"Prepare for Death" - a meandering...

"Prepare for death" were the words I heard
whispered recently, unexpectedly.
I tried to ignore them,
not wanting to acknowledge them,
but wanting to keep them at bay - like
they hadn't been heard -
but they had...

This meandering is not meant to be morbid, just realistic,
even sobering - it is for me anyway...

Maybe the "reason" our bodies decline,
I thought, is because it is, in a sense, preparing
us for death... so that we recognize what's coming,
because we feel the body's fading, so we can start
detaching from the attachments we made in this world...

Most people I've encountered recently
don't like the mention of the word "death",
they react, as if it was a dangerous word;
like it's not supposed to happen, at least not now,
because our lives, for the most part, are still
oriented toward achievement and accomplishment,
materializing what we want, acquiring - and legacy.

Most are not ready to "let go" yet.

Evidently the word "death" - makes some people
very uncomfortable - let alone its actuality.

In pondering death,
the reality of impermanence,
I never thought I would back away,
but would welcome the
release...  I still do really...
But I wasn't expecting the words to waft
through me either...

And do they mean - literally?
Or metaphorically - like - *some*thing is
going to die in me?  Or a message that some*one*
will pass?  Or symbolically - like some aspect of
myself is going to fall away?

It is not clear...

As I continued to ponder its meaning
memories of those who have passed and their lives
floated through.  But those memories seemed like
another world - like looking through a window
into another time - which it is actually
- it *was* another time
that now seems unreal.

I want to be able to look through the window
into the past-death portal and what that's going to 
be like.  It seems we really can't know until we get
there, unless we are given glimpses, through meditation,
or mystical moments, or belief...
And I "believe" that *some*thing departs -
but what?

Spirit, Soul, Consciousness?
Returning to the "energy"
from which "we" arose?

a Mystery...

I have no clue really - just meandering here...

But I do think we feel death coming
in the waning of our body and energy; and the mind
unable to maintain its acuity, its cognition, its
memory of words...

We *are* given signs, but we try to fool ourselves
into thinking that if we just "live right",
pray/meditate enough,
exercise and eat "right";
believe the "right" religion,
we can put off the inevitable.

When it's time for me to "let go" of this world -
I hope I can relax and willingly walk over the bridge,
 through the portal into the Unknown...

Namaste

_/\_

Mystic Meandering
July 13, 2024

12:30am

~

Photo - Mystic Meanderng

 

The Mystery of Death...

We are a mist, a vapor that appears and disappears,
like an aurora borealis - here and gone;
a moment in the sky,
then absorbed into Space.

We are a breath of Spirit,
the Breath of Life Itself,
in-spired at birth,
expired in one long sigh at "death."

We are energy that dances in the wind -

for a time - and then gone.  Gone, gone, gone beyond,
absorbed by the Primordial Womb again.
"Returned" to Source.
Exhaled and inhaled by the Primordial Breath.

"We" go - Life Itself goes back to the Cosmic Womb
again, and again, and again - to the Energy
that suspends all life in Its Embrace...

Energy to Energy
Breath to Breath
Life to Life

One movement in the Dance of Life...

A Mystery...

Mystic Meandering

Sept. 2009

This was written only a few weeks after our old cat,
Yodi Bodhi "died."  

~

Photo - South Pole Aurora Borealis 
from the Internet

 

Death and Rebirth - Matt Licata

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth
is playing out within us.  With each breath something
in us is dying - some aspect of who we think we are -
or the spiritual path that once brought us meaning...

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so 
much how we can most quickly facilitate rebirth, but
to what degree we will participate [consciously] in the
death when it appears.  Psychological death, or
spiritual death, is not just a preliminary process in
which we engage so that we can put it behind us and
get on to birth.  It is a valid, holy unfolding with its
own intelligence...  [It is] a catalyst, and vessel of
insight, perspective, and revelation...

It is natural to resist this falling apart and do what we
can to put it all back together.  But it is only from the
womb of death - attuned consciously - that rebirth can
emerge.

Allow the death time to unfold, to share its poetry and
fragrance...   Death is not merely a phase to get through.
In those periods in our lives, when things are being
rearranged and reorganized inside and around us, we
can attune to what is truly being asked of us...  Listen
to the wisdom in death and what it has to teach us about
love...  We allow the dissolution so that new forms can
emerge and provide the transformation for which we
most deeply long.

Matt Licata
from - A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Grace Comes...

 Grace comes unbidden...
Her soft Presence comforts in the
coldest dawn and darkest night,
and sits with us when we are broken,
beaten down by the "life game"...

She is the antidote for an aching heart
and struggling body...

She hears your silent tears...
and walks with you...

Grace brings you love and kindness
to endure the crosswinds that bite...

It's all Grace -
come to bind the wounds from those
who tried to suffocate your voice,
who tried to kill your spirit...

She softens the heart
and clears the pain from your vision...

She is always with us,
even in the death of the body.
She is "the beautiful woman sitting on
the fence," come to take you "home,"
or to your next "journey" -
wherever that may be...

Grace has come, Grace has come!

She is singing her love song!

There is nothing to do but surrender
and let Grace sing her song of Love
to the weary heart...

Listen...

Mystic Meandering
April 8, 2021

The reference to "the beautiful woman on the fence"
is something my mother experienced during her
dying process 2 years ago...

Hospice said she was hallucinating, but we knew she was *seeing.*
She saw a beautiful woman sitting on the fence out her window,
at the top of a small incline, on many occasions.
She said: "the beautiful woman on the fence
has come to take me on my next journey."

Grace Comes...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Delicate Dance - Gina Puorro

 I am feeling stretched, fingertips reaching wide towards the
sharp contrasts of joy and deep grief.  I feel weathered, open,
tired, curious, grateful, regretful, raw.  My body is going from
being an open channel for highly activated sensations to shut
down and hardened, sometimes within seconds of each other.
There have recently been blissful and ecstatic moments, and
moments that tear me apart.  Deep connections and penetrating
aloneness.  I've got a whole bunch of unanswered emails and
texts.  I feel a heightened awareness of the parts of me that feel
deeply wounded..., and all the stories that come along with them.
I'm trying to stay present to what is.  I feel like I am in a state of
unraveling, a grand coming undone that feels both wildly un-
comfortable and buoyant all at once, and I have been fighting
the urge to dig my heels in with defiance and resistance.

It feels as though we are deeply immersed in a season of death,
on the personal and collective levels.  So much dying - systems,
beliefs, ways of being, bodies, all being laid to rest in the cosmic
compost pile.  The phrase 'quality of life' has been coming up
a lot, and I wonder what that truly means - for the living and
the dying...  How does a society that is both grief-illiterate and
death phobic learn to die a good death?  Humans are such
curious creatures, and I fear we too often place ourselves at the
center, forgetting the much wider web we exist in.

I have been finding myself struggling to be open to views
starkly different than my own (sometimes I'm downright
judgmental and angry), which feels at odds with my idea of
who I am and my capacity to be compassionate and
understanding.   I feel like a fraud, like my membership card
 to the 'woke folk' club should be revoked.  I want answers,
 as we all do, and at times my mind spirals into a state of
desperate grasping for them when my body knows they don't
exist, at least not in some static and  definitive way.

I don't know what will happen and where we are all headed...
It feels like a delicate dance...

I feel far from my best right now. 

I pray for the softness required to take each step forward

with grace and humility, and for the bravery to 
dance this life...

Gina Puorro

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

We awoke to snow this morning and saw this leaf caught
in the snow on the front steps - blowing in the wind...

A Preponderance of Ponderings on Impermanence - Krishnamurti

 We have to understand another phenomenon in life, which is
 death: death from old age, or disease, and accidental death,
through disease, or naturally.  We grow old inevitably, and
that age is shown in the way we have lived our life, it shows
in our face...

So there is old age.  And there is this extraordinary thing called
death, of which most of us are dreadfully frightened.  If we are
not frightened, we have rationalized this phenomenon intellectually
and have accepted the edicts of the intellect.  But it is still there.
And obviously there is the ending of the organism, the body.
And we accept that naturally, because we see everything dying.

But what we do not accept is the psychological ending of the"me",
with family, with the house, with success, the things I have done,
and the things I have still to do, the fulfillments and the frustrations 
- and there is something more to do before I end!  And the
psychological entity, we're afraid that will come to an end -
the "me", the "I", the "soul", in various forms, words, that we give
to the center of our being.

Does it come to an end?  Does it have continuity?  The East 
has said it has a continuity: there is reincarnation, being born
better in the next life if you have lived rightly.  If you believe in
reincarnation, as the whole of Asia does, then in that idea is
implied, if you observe it very closely, that what you do now,
every day, matters tremendously.  Because in the next life you're
going to pay for it or be rewarded depending on how you have
lived.  So what matters is not what you believe will happen in
the next life, but what you are and how you live.  And that is
implied also when you talk about resurrection. Here (in the West)
you have symbolized it in one person and worship that person,
because you yourself don't know how to be reborn again in your
life now.

So what matters is how you live now - not what your beliefs are...
But we are also afraid that the center, called the "I", may come
to an end.  We ask:  Does it come to an end?

You have lived in thought; that is, you have given tremendous
importance to thinking.  But thinking is old; thinking is never new;
thinking is the continuation of memory.  If you have lived there,
obviously there is some kind of continuity.  And it is a continuity
that is over, finished.  It is something old; only that which ends
can have something new.  So dying is very important to understand;
to die; to die to everything that one knows. [believes]. 

  You know, one has collected so much, not only books, houses,
bank account, but inwardly. the memories of insults, the memories
of flattery, the memories of neurotic achievements, the memory of
holding onto your own particular experience, which gives you a
position.  To die to all that without argument, without discussion,
without any fear, just to give it up.  Do it psychologically - of course
we don't actually give up our wife/husband, our clothes, our children,
or our house, but inwardly, don't be attached to anything.  Love is
not attachment.  Where there is attachment, there is fear.  And fear
inevitably becomes authoritarian, possessive, oppressive, dominating.

But to die to everything within oneself! [attachments, ideas, concepts,
beliefs].  This  means that the mind, which is not of thought - the mind
becomes utterly quiet, silent, naturally, without any force, without
any discipline.  And in light of that silence all actions can take place,
the daily living, from that silence.  And if one were lucky enough to
have gone that far, then in that silence there is quite a different
movement, which is not of time, which is not of words, which is not
measurable by thought, because it is always new. It never dies.

J Krishnamurti
from talks in Europe 1968
Amsterdam
May 19, 1968

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Ethereal Window

Why We Fear Death - J. Krishnamurti

Questioner: The fact that death stares everybody in the face,
yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?

Krishnamurti:  Why is there fear of death?
When we cling to continuity, there is the fear of death.

There is fear of death as long there is the desire for
continuity [of the] character, in action, in capacity, in the
name, and so on.  As long as there is action seeking a result,
there must be the thinker who is seeking continuity.  Fear comes
into being when this continuity is threatened through death.

So, there is fear of death as long as there is the desire for
continuity.

Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the
unknown.  Death is the unknown.  The mind, which is the
result of continuity, cannot know the unknown.  It can only know
the known.  It can only act and have its being in the known,
which is continuous.  So the known is in fear of the unknown. 
The known can never know the unknown, and so death
remains the mystery.

Immortality is not the continuation of "me."  The me is of time,
the result of action towards an end.  So there is no relationship
between the me and that which is immortal, timeless.  We would
like to think there is a relationship, but this is an illusion.  That
which is immeasurable cannot be caught in the net of time. 

J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from a talk in Bombay in March 1948

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Pondering Impermanence...

With my mother's death last year and now with the COVID
Pandemic - feeling surrounded by death - I have become more
aware of my own mortality, especially at my age, with a body
malfunctioning, broken since birth.

So I have been pondering "death" - not morbidly, but with a
sense of the reality of the impermanence of this life of
physicality.  What can you do...  It's going to happen...
It's just the nature of time for things to fall away in the
cycle of life...

~

A few months ago, in my ponderings, I wrote this -

The "I" (the Eternal Being) that inhabits this body is not aging -
but "i" am surprised by the body's increasing decline - knowing
where it is headed - the inevitable...

death...

Saddened by the prospect -
although grateful that the end
to the body's struggles is closer -
how close "she" doesn't know -
but wonders what that will be like;
to witness the death of her body
and the possibility of a
"cosmic birthing" into a new "form"
of the Formless; or maybe dissolve
back into cosmic dust, or be absorbed
by the Vastness of the Eternal.
Sentience dissolving into the Eternal...

Who really knows...

All is transient here.
We're just passing through.

I shouldn't be surprised by this,
feeling the body's decline as I do -
but still -

gives me pause...

Mystic Meandering
Feb. 23, 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Goddess of the Dark - Ameeta

Who are you?
why do you speak to me so?
Stinging my eyes with unbidden tears
Filling my heart with unnamed sensation
Calling my whole being to pause

I don't know you
You are not a destination I aspired to
nor do you fit any image I've ever known
Yet when you appeared on my horizon
I recognized you instantly
in the soundless depths of me

You give no direction yet
But I can feel you anchoring me within
Preparing void as womb
Even as you lead me to lie there and die
in your embrace

Goddess of the Dark
I feel your presence in me now
And your strength and power
Perhaps now I will have the wherewithal
to let everything go
every last bit of it, good and bad

My highest ideal and my biggest fear
They are but two ends of one chain
that binds me to this world, this existence

I have to let them both go
I have to be prepared to die fully

Ameeta

May 2019

~

Photo - Someone's "selfie by mistake" that they sent me...
The Mystery of the Dark Goddess :)

Death and Rebirth - Matt Licata

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth is playing
out within us.  With each breath, something in us is dying: some
aspect of who we think we are, or what we're doing here, the death
of an old dream, or an idea about how it was all going to turn out.

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so much how can
we be reborn, but will we participate in death fully, and with an
open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge, trusting that
rebirth will take place according to a timeline originating far away
in the stars.

In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth, back into
the known, in an urgent attempt to cure, maintain, or heal that
which is dying, that which longs for transformation [within us.]
It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need to put it all back
together.  But it is only from the core of the womb of death - a
death tended to consciously - that rebirth can come into being.

The invitation, which we can at times hear clearly, during the dark
of night, in the slowness and the depths, as we move in and out of
states of sleep and dream, is to not abandon death...  To not short
circuit the intelligence that death is, and to remember that rebirth
is not possible without dissolution.

Allow death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and its
fragrances, which are not partial, but of a light that is whole.
In those times in our lives, when things are being rearranged
and reorganized inside and around us, we can attune to what
is truly being asked, to allow the forms of love safe passage to
continue their journey.  And equally allow them to dissolve...
Give them permission to dance and play and participate fully
in the sacred return...

Matt Licata