Adi Da: Death, Dying, and Beyond: Common questions of spiritual beginners

MORTALITY, DEATH, AND BEYOND

Q: What can we do about the fact of our own mortality? What does happen after we die? In what way — precisely — does how we live impact what happens to us after we die? What is the best way to live in order to serve tangible spiritual growth, as well as our destiny after death?

Part 1: You CAN'T take it with you

You CAN'T Take It With You Does your life have a purpose? If so, is it one that isn't going to get instantly ripped off when you die? Many of us spend our lives denying death, allowing ourselves to be completely consumed and distracted by our responsibilities, our indulgences, and our search for things we cannot take with us after death in any overt form (knowledge, accomplishment, fame, or friendship). But death is still coming. We get little support from culture, society, biology, or even conventional religion for becoming adequately prepared; indeed, we are actively discouraged from even considering the matter. In Western society, the “dying business” at best tends to help us come to the point of acceptance of death (which already should be true for us right now). And the “death business” tends to assist the living go on living rather than assist the dead in their transition, as more informed cultures do.

The ultimate key to freedom and happiness in life, in death, and beyond death, is not a matter of manipulating mind, body, or spirit; such techniques have limited potential by themselves. Instead, the ultimate key is based on linking up with the Divine Reality which is always present, and which transcends life and death, and, through that connection, allowing the Divine Reality Itself to set us free.

Perfect Happiness is not about changing ourselves or our situation. It is about Awakening altogether from the dream of being a separate, limited self — who is living, who is dying, who is suffering, who is stuck on the wheel of re-birth. We can make all kinds of improvements while we are asleep, to our dream character or our dream circumstance, but none of those changes in the dream represents the same radical freedom as does Waking Up from the dream. The great revelation of Enlightenment is that, in Reality, there are no separate selves; there is only One Being, the Divine Being. Divine Enlightment is to Wake Up out of the dream of mortality as the One Divine Being, in Whose Consciouness the realms of life and death are being dreamed spontaneously.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj Death makes your entire life bullshit. Don’t you see? That’s the problem. The body is going to die, every relation of the body is going to die. You can’t even depend on it continuing for another moment while you’re . . . associating with it. That’s the situation you’re in, but you use fabrications of mind and so forth, individually and collectively, that distract you from the fact of it, so that you won’t feel it profoundly. And so you build up this whole lifetime of endeavors, of attachments, of things you own, things you do, things you’re known for, things you know, things you know about — on and on and on. And it all passes. But in the meantime. . . you bullshit one another, effectively.

The Great Matter doesn’t confront you merely in death. It’s just that in death you are disarmed and you have no choice. While you are alive, you delude yourself! You fabricate a reality that’s not altogether true, in order to give yourself a sense of permanence, continuation, certainty — as if life is about being enthusiastic, about fulfillment of the next desire. In fact, you could easily drop dead in any moment. All kinds of people drop dead every day. And a lot of them haven’t lived a very long life beforehand. All kinds of terrible things are being done by human beings to one another and otherwise by the situation itself.

So you can participate in the round of desires and consolations as much as you are able for a lifetime, however long that lasts, and then be necessarily confronted by profundity at the point of death. Or you can go beyond even right now and exist in that profundity right now. . .

True religious life is a great profundity. But the religious life that people propose for themselves and propose to one another, generally speaking, is the life of consolation, of distraction, of arbitrary beliefs that suggest some kind of continuation (or even permanence) of the present pattern.

It’s not merely the state of the world at the present time — which, of course, is dreadful — but it’s not merely that which confronts you and suggests that perhaps you should become serious. Even if it were not as chaotic as this, the great profundity still confronts you and you could embrace it — or you could continue to ignore it. . . . The same profundity that exists in death is right now. The vortex of fire exists right now. And the fundamental Light exists right now.

Easy Death

recommended reading: You CAN'T Take It With You

Part 2: You WILL take it with you

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All excerpts from the works of Avatar Adi Da Samraj and and pictures of Avatar Adi Da Samraj © 2011 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed.