G. Jung said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”

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