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What Is Death?

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There are people who claim that they are not afraid of death. This is a lie, a denial. In the depth, there is always a far-reaching fear of death. Behind every fear of the small catastrophes of everyday life, there is hidden the fear of this one great catastrophe: The destruction of ourselves, the annihilation, death, not being.

Naturally, we believe to know that we are going to die but in reality we don't know. We don't know anything about death. All we know is an accumulation of images that we have taken over from the religious collective, from teachers of the past, from our parents or it is just a product of our free imagination, of our fears, of our belligerent attitude, or whatever may be behind it.

This mind that pretends to be "I", is like a young child which is megalomaniac at the same time. Megalomaniac in it's belief to be able to somehow escape death, to be able to survive. We don't have a natural relationship with death. We don't respect death. And therefore, we don't recognize it as the true master who is the threshold, the entry, the revelation of the end. And this end is the end of suffering. The end of the personal story. And the end of the identification with this personal story.

Death is not interested in whether you respect it or not. It will come to fetch this organism anyway, when the time has come. When you accept this, there is a deep inner relaxation. When a human being is free of any fear of death, free of any transience and therefore, also free of any desire to survive at all, then he has attained a state of inner peace which remains and which is untouched by any of the difficulties of outer life. At the end of becoming, life and death are exactly the same. All differences between life and death, between aliveness and lifelessness, totally dissolve in being as these are differences which don't exist in reality. They are merely differences created by the thinking mind, and everything created by thought is an illusion of itself: Nothing but a thought.

On August 6, 1990, I myself met death unexpectedly and involuntarily. Today, it seems as if I only speak about death.. And in fact, it's like I was predestined for it. One could say, I am sitting here to suggest to people to voluntarily have this meeting with death, which happened to me involuntarily. For the meeting with death is a meeting which is absolutely essential for every human being. I don't mean looking at a dead body, I mean the meeting with death itself. The meeting with death as the entry into permanent, eternal consciousness, which knows no beginning and no end.

After a car accident, I fell into the state of clinical death and later woke out of a coma. In the moment of waking up, nothing was as it had been before. The identity had dissolved without there being any consciousness about how that could happen. What remained were simply just images, feelings, sensations - but there was no person any more, no identity with this body. And after this accident, grace actually led me to a female master who could prevent that this experience become only of transitory nature. She transmitted the understanding to me that it was not about any kind of experience, but about an insight into the true nature of what I really AM.

For me, this meeting with death was connected in every respect to a lot of pain. Naturally, it is not necessary to go through such a painful and violent process. Yet, in the course of time, the understanding has deepened that no human being who feels in him- or herself the deep and sincere desire for freedom, can get around this meeting with death. Masters of all generations have stated again and again: "Die before the body dies." This is not a theoretic concept, but the expression of an unquestionable experience. Being with me is an invitation to allow this experience.

Did you actually know that the personal teacher is also a form in which death appears? So the guidance on the spiritual path is in fact guidance into death, and into the resistances against death and into the arrogance and the fears that the mind has initially raised in front of death. The spiritual path requires the readiness to learn from a higher force that cannot be controlled by the "I" It requires the readiness to lose what we believe to have already gained. We have no really positive connection to a moment of loss. We have not learned about the value of loss, so that we must have a new inner experience of this value again, of the opening, the liberation and in the truest sense of the word, of the un-burdening which inner loss of attachment, relationship and identification bring along.

We are like beggars clinging to their last shirt although, in fact, we dwell in a kingdom of abundance, an abundance we cannot recognize because we are so busy fighting for our last shirt. The path into death is the path of losing, the path of giving up and not getting anything for it. But I could also say: We get everything, we get everything we desired, but could not put into words, and that is not more and not less than the ultimate realization of THAT, which we really are. This is the only true freedom that exists. It is an ultimate inner experience that will totally change what you called your life.

Death changes everything you have ever experienced. The finality of death doesn't allow any traces to be left, traces of attachment, traces of bondage that we have left in our story. Death is a radical moment, an absolute moment, a final moment. We can approach this finality when we start to have a premonition of what death could mean for us.

This space of premonition opens up in your readiness to get involved. This space opens in your readiness to let yourself be touched, to come closer inwardly, to feel what is bubbling in you, what wants to arise, what has been avoided until now. The mind is not capable of imagining the freedom of death, the mind is not capable of crossing the threshold of death and to have even the slightest glimpse of what is beyond this threshold.

Having a glimpse of death, crossing this threshold of death inwardly has nothing to do with the death of the body - nothing at all. Death is actually the entry into all of what we also call: freedom, love, bliss, Self, the essence of my Self.

Death is soft. What is cruel is what we have imagined death to be. All fears of death are consequences of our own imaginations with which we have filled this space that we don't know. The truth about death is that death is of infinite delicacy, of infinite gentleness. There is no trace of violence. Death is a passage into what has always been, into what always is and will always be.

 

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