The cultural norms we grow up with do not fulfill our souls.
The disconnection from our feelings and nature, the preoccupation with being successful, comfortable and entertained, the blind acceptance of social conventions all keep us from ever truly knowing ourselves - and each other for that matter.
We find that we have much to learn that was not taught us in school or college, essentials like self-awakening, living our feelings, being in our bodies, appreciating ourselves as female or male. And the most fundamental essential of them
all: the recognition that we will one day leave this body, this world, and all that we have lived. Death - by far the most transformational event of our lives, and in our fast-paced life the most neglected - will happen for each and every one of us.
Our culture is so far removed from the essentials that death and dying feature hardly at all in our educational curriculum. Somehow they are assumed taken care of by religion; but being fed beliefs that you either accept or reject is not
education. And the beliefs in any case do not teach us the mysteries and the gifts that death itself can whisper to us.
If death were a more included and natural part of our social living and not so separated by our tendency to make it as invisible as possible, we would have more opportunity to learn from the deaths of our loved ones, especially if they knew how to die!
This is how it once was. The elders were revered, and in the manner of their passing the young ones could
find personal awakening, the realization of trust, the acceptance of the life-death journey, and the great gift of letting go.
Sadly this time has gone. As often as not, our old people are consigned to states of vegetation where they are already dead long before they die, drugged and reduced until their inner light is so dimmed that they don’t notice their own death.
The friends and family say, "Ah, he died peacefully!" But did they die with dignity, with presence,
with trust and openness to the approaching mystery? And it may not be our destiny to die old. We cannot know the time or manner of our passing.
No matter. In any event it makes a difference how consciously or otherwise we die. It makes a difference if we can find our way to be in love in our leaving. In love not with this or that, but as a state of being.
Love and presence go together. To be here now is to be in love. This is the beauty of being, that it cannot happen without
the heart open, and the open heart is naturally in love. It is all the heart can be.
This is why people who are really awake radiate love. As Osho used to say, love and awareness are the two wings of being. To fly on these wings is to be here now.
| | It takes deep encounters with yourself to learn to be here now, because you have to be open
all the way through yourself. This means being willing to feel, sense and accept anything that goes on in you.
And since we’ve all grown up with fears and judgments, there are all kinds of things we learn to not accept or even allow within ourselves, including joy, tears, openness, playfulness, anger, libido, wonder, grief, fear, not-knowing, aloneness, loneliness, surrender, trust, the eternal spirit, ecstasy, to name but a few!
"Be here now" is a phrase made
popular by Ram Dass back in the 60’s when he was still calling himself Richard Alpert. As profound as it is clichéd, it invites us to fulfill our human potential. Comically and tragically, we are too busy to be bothered.
Not by accident, we have the same disregard towards our death. We don’t learn how to die spiritually awake and in a state of love. That is in itself essential learning that can transform our death into an exquisite gift, for our loved ones too. But something far more
immediate to us is also involved: learning how to die is learning how to live!
If we take the time to learn and practice the opening and letting go that death invites, we inevitably learn how to open and let go in those moments in daily life when our conditioning would have us shut down and hold on.
Death offers us the key to being present in our life! This is the essential for being happy!
And there are so many little deaths in our daily living, and not-so-little ones too, all of them inviting us to discover that letting go opens and awakens us to the present.
Unfortunately, our culture does not value presence. It values that which keeps us from being present (and therefore aware and in love).
It values having and getting. As a civilization we are still in our infancy. Two-year olds are mercilessly obsessive about getting what they want. They will use power,
rage and whatever means of persuasion they can muster up to get what they want, and their distress at not getting is harassingly real. They make it vividly clear that the instinct to have and get is deep-rooted in us.
It is not, however, where we are supposed to stop in our personal growth; and yet this is about as far as our civilization has come. We are a culture in severely arrested development, to such a degree that we are in the process of destroying our planet’s riches and beauty
for the sake of getting what we want.
More personally to us, virtually all that we struggle with, including our psychological and emotional distress, our day-to-day stresses and even our physical illnesses, are attributable to the best-learned and least helpful lesson in our culture. That is, to get what we can of what we want and to hold on to it - especially to hold on.
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