So to reiterate the issue that faces us.
I used to think, and it is well documented in the early days of this blog, that death separates people. I used to think that being separated from someone in any way was analogous to death, with death being the final separation. Seeing graves laid out in orderly geometric rank and file with grass between them for the living to walk up and down seemed to illustrate how death robs us of our connections to the world and bites us off into isolation and solitude. Much in fact as lock down, self-isolation and coronavirus seems to have. But it turns out I had it all wrong. Its the other way around!
Death in fact unites us. If one thinks of the world before they were born, it is much the same as after they die. It is just the world. If we had never existed it would be just the world. What we find hard to understand (and I am pursing now with greater focus as I realise this is where the issue lies) is that even when we do exist there is just the world. Nothing is ever made or taken away. Of all the strange places to see this well explained is by Cary Grant in Houseboat (1958).
So far so good, but it doesn't seem to explain anything about myself. The experience I have is not of a single interconnected, joined up, uniform world. What I see is myself separate from a world that lies outside me. This more or less is the ego. When we are born we sprout almost like a flower from a world that is quite unlike us, into a beautiful thing which is apparently totally distinct and unique to itself. This is myself, the I, the ego. And we believe that like the flower this exists quite distinct from the world around it. We might even wish to cut the stem and take this beautiful distinct self with us. But like the flower if we ever do completely separate it from the world around it then it will fade and wither. We are always ultimately connected to the world, even though it does not appear like this.
I like to see the Self as like the Little Mermaid (at least the original, I don't know the Disney version). When she falls in love with a human she seeks a way to walk on Earth rather than swim in the Sea. She is told that this is possible, but the side effect is that every step will feel like walking on broken glass. Her love is so captivating that she makes the sacrifice. Likewise the cost of being an Ego is suffering. We can be a distinct entity, beautiful and unique in our self, but the cost is being separated from the world around us, of not having the things we want and having to struggle for the things we would like, and the anxieties of common isolation and loss and ultimately of Death. The fear of death is the price we have paid for walking as a distinct self. Death will come and when it comes we will lose that separatedness, but our Ego so fears losing itself that it fears being once again returning to the state it had before it was born. So complete is the Egos illusion that it is self-made, without beginning and end, without dependency on the world or any others, complete and perfect in itself; so complete is this illusion, that Death while completely natural becomes a barrier that it cannot bring itself to face. Death becomes a challenge seemingly incomprehensible and unfathomable. We were Dead before we were born, it is hardly that remarkable, mysterious or unfamiliar a place.
However the Ego is completely binding for normal mortals. we cannot escape it easily. I thought after decades I had made progress, but coronavirus made me realise I am no more ready to die than the next person, in fact maybe I'm even more of a coward. It seems completely unfamiliar and impossible to measure or make sense of, a looming shadow filled with who knows what. But this is just my Ego staring into the void it has created by believing it stands alone. It is not a fundamental thing in this world and like everything it was born of this world as will return to it in a quite ordinary cycle, and there will be no loss as nothing was made and nothing destroyed. But to see this, Ego must grasp its own illusory nature, like the moon reflected on a lake we often don't see the water that is really there and get captivated by the other worldly dancing light beneath us. So it is with the ego: this "me" is an other worldly dancing light that can completely entrance us.
And this folds neatly into my oldest preoccupation which is trying to make sense of consciousness. It seems hard to accept that consciousness is actually created by the world around us. When we sleep it flickers out, and when we dream or awake it flickers back. There are drugs we can take that make consciousness switch off. Religious experience and meditation can make our consciousness more focused and able to pierce reality. There are states of consciousness that go beyond space and even world. The highest Jhana goes beyond even existence and non-existence. Hinduism records the Tat Tvam Asi where the illusion of Ego is dissolved and the Self (Atman) is seem to be the same as the Brahman (the world). I need add that I suspect that Self (Atman) is not the same as Ego. Ego is that part of Atman that is defensive, which goes to great lengths (often for no gain or reason) in standing up for itself against things like humiliation or slander. The Atman doesn't care for this cos it knows what it is and nothing outside can change what it is. Jesus dying on the cross is a great reminder of what is not ego. And Jesus also illustrates how Death is not to be feared by those who have escaped the self. But Jesus was also mortal which made the process of dying on the cross no more easy. Its remarkable how his followers were in most cases so much more milling to accept death than even Jesus who suffered a very long night in Gethsemane.
I am aware of these paths of investigation, and I thought I had made progress, but I either got no where or have forgotten it all. Right now I must admit I have no way out of Ego or Self. What coronavirus taught me is that I do not even have Faith. While most of us will never pierce the illusion of Ego or self to see the world as it was before we were born ,and how it will be after we die; the world as it is unchanging and fertile with the possibility of consciousness and selves; we have faith that there is a vast ocean beyond us that supports us like the stem and roots of the flower and provides the light and energy with which we shine out our mortal days. For people such as this death is just the thin veil that divides us from the true world of infinite richness and potential. Death is not something to be feared but simply opening again to the embrace of our maker. No one says it better than the C13th Iranian sage Rumi in his famous poem which brings this blog post, like everything must, to its end... and yet the world will keep going as it always does and absorb back into itself the energy from which this post came.
