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If you know yourself as someone beyond time and space, your identity will have expanded to include death.
from Life After Death,
by Deepak Chopra
This weekend is the anniversary of a friend's death. She was a meditator. When she left, she had become ready to leave, and not just because of the pain she was in.
Each time we meditate we are practicing letting go. We close our eyes, pick up our mantra and allow it to lead us into unboundedness. Like a wave on the ocean, our individuality de-excites so that less and less we identify with our wave-self, and more and more we can experience our oceanic self. We let go of our senses, transcending each, one by one, letting go of our identification with the body; and then we transcend our thoughts as well. We go beyond the level from which thoughts arise, letting go of our identification with the ego, with our ideas and opinions. We dip into the realm of pure Being, pure bliss, pure consciousness. The great transcendent basis of life. We begin to experience, to a greater or lesser degree, our oneness with all things. And even at those times when our meditation does not take us beyond thought, still we are having a more subtle experience of life. This is in one sense the practice of dying.
The ancient rishis of the Veda saw all movement from one reality to another as occurring in consciousness: the movement from waking to sleeping, from sleeping to dreaming, from not-here to the quickening of the fetus, from life to death.
Death is a letting-go of one's identity with the body and with the ego, and a more full identification with the subtle realms.
My friend had practiced this movement in consciousness. She had expanded her idea of existence and her experience of existence to include not only life, this shared experience we all are having, but also something more. I don't think she was afraid. I think she was, on some level, looking forward to what was next. She had explored the known and was looking forward to the unknown.
Fear is always in relation to the known, not the unknown. J. Krishnamurti
My friend had to go through the pain of a rather lengthy process of the dying of her body, and she did it in a most courageous and graceful fashion. Those of us who knew her had the amazing experience of accompanying her in that process. She taught us a lot. And then she was gone.
According to the Veda, her experience of life expanded at that moment. She no longer was bounded by her illness- and pain-racked body. She was free.
I still talk to her sometimes. I don't hear her voice, I no longer can locate her in the physical, but I can feel her presence. And most always the thought of her makes me smile, for I am remembering some shared moment--of laughter, of life, of horses, of wonder at the hundred little miracles we saw in the world and in each other nearly every time we got together. Most always I smile; but every once in a while, perhaps in the night, in the rain, as the anniversary of her passing comes once more around the wheel of the seasons, I find myself being greedy and wanting just one more of those experiences we had together (as if that would be enough), wanting just once more to see, to feel, to smell, to touch the person that she was and to let her know absolutely, in case she missed it, how much I loved her, how much she meant to me.
I'm grateful for these feelings. I have come to know that even these feelings of sadness, of loss, of longing are precious. They put into sharp relief all the moments of joy that come my way. They help me to recognize the gift of having loved someone enough that it hurts when they are gone. They help me to know my assignment as one who still lives in the body. Tomorrow I will see another friend who shared my love for her, and I will be sure to put my arms around him, because I know how he feels, and because with him, and what I have learned, I have a head start in letting him know how much he means to me.
Without death there can be no present moment, for the last moment has to die to make the next one possible. There can be no present love, for the last emotion has to die to make a new one possible. There can be no present life, for the old cells in my body have to die to make new tissue possible. This is the miracle of creation, which in every second is one thing: life and death joined in an eternal dance. It would be a catastrophe to exclude death from this dance. That would guarantee a universe with no chance for renewal.
from Life After Death, by Deepak Chopra
 Raindrops and Thorns, Studio City, CA
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