Dust, Ashes, and Love

Why Life is Stranger and More Beautiful Than You Imagine

Here’s a tiny question. What happens when we die?

If you’re a Highly Intelligent and Civilized person, I bet I know what you believe: nothing happens. The TV screen of consciousness winks out, and there’s eternal darkness.What else would there be? Religion, after all, is the refuge of the unreasoning.

Is it really that simple — and bleak? I think that life is in fact not bleaker than we can imagine — but more beautiful and vast.

Death as nothingness. Who created it? The existentialists. In fact, “death” is a very modern idea. So we, modern people, find uncomfortable ways to live with this paradox. We believe we’re going to die into nothing, and yet we must live somehow, as doomed and cursed beings in the meantime. Is genuine happiness in such a life possible? Or does this contradiction explain so much of the bitterness and hate we see in the West? No matter. I digress.

What happens when you die? We know that the universe is awareness. Quantum physics and introspection (ie, touching it with your mind) both tell us that. Therefore, the idea of death as nothingness is wrong. Death cannot be nothing if the fundamental element of being is awareness itself.

So what happens to you? Let’s take it slowly. You might think: “I” am still annhiliated anyways. I fall back into pure awareness, so “my” consciousness is “destroyed”. You are wrong. It’s not. It can’t be. Pure awareness has no time or space — they are just rates of change in material objects, aren’t they? Therefore, because you are already beyond time and space, “you” cannot be destroyed.

“You”, the you you are now, is like a drop in an endless ocean. The drop is never there. The drop is always there. All the drops are there, and none of the drops are there — the drops are just ways the ocean sees, feels, hears, itself. “You” don’t go anywhere. You shine on, that little drop reflecting all the colors of the sun. It’s hard to hold this in your mind — because you are not the ocean’s mind, and yet you are the ocean’s mind. It’s only believing in “you” that prevents the ocean’s mind from arising in you. But I digress again.

Now two things can happen. One is that you merge back into pure awareness, without “you” being destroyed. You can see “you”, and you can also see all the lives that have ever lived. Two is that the the consciousness that holds “you” in time and space just becomes another consciousness holding another “you” in time and space.

I used to really hate pets. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. Now I like them. Dying, it’s a wonderful thing. Let’s imagine that you become a cat. Is there anything so bad about that? I think cats, like babies, are much closer to the truths of life than we are — adult humans, wrapped up in our little mental fictions and delusions and desires and anxieties. They are closer to pure awareness, aren’t they? In that sense, they are capable of purer and truer love than we are. Yes, of course, they fuss, and so on. Their bodies make them. But their mind is closer to universal mind, their heart to universal heart, than ours are.

So what is there to be afraid of? There is nothing so bad, so wrong, about the transformation of consciousness. But we don’t really understand what it means until we see its fullest truth.

You are “you” now. But you are taking a strange and wonderful journey through being. You will be many things. You will be the grass, the wind, the rain, the stars.

Here is a great secret.

You will be everything. You will take this whole journey of consciousness. From being a mote of dust, to a cinder of ashes, to a little cat, to a human, to a fiery star, to a blade of grass. You will be the stardust and the soil. There is no time or space in pure awareness, remember?

When you have been everything, you will come home to pure being. Where is there left for you to go? In fact then you are home. Now you are the truth of pure awareness, which is that everything is in everything. And that is what love genuinely is.

This life is small. But you are vast. Everything is in you in this beautiful and profound and vast sense.

So love fiercely, with the fire in your heart. All the things that are. Hold them as close as a baby and as gently as the sun holds the moon. They are you, and you are them. It is only time that separates this you from knowing that you are all yous.

Umair
April 2017