Martin LeFevre: Death Is Awareness

Color as thick as the clouds themselves suffuses the massive, multi-layered cumulus. The color appears almost solid, so that the substance of the clouds seems to be color itself.

After the squalls that rolled through during the day, the smell of earth, new growth, and browning grass are strong and sweet. Swallows play on the air and swerve close; they are the essence of joy without fear. I catch a glimpse of a falcon as it disappears behind a tree. But just as I get up to confirm it, the sun emerges with painful brilliance. Any chance of verifying the kestrel by its fluttering flight pattern is impossible.

To die as easily as a sunset, with silent fire and blazing color, is the meaning to me of a good life and a good death. The biggest question to my mind is not God, but death. There is, I am certain, no separate ‘Creator,’ though the universe is an expression of an infinite, indivisible intelligence. One can come into contact with that perpetual mystery, and still understand little of death.

Is the death of psychological thought--that is, of the continuity of memory, identity, and the past--the beginning of an awareness that does not die? Perhaps, given that the universe is permeated by an inseparable intelligence, which we can only see and feel when thought is completely still. Dying while fully alive, a new synaptic node of awareness in the cosmos is formed when a human being fully awakens.

On the other hand, the notion of an afterlife pertains to the continuity of self, which is a construction of thought. There may be continuity in collective consciousness after an individual’s death, but that is not death at all. Indeed, to my mind it’s a fate worse than death.

The essential thing is to psychologically die while fully alive. Of course that is precisely the thing we fear the most—the death of ‘My Self.’ But what I fear most is exactly the opposite—the continuity of myself in some form after death. I’m not speaking of some supernatural realm, but of human consciousness, which we hardly understand at all.

Continuity of self is the nightmare never ending. Of course those who believe there is nothing but thought and the self don’t go near these questions because they don’t want to confront the fear of nothingness.

The belief that there is no intelligence at all in the universe is just the flipside of the belief in a Creator. So too, the idea that there is nothing but the meaning our minds invent is the flipside of the notion that ‘Jesus has a place for me in heaven.’ Both give primacy to the self, just in opposite ways.

The essential thing is to die while fully alive. Then, when one physically expires, awareness does not die. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it.”

One can’t fool death. One has to psychologically die to transcend death, and that is the hardest thing for us to do. It happens temporarily in the meditative state, but can it happen irrevocably, so that one leaves the stream of content-consciousness for good, while fully alive? Surely that is illumination.

To embrace death when one’s time comes, without fear, regret, and unfinished business, is the mark of a good life. Indeed, it is a mark of greatness. Perhaps that doesn’t require illumination, and is more common than we realize. But that simply means that ordinary human beings are capable of greatness, and that we can grow to be, synapses of awareness in the cosmic mind.

It’s a strange thing how beauty, love, and death go together. Not in any morbid sense, when one is sick or on one’s deathbed. Rather, they flow together, not as ideals, Platonic or otherwise, but as essences. They are actually one movement.

With understanding, the thing we want—the continuity of the self—is what we would rightly fear; and what we fear—the ending of the self—is what we would truly want.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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