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Death is not usually people’s favorite topic. There are plenty of wonderful things to talk about, like ice cream. Or chocolate.

But death lurks in our minds, always giving us a vaguely uneasy feeling. Then someone we love dies, or we’re confronted with our own death, and suddenly death is overwhelming – it absorbs all our emotional and mental energy.

Our Current Beliefs

Death tends to be the big decision-maker when we choose a belief system. If I’m going to adopt a set of beliefs, I’d sure like to know what happens when I die. For most of us, the whole issue of death can be immensely confusing. Our Standard Dualistic Model – the system of thought most of us are operating under – tells us that we were born into this world, will last for a century or less, and then we’ll disappear.

That sounds pretty frightening!

Burdened with that belief, we desperately try to attach other beliefs onto the issue of death. On one extreme, we imagine an endless paradise where we go once we die, while on the other extreme we imagine that we’re nothing but a brief manifestation, and once we die we will simply be ‘nothing’. Our bodies will return to dust, and our consciousness will evaporate. Between those extremes we have the various theories of reincarnation.

If, like many people, you think you don’t know what happens after death, you’re in a perfect place to see, directly, what death is. However, if you have preconceptions about what happens after death, you probably won’t give them up very easily. You probably feel that you have lots of evidence for your particular belief.

Whatever you believe regarding death, your beliefs say quite a bit about how you currently view your life situation. For instance, if you’re hoping for a paradise after death, it probably is an indication that you don’t find this life to be very paradisiacal. Beliefs in reincarnation are usually held by people who think of life as a process of learning or growth – showing that we think of life as a set of goals, rather than an opportunity to be truly present in the Now. Those who feel we’re just going to evaporate? A clear sign that they adhere completely to the belief system represented by the Standard Dualistic Model.

Whatever our beliefs, they are only that – beliefs. And every belief about death which has ever been created serves, in rather subtle ways, to enhance our disconnection with our actual lives.

What is Death, Really?

What if we dispense with belief, and see what’s really going on?

The result is quite startling.

The trick, of course, is that our language is not capable of describing reality. (Could you describe the color orange to someone who has never seen it before? The only way we can really show someone ‘orange’ is to show them the color itself. No words make the color.) And death is one of those things that’s like a color – it can’t be described in words. It can only be experienced directly. The remainder of this article, then, won’t attempt to describe death. Instead it will point toward a direct perception of what death is.

What Does It Mean To Die?

This is an easy one, right? I mean, a person is lying on a bed, and all their vital signs are going. And then the line goes flat, and their eyes get glassy, and they are dead.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that clear-cut.

There are innumerable examples of these sorts of things in dualistic thought. I say ‘me’, and I know what I mean. Right? I say ‘I trust you’, and I know what I’m saying. Right?

It might be better if we say we think we know what we’re saying. Because if we’re asked to examine the issue, we often don’t actually have a clear idea. This is a direct sign that the dualistic belief system we’ve been given doesn’t do a very good job of describing reality.

In the case of death, let’s examine what we mean by ‘dying’. To do so, let’s play a game – a reduction game – to try to see what we mean by ‘dead’.

Let’s say your right pinkie is removed as you’re chopping onions.

Whoops!

Yes, it hurts.

But are you dead? Probably not. In fact, we can lose quite a bit of our body and still not consider ourselves dead. If your best friend has a heart attack and the doctor replaces her heart with a plastic one, is your friend dead? Of course not! In fact, if your friend’s body is completely destroyed from the neck down (allow a slight advancement in medical science here), and she gets a replacement body, you’re still probably not going to consider her dead. She still smiles and talks to you and tells those same stupid jokes.

From here it gets more difficult, since in our culture we place the source of life in the head and the brain. So let’s say that all your friend has left is a brain. We can hook up the brain to a computer, and through that, she can speak to you. Is she still alive?

It might be easier to imagine if you put yourself in the place of your friend. Let’s say you are only a brain. People come into the room, and the technician speaks into your computer input. You get the sensation that there are people in the room. You think words, and the words come up on a screen. In this way, you communicate.

Are you dead? Probably not, because you’re pretty sure that if someone pulled the plug on your brain-support system, you’d die.

Then a terrible thing happens. In fact, the worst possible thing happens to you.

You get brain cancer.

Now let’s suppose that the doctor has a computer that can download the contents of your brain. You do the switch, and you find yourself able to communicate just like before, even though they are removing your brain from the room in a plastic bag. You’re still able to think, feel, dream, and communicate, even though there is nothing left of your physical self. Are you dead?

We can take this game further if we then imagine that the doctors tell us that they’ve successfully cloned your former body, and they transplant your download back into this new body. Now you’re just like before, able to jump and tell jokes and eat noodles. Would you call yourself dead?

Of course, what would have happened if, when we first got our finger chopped off, the doctor would have said, “Here, we have a new cloned body. It’s you!”

We would probably have said, “No, that’s not me. It looks like me, but it’s not me.”

Seen this way, it becomes clear that we imagine ‘me’ to be something other than our body or our brain.

Consciousness

You’ve probably got it by now. Most of us equate ourselves, at the deepest level, with our consciousness. What I mean by consciousness is an ability to interact with the world, or at least with our own thought processes. In other words, even if we were to get in an accident and found ourselves in a coma, unable to sense anything but our own thoughts, we’d still have the sensation of being ‘alive’. You might, in this scenario, find yourself awaiting, with either great fear or great eagerness, the time when the doctors pull the plug on the life support, and everything will go dark and fade into nothing.

In a similar manner, when we imagine that we continue on after we ‘die’, we often imagine our consciousness, at some level, as the thing that continues. We might call it a ‘soul’.

In the end, if we look carefully, we’ll find that the thing we’re afraid of losing most is ‘me’.

No Consciousness

Non-dualism asks us to look at what we really perceive, right? In learning to distinguish between actual perception and our imaginings about the world, we can come to find ‘reality’. Past that, everything is belief.

So what does true observation find when it looks for consciousness?

Peering inside, I can find my current mind activity. If I have a memory, it’s only current mind activity. If I have an emotion or a thought, it’s only current mind activity. If I see a grapefruit, it’s only current mind activity.

All I can really know is that there is mind activity. No emotions or thoughts or memories or grapefruits. Only current mind activity. There could be grapefruits, but we really have no way of knowing. They could just as easily be images in a video game — a super-realistic video game where our minds are made to ‘forget’ we’re playing. You can pretend to know whatever you want, but the truth of the matter is that all you really know is that there is this perception of an apparent grapefruit. Past that all is belief.

Part of what we like to believe is that there is a ‘perceiver’ observing the grapefruit. But if I look carefully enough, I’ll find that there isn’t even anyone having the mind activity! There is only the activity itself! Again, I can pretend that there is a ‘me’ observing the mind activity, but if I look clearly, I’ll see that I have no evidence for this. It’s just a belief.

How odd! Every time I think of ‘me’, it’s just a thought or an emotion – just current mind activity.

This clarity of observation is startling. It can take a moment for the full implication to set in. But it is suddenly completely clear that the whole idea of ‘me’, or of ’consciousness’, is just an arbitrary add-on that’s not really necessary. In fact, there’s no evidence for it at all! There is only the current mind activity.

What I’m describing here is an actual direct perception. Like the color orange. My words are only doing a crude job of explaining it, but the rest of this site aims to lead you to experience that perception for yourself.

But why have that perception? It sounds awful, right?

Read on.

Dead and Alive

In this way, an experience of non-dualism is the same as literal death. You see clearly, and what do you see? That there is no ‘you’. Everything you’ve been afraid of losing when you ‘die’ is already lost! In fact, it becomes clear that ‘you’ were never there in the first place, so in fact, nothing is lost at all!

From this vantage, it becomes clear that the whole idea of death is just a concept to explain the loss of something that was never there in the first place. It’s as if someone comes to the door, and says ‘sorry, but we’re going to have to confiscate all six billion dollars from your Swiss bank account’.

Since you don’t have a Swiss bank account, and certainly don’t have one with six billion dollars in it, it’s no loss to you!

We might get excited and check into things to see if we really did, somehow, have a Swiss account with our name on it. If we discovered that we did, we might feel that we’ve suffered a great loss. But if we find out that it was just the neighbor playing a prank on us, and that we never had such an account – well, there will be no loss at all.

In the same way, we’ve been taught that we have a ‘me’. But when we see that it was never there in the first place, we don’t feel any loss. In fact, we feel a sudden, immense freedom, because maintaining a ‘me’ is huge work! We can stop spending all our life energies trying to support our ‘me’ idea, and begin to actually Live!

Vibrant Living

I said, above, that all we can truly experience is current mind activity. The trouble is, this sounds like some kind of nightmare!

First, realize that I’m trying to describe a direct perception, and like any such description, it’s terribly inaccurate. In fact, I’m only using that phrase as a pointer to nudge us toward an actual perception of what I’m talking about. So to say current mind activity is all wrong.

When we meditate, it appears that there is only current mind activity. It appears that way because we’re viewing from our usual dualistic perspective, which can’t discern reality, but wants to put names and labels and properties onto everything.

If we look carefully, we’d see that mind activity implies things that aren’t there. Like mind. And activity.

You see, if I’m imagining only current mind activity, what I’m really doing is imagining myself having only current mind activity.

We forget that the ‘myself’ disappears when we see what’s ‘actually going on’!

What’s actually there is the immensity and simplicity of Now. To describe this perception might be folly, since any description will be, at best, a poor, inaccurate representation. But I’ll hazard it anyway, just to give us something to hold on to.

The direct perception of reality is Wholeness. Not a wholeness made up of parts, and not a Wholeness of which you are a portion. A perfect, complete wholeness free of all the concepts we hold to be true. Here there is no time. No self who can die. No self who was born. Just the all-consuming direct perception of Now. At the same time, all the ‘Things’ of the world take on a new beauty and importance, much in the way each sway and twirl makes up a dance. The sways and twirls are only differentiated from the dance as a Whole because we choose to call something a sway, and something else a twirl. And yet, those sways and twirls are the whole meaning of the dance.

To think that there is only a ‘me’ perceiving images in my head is all wrong. So is the idea that there are things out in the world with which I’m interacting. In fact, any thought or concept we try to wrap around this direct perception will only serve to obscure it. The direct perception is available to us all, but we tend to miss it because we can only imagine understanding things through thought or belief – not through direct perception.

If we follow this to its end, it leads us to incredibly vibrant living. In this state the world becomes a delightful playground where you simultaneously are able to dance with life, and you also are infused with a deep compassion for everyone and everything around you. Everything becomes perfectly clear, and you find that life is immensely more amazing than you could have ever imagined.

We’re finally free of all the work and toil of maintaining the fictional ‘me’, and can simply enjoy each moment as it unfolds.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Death. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.