The Buddha’s decree was simply this, “Death does not exist.” He proclaimed the Deathless, which is not a different life: it is this life lived from a different perspective. He suggests awakening to death as an advisor and allowing it to reveal our miscalculations, misplaced identity, and misunderstood truths. We are asked to use death as its own foundation referencing everything back through it. It holds the suffering and contains the liberation.
Inquire whether love lives within death. Notice whether love renews itself in your thoughts or in stillness. Where is its natural home, and from what does it spring forth? Can you prolong love through your narrative? Does love arise within the moment or is it a product of your thinking? Live love and see for yourself what confines it and what sets it free.
Love needs to be refreshed moment after moment, and protracted thinking inhibits love’s renewal. All the heart qualities like caring and kindness are immediate expressions of the heart and are accessible here and now as long as the mind is not obstructing the heart with a narrative. From our personal point of view it appears as if the heart is here one moment and gone the next, having its own timing and duration. In fact, we are turning away from the heart by reliving and prolonging what just occurred. In order to come back to ever-present love we have to die to the thought of love. Love lives within the death of form; it lives within the stillness that surrounds the words and not within the words themselves.
Settle yourself into a quiet position and ask what cannot die. When you ask that question what usually floods the consciousness is everything that can and will die. You may start thinking and emoting about the question, you may get nervous and become restless, or you may become fearful of this line of inquiry. Let everything that can die, including your entire consciousness, start to settle, and then ask the question again. If everything of form dies, what is left? What holds form? Continue to encourage that question forth until you settle into a deeper and deeper repose. What is the seat of aliveness itself? If everything that moves must die, what does not move and therefore cannot die? As you quiet even further, you will rest your questioning upon the stillness that sees.
Those who are physically close to death can remain distant from the subject as well by placing a lifetime of mental content between themselves and their death. They worry about their loved ones, their lack of forgiveness, their remorse and grief, their religious convictions, or the symptoms they may be facing as death approaches. Each mental disturbance keeps them tangential to their death by making these subjects more important than the understanding of death. To abide within death, death must be our central focus, or the wisdom within dying will pass us by; and like many of life’s experiences, we will move through death without any recognition of the depth and profundity it contains.
We invest so much expectation into the body that we will not allow it to show us its dissolution, but death is the gateway through which form returns to the formless.
Reflect upon a time when your body was hurt or injured. Was the physical limitation annoying? If so, it meant the injury represented an unrealized expectation: something you would like to do but no longer could. Every injury potentially has two expressions of healing. The first is the physical healing of the injury itself. The second is the healing of the mind back into the body. During this healing the mind genuinely cares for the fact that the body is hurt and reconnects with the body. What is healed during this phase is the rift between what the body can no longer do that irritates the mind and the compassion of the mind for an injured body. This is the most important expression of healing, since we are now aligning ourselves with the reality of the loss of potential.
It is not possible to listen without being aware. Awareness is listening. Notice the quality of listening when you are waiting to speak as opposed to wanting to understand. How thorough is your listening when you know what the other person is going to say or when you have opinions about what is being said? See if you can recognize in yourself the underlying qualities of pure listening: innocence, not knowing, receptivity, humility, and interest.
Has your practice moved beyond your control? You have to see the utter futility of manipulating your practice in any way before you will be willing to surrender control, and only then will a new possibility open. This means that the egoic sense of you obstructs a greater awareness. You have to acknowledge the interference you bring when you attempt to self-manage the mindfulness. To do that you have to begin to understand that the sense of you is an extension of the conditioned unconscious mind and that awareness is conscious and unconditioned. When you see how completely conditioned you are, you will want to leave awareness untouched in its pristine unconditioned state. How can the unconscious you have a role in making the mind more conscious? Look at yourself and ask whether you truly understand that you are a product of the mental process, not its controller. If you do you will stop believing in your ability to control awareness.
Get a sense of how you use mindfulness. For example, attend to whatever your hands are doing, noticing the physical sensations that are present. You can notice your hands in this way, or your feet, your shoulders, or whatever parts of the body you wish. You are having the experience of mindfulness and controlling where mindfulness goes. Now stop and shift perspectives. You must be very quiet to sense this reversal. Can you get a sense of awareness having the experience of you? Awareness in this exercise surrounds you but is not under your direction or control. The reason it felt like you were in control of mindfulness in the earlier example is because the mindfulness missed seeing the thought that created the sense-of-you as an experience. You omitted yourself within your mindfulness by placing yourself outside of the process that was occurring. Once you allow mindfulness to see that the sense of you can be experienced, awareness starts including you in its observation.
When we first start following our breath, we begin the process of uncoupling awareness from the mind’s overlay of thought, emotion, attitude, belief, and so on. At first it seems like an either/or process—either I am with the breath or I am thinking—but as the practice develops, both occur simultaneously. The knowing that thought is arising (awareness) occurs in chorus with the thought itself. This is the beginning of separating form from formlessness, and initiates a process that will consume much of our spiritual journey.
When we surrender our formation, we transmute form into the formless, and when we mentally invest in the concept of me, we resurrect ourselves back into existence. If we attempt to control this process, the very act of asserting our will keeps us within form, but once our personal will is surrendered there is nothing that can pull consciousness back into separation. This continual return to form through our control and the eventual surrender of our will back into the formless continues for some time. At some point the pull of our will is no longer strong enough to draw us out of the formless, and the formless surrounds and engulfs form.
The central issue of the spiritual journey is stepping out of the self-imposed deception of being someone. At a certain point you will recognize the truth of your own emptiness, and the practice can then become very simple. Surrender the need to be someone. That surrender takes you to deeper levels of self-identification, which must also be relinquished. Begin with the more gross expressions of yourself, encased within your reactions, dislikes, fears, and passions. See them arise and release them back to the quiet from which they came. As you refine your noticing, so too will the more nuanced areas of your persona begin to be seen. Let them be released into the stillness as well.
Surrender is the act of releasing our separation. We are not surrendering to someone or something but simply releasing the need to perpetuate the false belief of being a separate entity. If the sense-of-self is untrue, then it is better to let it go than to falsely sustain it. We do this not by making a problem out of the arising of self, but by releasing the story that supports it—and we do not allow a new story to form about how noble we are to release it. We surrender into silence, which means we surrender into the formless.
Once form and the formless are separated and understood, they return to their original union. When they reemerge they do not come back as either/or, they return inseparably as one and the same. The two were always identical. Form was confused as different from the formless because of the lure of form’s appearance. We did not see form in its true state of emptiness; we saw only what we wanted to see and pursued that appearance.
We want to be more conscious but repeatedly fall back into our habitual patterns of delusion. Insights are helpful, but it takes a while for an insight to penetrate our unconscious tendencies. When insights do arise we often reinterpret the message back into the darkened world of our slumber. Slowly after repeated incursions into our unconscious a threshold is reached and the insights can no longer be denied. We then consent to the direction in which the insights are pointing.
As our lives become more conscious, inevitably a tear occurs in the veil that separates the unconscious worldly life from the consciously sacred existence. This opening can happen at any time, but it usually occurs when the unconscious shroud becomes sheer through our intention to be conscious and still. Even when the ignorance that veils our awakening usually returns, something has been indelibly engraved on our consciousness.
What happens during the awakened moment is a shift of identity away from the egoic self-centeredness through which we have always viewed the world, and into the authentic unconditioned source of our being. This moment reveals that we have utterly and completely misrepresented ourselves, and we now understand that we are continually and forever being birthed by the source from which all form and formlessness is derived. This moment of conscious awakening will then drive and direct the rest of our lives.
When the moment is abided within, it carries both the translucence of the formless and the functionality of form. In this stage, we walk through life never believing in either exclusively, but living both simultaneously. When this realization is lived, form and the formless are no longer in opposition to one another. When thinking is needed, the formless uses the mind, and thought informs consciousness but no longer directs it.
