"vyutthāna—the several-minutes-long process of coming out of deep meditation, of moving from fully introversive awareness to the extroversive state. It is in this vyutthāna phase that we have a golden opportunity to integrate the former with the latter. Kṣema teaches...
a practice in dying
“If you would die well, permit yourself to fill with the rush of breath, playful movement, stirring warmth, and the clarity of rest. The angel of death bares no harm to life unresisted.”
What blocks us from evolving in a more satisfying or dignified way?
Perhaps fear.
If so, what are we fearful most of?
Perhaps the event that would be the end of all our perceived experience, death.
When we die, what happens? Yes, that timeless question.
Will anyone ever know?
Yes, I would say. I have witnessed hundreds of deaths. Not as a paramedic, an ER doctor, or soldier. I’m speaking of the clichéd ego-death. And yet, not the ones we’re mostly familiar with—the relative ones. But one that comes so efficiently and completely with this particular molecule that can help us die.
What are we free of when we die? What dies? Who dies?
In death, something gives way. Something is released. What is it? Well, amongst other things, all those fears that form much of our identlty—conscious or unconscious. All those barriers that protect us from discomfort, or hold us back from… evolving?
What if we could intentionally be released from all that holds us back, only to come back.
Come back from what? We may have heard the stories of near-death experiences. We may have touched on transcendent joy, ecstasy, bliss. It’s all hard to put into words. It can’t be put into words. It’s ineffable.
What’s not ineffable are the qualities that are linked with an ease—a real ease—of being, a wildness and an innocence that is beyond programming. Not so much a becoming something but maybe an un-becoming, a re-membering of all the disparate parts that would have us feeling broken and not whole.
What are these qualites? Compassion, joy, loving presence, forgiveness, curiosity, empathy, gratitude, grace….
In the full release with the god molecule, death—the temporary yet eternally accessible direct experience with all that is—reveals these qualities by way of helping us shed the patterned, conditioned self. Dying into the whole, into the One. It can be a practice.
Does taking this molecule just give us these qualities? No. However, it can reveal them as we’re released from the dismemberment of a life lived defended, unwitnessed, fragmented. A life sometimes agitated, other times sleepy, tame, perhaps numbed. Tamed by a status quo apparatus that is characterized by echelons of stratified society: separateness.
To separate us.
A sepparatUs.
Perhaps an antidote to this malaise could be a direct experience of unity. This is the reliable potential of the god molecule: it’s trans-personal, trans-human. And yet to be human—to be a cis-human—is to consciously choose to be that, to be here in that, to be here in that now.
And what kind of human do we want to be?
Hopefully not one that is clinging on to life for fear of losing it. Hopefully one that is open to the idea that life is here to be lived and it includes being fully human.
Beautiful human.
Be-a-yoU-to-full, human.
Feel all the feels. Think all the thoughts. Embrace all that there is to be experienced. But first, embracing this experience that is happening right now.
The present moment is eternal. Death, I would say, is that. It’s uncensored by time. And the mind’s ego is the time machine. But the present moment is held. Held in this body—for awhile. And held eternally in infinite awareness.
I don’t wish to embellish or glamourise death. Or make it profane. It is sacred. It is real.
With all due respect, I engage with death to revere even more this life that is being lived.
This is no frivolous adventure.
This is about embodying the freedom to live in an undefended way, in a way that is not fettered by the fear of losing it all. Bringing those heavenly qualities we all have access to and the capacity to cultivate to the forefront of our felt experience.
Because we feel here, with this body.
This wild, ephemeral body.
And we’re on earth.
I practise death to bring heaven on earth.
Sounds like enlightenment?
I don’t know but,
as I learn to die well,
I en-lighten up!
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