Death and Continuity

As most of you know, I work with Grief Recovery and Brain Retraining. What I have found quite profound in this work is that it is in understanding death, that we can understand life. Let’s see how to live fully in the now as we understand death and understand the human mind.

From the beginning of time, man has feared death. Yet each of us is aware that death is inevitable for each of us. In this post, I would like to enquire into death itself. Not about what happens after death, but to understand what it means to die.

We can look at death as an ending. And we gather much through our lives. There are material objects – which may include money, a house, a family, various possessions. We have also acquired experiences, learning, memories, attachments. We want continuity of our life. So people make wills, and also hold on as long as they can to everything they gather through life. And there is the belief in the afterlife where some believe that there are the consequences of actions through a heaven/hell and some believe in karma leading to future lives also from the consequences of actions in life. Yet few look into the experience of death itself rather than what precedes it (accumulation) and what follows (reward/punishment).

Is there an ending to these our accumulations? Why are people attached to something or another – property, people, a reputation, one’s conclusions, ideologies, learning, a memory, an experience? And what are the consequences of attachment? There is a fear of loss of anything we are attached to. From fear we may see jealousies and competitions and even hatred from suspicion, one-upmanship and secrecy. And death is really letting go of attachments. We can do this while living by seeing each day afresh. From this freedom from attachment, there is authentic Love. We can then love everything we see or experience wholly – not because we are attached to them, but because we understand authentic love – a non-attached space which is the same as the space of death. When we train our minds to live from such a space, death is the ongoing continuity of authentic Love.

This is the Art of Living.

I hope this post has provided food for your own reflection.

Namaste my friends. May we all live fully.

Kindly,

Hanifa