Classroom Talk
Fall 2001 Archive
The way to really live is to die... Posted by Sally on November 09, 2001 at 22:15:42:
In Reply to: Part Two (B) Beginning to listen for the music of the types. posted by John on November 07, 2001 at 22:30:50:
Subj: 55 - DEAD AHEAD
Date: 11/4/01 10:38:25 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: ScottR@Spiritus.Org (Scott Reeves)
To: Spiritus@Alltel.Net
I've often said to people that the way to really live is to die. The
passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine that
you're lying in your coffin. Any posture you like. In India we put
them
in cross-legged. Sometimes they're carried that way to the burning
ground. Sometimes, though, they're lying flat. So imagine you're
lying
flat and you're dead. Now look at your problems from that
viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn't it?
What a lovely, lovely meditation. Do it every day if you have the
time. It's unbelievable, but you'll come alive. I have a meditation
about
that in a book of mine, Wellsprings. You see the body decomposing,
then
bones, then dust. Every time I talk about this, people say, "How
disgusting!" But what's so disgusting about it? It's reality, for
heaven's sake. But many of you don't want to see reality. You don't
want
to think of death. People don't live, most of you, you don't live,
you're
just keeping the body alive. That's not life. You're not living until
it
doesn't matter a tinker's damn to you whether you live or die. At that
point you live. When you're ready to lose your life, you live it. But
if
you're protecting your life, you're dead. If you're sitting up there
in
the attic and I say to you, "Come on down!" and you say, "Oh no, I've
read
about people going down stairs. They slip and they break their necks;
it's
too dangerous." Or I can't get you to cross the street because you
say,
"You know how many people get run over when they cross the street?" If
I
can't get you to cross a street, how can I get you to cross a
continent? And if I can't get you to peep out of your little narrow
beliefs and convictions and look at another world, you're dead, you're
completely dead; life has passed you by. You're sitting in your little
prison, where you're frightened; you're going to lose your God, your
religion, your friends, all kinds of things. Life is for the gambler,
it
really is. That's what Jesus was saying. Are you ready to risk it?
Do
you know when you're ready to risk it? When you've discovered that,
when
you know that this thing that people call life is not really life.
People
mistakenly think that living is keeping the body alive. So love the
thought of death, love it. Go back to it again and again. Think of
the
loveliness of that corpse, of that skeleton, of those bones crumbling
till
there's only a handful of dust. From there on, what a relief, what a
relief. Some of you probably don't know what I'm talking about at this
point; you're too frightened to think of it. But it's such a relief
when
you can look back on life from that perspective.
Or visit a graveyard. It's an enormously purifying and beautiful
experience. You look at this name and you say, "Gee, he lived so many
years ago, two centuries ago; he must have had all the problems that I
have, must have had lots of sleepless nights. How crazy, we live for
such
a short time. An Italian poet said, "We live in a flash of light;
evening
comes and it is night forever." It's only a flash and we waste it. We
waste it with our anxiety, our worries, our concerns, our burdens.
Now, as
you make that meditation, you can just end up with information; but you
may
end up with awareness. And in that moment of awareness, you are new.
At
least as long as it lasts. Then you'll know the difference between
information and awareness.
An astronomer friend was recently telling me some of the fundamental
things
about astronomy. I did not know, until he told me, that when you see
the
sun, you're seeing it where it was eight and a half minutes ago, not
where
it is now. Because it takes a ray of the sun eight and a half minutes
to
get to us. So you're not seeing it where it is; it's now somewhere
else. Stars, too, have been sending light to us for hundreds of
thousands
of years. So when we're looking at them, they may not be where we're
seeing them; they may be somewhere else. He said that, if we imagine a
galaxy, a whole universe, this earth of ours would be lost toward the
tail
end of the Milky Way; not even in the center. And every one of the
stars
is a sun and some suns are so big that they could contain the sun and
the
earth and the distance between them. At a conservative estimate, there
are
one hundred million galaxies! The universe, as we know it, is
expanding at
the rate of two million miles a second. I was fascinated listening to
all
of this, and when I came out of the restaurant where we were eating, I
looked up there and I had a different feel, a different perspective on
life. That's awareness. So you can pick all this up as cold fact (and
that's information), or suddenly you get another perspective on life --
what are we, what's this universe, what's human life? When you get
that
feel, that's what I mean when I speak of awareness.
Anthony de Mello
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