Everyone has their own personal approach to spirituality, even if it is to say, “Spirituality is a load of crap, I have no interest in it.” I’m sympathetic with that attitude, because I’ve become increasingly reluctant to use that term, spirituality.
It’s difficult to find substitutes, given that the word is so commonly used to denote looking for meaning in life in some sort of non-materialistic fashion. I mean, an avid gambler finds meaning in placing bets, but few people would consider that a spiritual pursuit.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter if there isn’t a coherent widely-agreed upon definition of spirituality. Maybe the best we can do is view spirituality as a pointer toward insights or practices that are meaningful to the person having or engaging in them, regardless if others feel the same way.
That’s the background with which I share the most essential aspect of spirituality for me these days: deeply feeling that life one day will end. This recognition is both astoundingly obvious and astoundingly obscure.
Obvious, because it’s so clear that everything which lives, will die. People. Pets. Plants. Living beings of any size, shape, or species. All will die. Naturally including you, me, and every other human.
Obscure, because it’s one thing to know conceptually that life will end for us one day. It’s a whole other thing to recognize this not as a thought, but as an intuitive feeling that resonates like a bell announcing the stroke of midnight.
My personal experience is just a sample of one. However, I suspect that it is more than a coincidence that the older I become (I’m 77), the more frequent a feeling best expressed in words as “All this will be no more” washes over me. The feeling doesn’t seem to be related to where I am or what I’m doing.
It simply arises unbidden as a stark glimpse into the fact that no matter how pleasurable or painful my life is, the absence of life after death is on a completely different plane of existence — since there is nothing about life that carries over into non-life, nonexistence.
I understand that believers in the supernatural likely will heartily disagree. All I can say in response, speaking as someone who used to believe in life after death, is that no one, repeat, no one, knows if life continues on in some fashion after the body dies, because anyone making such a claim obviously is alive, not dead.
Yet we all have experienced loved ones, human, animal, or plant, who once were part of our life and now aren’t, because they died. That feeling of absence is the closest I can come to describing how I feel when the fact of my life ending hits me with the sledgehammer of Undeniable Reality. It isn’t so much a fear, as of the eventual lack of fear, along with the lack of everything else I’ve come to love, hate, or be indifferent to in my life.
I can’t call it an unpleasant experience, nor a pleasant experience. It’s more like a reminder of something inescapable and important than usually is submerged among the many details of my everyday life. That’s why I’m grateful for the feeling that one day life will end for me.
I’m reminded to pay attention.
Not in a frantic I’ve got to get working on my bucket list!, but as something like the familiar adage, Be here now. While in one sense there is nothing other than now — we can’t live in the past or future — it’s possible to fill that now with regrets and hopes instead of what is present to us at this very moment.
I attempted to address this subject seven years ago, albeit from a bit different perspective, in “Zen’s tiger and strawberry story is about dealing with death.” The post starts off with:
The older I get — I’m 69 — the more I resonate with the Zen story of a man who had a bad day when he was chased by a tiger. Which turned into a much worse day when another tiger and a couple of mice showed up.
“A man was walking across a field when he saw a tiger. Fearing for his life, the man fled, but the tiger gave chase. The man reached the edge of a cliff, and just as he thought the tiger would get him, he spotted a vine growing over the edge of the cliff. Grabbing on to it, he swung himself over the edge to safety.
The tiger came to the edge and snarled at him from above. While precariously perched like this, the man saw another tiger growling at him from below. Trembling, he held on to the thin vine that was keeping him from being dinner for the tigers. What could be worse than this, he wondered.
Just then, two mice scampered out and began gnawing at the vine. As they chewed and the man pondered over his fate, he saw a juicy, red strawberry on a ledge next to him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. Ah, how sweet it tasted!”
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One could say that everything is the essence of spirituality just as everything is the essence of physicality. I mean, they are just words that we use to explain things conceptually. I’m more drawn towards the reality of the moment before thought overlays the actual experience with conditioned concepts. Suzuki Roshi often mentioned this habit of ours of overlaying what we see with what we think, thereby separating ourselves from the reality of the moment: He reminds us that: – “Wherever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.” Suzuki Roshi.
But, seeing everything as separate from us is a deeply ingrained habit and distancing ourselves from such realities as death through various concepts comes almost automatically. I tend to think that the Buddhist concept of impermanence is key. To see that all things are transient, uncertain and impermanent, to see the uncertainty of things is to see the reality of them. Everything eventually dies. Birth, a brief existence and death are all part of the impermanence of things, planets, suns, galaxies, creatures, plants, bacteria, rocks etc., it is all part of the natural order of things.
My question is, why want more? Perhaps because we habitually separate ourselves mentally via the ‘self-concept’ – the belief or feeling that we are separate individuals thereby believing ourselves to be special and deserving of more life than nature provides. So, we invent and hope for more life continuing in some non-natural way.
Impermanence is a fact of life. It is natural to sustain and protect our lives but to extend this protection to some imagined after-life, is to maintain a ‘self’ importance that is purely conceptual. If it’s truth we after, then Suzuki tells us: – “When we realize the everlasting truth of “everything changes” and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.”
And perhaps Nirvana, rather than being the expected all lights and delights is simply being without the suffering that the barrage of concepts produces.
“I understand that believers in the supernatural likely will heartily disagree. All I can say in response, speaking as someone who used to believe in life after death, is that no one, repeat, no one, knows if life continues on in some fashion after the body dies, because anyone making such a claim obviously is alive, not dead.”
Even Zen Buddhists would disagree.
Everything isn’t going away. You aren’t the whole story. Sorry. It’s not about you. The only thing that is going away is your illusion of identity. That has a deadline. All of reality will continue as it has, as it is.
The world is not what we perceive or think. Those false witnesses filled with need, passion and pride, hopelessly twisted and warping perception will finally, for a little while, come to an end.
But they don’t exist except in short term memory. And what you thinck of all your past parcel perceptions is a chemical impression rebuilt by your brain moment to moment. No, you don’t remember it right, no one does.
And what if all the things you no longer remember? Gone until you use a memory jogger to reconstruct and reconnect tooth those old things.
If it think that’s all, if you think that’s real, what was all that spiritual practice for?
Spiritually is all about sharpening, broadening and deepening our connection to reality. That wealth never goes away. You just go into it. And if you have done that daily, then it is a pleasure to be free of the shackles of the prison cell of mind and the false images of reality and identity it creates, once and for all.
Spirit is uniquely connected to all things. And they don’t disappear ss this tiny and flawed persona is destined to.
It sounds more like a condition of early dementia. The same exact thing happens to everyone when they die. No difference between satsangies and everyone else. Life doesn’t begin at birth and it doesn’t end at death. It continues with you or without you. That everlasting thang is what you discovered when you took LSD or when you meditated whichever came first. In your case sounds like another LSD casualty. Pride comes before a fall.