This talk is dedicated to the memory of Georgina Marjorie Crook. It was delivered to the assembly of practitioners at the Two Day Retreat in Rickford, October 24th 1992.
Two things are omnipresent in our lives and yet day after day we fail to notice them - death and the sky. Every day people are dying: if they are our dear ones we know and feel it but the fact of everyday dying, next door, in the neighbouring street, all over town, we choose to ignore. I do not mean the accidents, murders and genocides that are the focus of our news bulletins, I mean ordinary everyday death which is as common as birth.
The sky? How often do we raise our eyes to the great blue dome? On a bright day we notice the sunlight, shining clouds and the shifting shadows moving with the clock. Yet we rarely look deliberately up into the azure haze, passing on and out into unimaginable spaces. Some of us never look. Yet there it is above us all the time. At night how often do you look out between the stars and wonder how far you can see? What is it, this endless space, this awesome void?
Death and Space; awesome, needing the reflective moment few of us give time for; they are outside the run of our concern. Big mind rarely comes from small mind. We usually need a shock.
When you sit at the bedside of a dying person or have the privilege of nursing someone whose life is moving to its close, there is a great opportunity. It is like going on a retreat knowing it could be your last. On the one hand there is the tragedy of passing time, the ending of a personal epoch, the severing of identity. On the other there is often a curious tranquillity as the mind accepts the inevitable. Tears and peace come to inform one another. It is vital not to avoid this experience by taking refuge in gossip or the repression of painful feeling. You have to be really there or you learn nothing.
The Tibetans have a meditation on death. In this process you envisage the slow dissolution of personal attributes. The earth element dissolves into water, water evaporates into air, air disappears in space. The dying self traverses each stage at differing speeds depending on circumstance. In these meditations the practitioner visualises these processes, partakes of them emptying the self of attachment and moving with the flow of dissolution. This is natural, the end game of a cycle which is eternal. In the presence of the dying the practitioner goes through this cycle mentally or verbally, assisting the passage of the other through the stages, passing through the intermediate ones to final peace. Sometimes these phases occur rapidly, all at the time of death, in other cases many of them are complete before the final breath is drawn.
When death has come it is good to sit with the dead far into the night with a candle burning, shadows moving on the beloved face. At first, overwhelmed by disbelief, it is as if the other will turn and speak, waking up once more as on so many mornings. But gradually the room resolves itself, the presence of the other slowly leaves, withdrawing into a deeper silence wherein the night sounds come, wind, leaves flying past the window, night bird's call. You say a prayer. You wish all well, God speed. And then you are alone. The room is empty. The other has gone on. Where? How? What is the meaning? What is it? In the silence the candle burns as you turn to your own rest.
Often the mind itself decays long before death. How can one help the one who is dying without awareness, grimly holding on, fighting every moment towards the end. The aim must be to facilitate tranquillity so that the natural dissolution can move peacefully on its way.
At such a time, remember the sky, letting the mind go beyond the visible into the eternity of space itself. Maybe this will be frightening and it reminds us of the need for profound meditation on the emptiness of all things including the great Universe itself. Cycles of life and death are surrounded by the awesome void of space. Yet here too there are constant arisings and fallings, comings to be and goings out of existence, the becoming and ending of stars, galaxies, worlds. We exist within great cycles like huge mandalas, realms within realms. The nature of being has many modes, not all of them conscious. The realms contain each other. At what level is the brain aware? The neuronal level differs from the mental yet the latter could not be without the former. What then are we?
A mind that probes beyond the relative sees the Universe as "perfect". Indeed whatever could it mean to say it was "imperfect"? The Universe is none other than it is and the only word for it must be perfection without an opposite. Since you and I are contained by, pervaded by, born into and of the Universe, we too partake of this perfection. We are quite simply what we are. To wish otherwise is a form of rejection, attachment to illusion, ignorance and assertion of self. And self we know is highly soluble.
Each one of us works out our karma as best we can. In relativity there is pain and distress. God, the fickle bastard, seems cruel, uncaring, rewarding the righteous with injustice. Yet in the transpersonal vision there is an opening space, the unchangeable root of change. Here is the Eternal of which we cannot speak, for to speak is relative. We can however gaze out between the stars letting go into free fall. Goodbye is present at the ending and in the beginning. And miraculously, without comprehension, love appears in a rising light.
How does the river flow? The stream descends as it must, moulding itself in flow around the rocks and boulders finding its natural way. "Going to where the water ends" means the ocean and the sun raised vapours forming again into great clouds, the never ending return. And the sharp rocks, the obstacles, gradually become softly shaped into round stones all fitting the watery bed in natural patterns. Obstacles and water all shape each other reciprocally. There is a lesson here.
How does the river of experience flow? It runs as it must, a never ending stream which, in the freedom of its own nature, shapes all obstacles as its bed. Broken stones become smooth surfaces, each one fitting the next in a pattern of karmic creation. How does the river flow? Interdependently as it must within the eternal. When you feel this in your life and meditation you have learned to ride the Ox.
