Good morning, good morning, good morning. I feel like I'm in some craft that's seeking to liftoff with propellers all around. It's kind of nice. I've gotten a number of notes asking me to speak of what happens after death. My real response is just wait and find out. You will all come to know better and more clearly than the greatest gurus what happen after death 'cause it will all eventually occur. But the problem with this idea of what happens after death is it takes death seriously. As if there is such a thing as death. Death meaning some finality, some ending, some way that something ultimately ceases to be.
But everything is in a sense of flow. And so this thing we call death is also part of a totally natural flow of life. There is no such thing as the end of life. Life does not end. It does not end spiritually, it does not end metaphysically, it does not even end scientifically. Biologists, chemists, the physicist knows, not in the same way that a mystic knows but they know even on the level of matter that life does not end. It transmutes, it changes form, there's never more, never less energy. The only thing that can happen is energy changes its form. And so ultimately there's really no ending to anything. There's a turning of the page, a particular story line called 'my existence as I know it' ceasing. Obviously people we care about or we love or we like being with disappear, they seem to die, their bodies stop functioning. We no longer have those relationship with them 'cause they are not in form anymore and since death is really a changing of state more than it is a distinct unalterable event. It's only a distinct unalterable event if our perception is locked in the appearance of things. If it's just on the visual plane. On that plane of course we see bodies pass, stop functioning. We can no longer relate with the person who has died. That's all obvious. But that's also superficial. Although we may or may not want someone to be around, the fact that somebody or ourselves passes away, has any sense of some finality, is in many ways the very illusion that separation is derived from. Separation needs the illusion, the belief, in death. Without the belief in death, there is no fear. Without fear there is no separation.
So I always tell people basically what's going to happen after death, after a relatively brief transition, it's going to be basically the same thing that happens during life. And of course people often get very disappointed by that. But we tend to take very similar tendencies which construct the dream we live, and we take them with us. We take them with us from one day to the next, you go to sleep, you seem to disappear, you wake up, your tendencies wake up with you, you recreate the self you had before, you create the life you had before and you go on. You go to sleep the next night, you disappear, you wake up, the tendencies are still there. They recreate how you feel, who you think you are, who you imagine yourself to be and so it goes.
Of course after death things happen with a lot more flow. And the same things when you go to sleep and you have a dream, there's a lot more flow in a dream, right? Things can happen much quicker, transitions can be instantaneous. The dream state is not near as dense for most people as the waking state. That's why it can be so bizarre. After death it's very similar to that. It's a lot less dense so transitions are very quick. Things happen very fast. There's not near as much resistance but ultimately all of us, the latent tendencies within us continue to recreate everything we need to wake up. They do it in this thing called life, they do it after this thing called death. They keep recreating the next manifestation of consciousness whether it's a material realm or some subtle realm, we keep manifesting everything we need to wake up, whether that's easy or difficult.
So of course usually the idea of death, the fear of death itself, always comes from separation, it's the 'me' wondering what's going to happen to it when it takes its last breath. But of course the bad news is the 'me' doesn't exist in the first place. It's already dead. I wonder if people notice this sometimes. The 'me' is a totally repetitive, mostly predictable, completely mechanical thing with no actual life to it. It's like a computer program on a disk. It's not very alive. You shove it into the computer, you add a little electricity, the whole thing comes alive but in and of itself it has no real existence. The separation of 'me' is just a program. And of course that program is very fearful of its ending. Anything that was truly alive never fears its ending. Any life form that doesn't have the idea, the belief structure that causes the illusion of separation, never…your dog doesn't sit around wondering about its death. It doesn't get in great existential dread. It may mope around the house for awhile if someone it likes passes away, or something like that but most life forms since they are not going around creating separate senses of self, they don't walk around with this existential dread. 'That I may not be.'
Adyashanti – Omega 2007
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