The Mystic Death...
The truth of your own nature, the mystics all testify, is that you are nothing, which reveals that you are everything.
In your deepest essence, you are identical with God or ultimate reality.
Your real Life is the birthless and deathless Life of God, and the Life of God embraces the whole of creation.
But as long as your identity is centered in the limited life of the ego, you cannot live in full consciousness of this Life.
Thus, you must die to your self-centered life in order to awaken into the Life of God.
As Rumi says, “You want Reality unmasked? Choose death!
Not the death that drags you to the tomb—the death that is a transmutation, so you at last change into the Light” (Rumi, Odes).
Or, as Jesus says, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25-26).
Thus, the genuine mystic lives in and as God only insofar as the life in and as the ego is dead.
It is the ego’s delusion of grandeur that imagines you can escape suffering and attain immortality, when in fact your life centered in the ego must be completely sacrificed in the mystical death.
Any teacher or teaching that is not clear about this just feeds the ego’s propensity for megalomania and self-deception.
The genuine mystical path involves the perpetual surrender and sacrifice of all self-centered egoistic activity, up to and including the complete sacrifice of ego-centered life itself.
Thus all genuine mysticism teaches the cultivation of selflessness, love, and compassion...
-from integralscience.org
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"At the last doorway to enlightenment stands the ego's final challenge, which is the central core belief that it is the source and locus of not only identity but also of life itself. At that point, one is all alone and shorn of all protection or comforting props, belief systems, or even memory. There is solely available within one's aura the high-frequency vibration of the consciousness of the Enlightened Teacher, with its encoded Knowingness. The last step is intuited as a finality from which no turning back is possible, and thus there is consternation at the absoluteness of the finality. Then arises the knowing to walk straight ahead, no matter what, for all fear is illusion. As this last step is taken by the Spiritual Will, death is experienced, but the fierce anguish lasts for only a few moments. The death of the ego is the only actual death that one can possibly experience, in contrast to which the previous deaths of leaving the body were relatively trivial. The experience of death is terminated by awe at the revelation of the Ultimate Reality—and then even the awe disappears and the Self transcends the duality of Existence versus Nonexistence, Allness versus Nothingness, and Omnipresence versus Void."
"The serious student needs to know well in advance that at the very last doorway, he will be confronted by his willingness to surrender life itself—or at least that which has been believed since the beginning of evolution to be the very core of life itself. This final gateway is very rarely passed, and one reason is the lack of preparation, the lack of certainty, and a final doubt of major magnitude."
- David Hawkins, from the last 2 pages of "Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self"
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