This morning I had arranged for the viewing of a 55-year old man, who had peacefully died in his sleep, in his bed, of congestive heart failure. Afterwards, the family asked me to tell them “where did he go?”
I answered he didn’t go anywhere, he’s right here with us. He just dropped his body which didn’t work for him anymore. People sell cars and houses all the time – those are also shells they become very attached to. They identify with them as their “home”. We have gotten used to consider our body as ourselves, but in fact it is just our temporary home, our avatar, our vehicle that we use to travel around this material space-time, have experiences with it. It’s our interface – between our spiritual essence and our material, sensual experience: the body is the tool that allows us to remain our luminous, spiritual, eternal being and – have a material experience at the same time. It’s magic.
Often people ask me if I believe there’s life after death. For me, it’s not something to “believe” or not. You know it or you don’t know it yet. A tree doesn’t mind if you don’t believe in its’ existence. It just IS.
First we live life, then we live death – both are experiences where our consciousness is fully involved. The process of dying to me seems like the process of waking up into the deeper truth of what we really are. To see the big picture and leave the tunnel vision of the human perspective behind. I’m in fact looking forward to have many questions answered and things explained to me once I’ve dropped my body.
When a 95-year old person develops cancer, doctors or family members sometimes still try to talk them into chemo and radiation. So that they don’t have to say good-bye to the body they have identified with YOU. But maybe it’s just the perfect time to drop this avatar, without drama. Our culture tells us we’re roses that should never drop from the rosebush. We should just hang on for “dear life”. But there’s a reason for each season – and life and death are the returning seasons of our soul.
I’m extremely grateful to my avatar, my body and I treat it with love, respect and awe – at the same time I’m very aware that our vehicles get used up in the process of a material lifetime. At some point it’s time to drop an old vehicle – if we choose to, we can always get a brand new one. Or we can decide to hang back for a while and just watch the anthill we call planet earth.
