Die While You’re Alive

Surely you never have dreamed the 
incredible depths were
prologue and epilogue merely
To the surface play in the sun, the instant 
of life, what is called
life? I fancy
That silence is the thing…

Robinson Jeffers

It was the first complete meditation in the parkland in nearly two weeks, since some miscreant started the huge “Park Fire” in Upper Park by igniting a car and pushing it into a ravine.

The winds have mostly been out of the south, pushing the fire, as well as the smoke north. So Chico has only had a couple “hazardous” air quality days. But the fire has been physically and emotionally devastating to people in this area. And metaphysically, it’s very strange.­­­

Not only because of its size (approaching half a million acres, the largest in the USA so far this year), or even because it was started in Bidwell Park, the jewel of this rapidly growing small city at the northeastern corner of the Central Valley. One thing is for sure -- you can’t do metaphysics and be a materialist.

Philosophy is secondary at any rate. What is a complete meditation? To my mind, it’s changed over the years. As a young man, a complete meditation simply meant the ending of the observer in choiceless watchfulness in the mirror of nature. Passive awareness allows one’s awareness to grow quicker than the usually subconscious reactions of judgment and interpretation of the observer.

While intense states of wordless insight would often occur, my philosophy of meditation wasn’t developed. That’s a paradox, because meditation cannot begin until the verbal and conceptual yield to the sensory and wordless. The word is not the thing, the map is not the territory, and the philosophy is not the actuality.

In recent years, complete meditation meant the spontaneous ending of time, which is the essence of thought. With the ending of time the movement of the past through the present into the future ceases, and one is totally present with what is.

If one is fortunate enough to sit beside a stream surrounded by foliage, with little or no man-made noise, the beauty of the earth and beyond nature becomes palpable. And beauty is always new, however many times one may have taken a meditation at the same place.

Lately I feel that a complete meditation means making a friend of death. When death draws near without fear, and is seen and felt as inextricable from life, meditation has truly begun, and the unnamable is.

Separating death from life was probably the first psychological separation that our proto-human ancestors made hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Life, death and non-personal love are one movement however, and the movement of thought must effortlessly end for that truth to be. The eyes are cleansed of the old and bathed in the new.

Thinking on and writing about these things today, a short poem by the 17th century Japanese Zen Master Bunan came to mind:

Die while you’re alive
and be absolutely dead.
Then do whatever you want:
it’s all good.

Even to an adept meditator, that sounds rather extreme. What is he referring to? Psychological death obviously, the death of the self. Is that possible for ordinary human beings, or even desirable?

It is where human consciousness is headed, if it’s headed anywhere except increasing darkness. Though there is no arrival, irrevocable psychological death is what “attaining enlightenment” really means.

Small deaths occur in the deeper states of meditation, but there’s a reversion to so-called normal consciousness, which has become so untenable in humans the world over.

If we live with the actuality of death while fully alive, which is occurring within and around us every moment, what is death when we expire?

Given the consciousness we know, we hold death off until the end. But it is possible to transcend death while fully alive. If we don’t psychologically and emotionally separate death from life while fully alive, is there death at all when we expire, or just the end of the body?

Death is not just the termination of the body however, but the complete ending of the continuity of the self. However rare that is at present in people, we can make a friend of death when we’re healthy.

Indeed, dying every day while fully alive not only makes life much more vibrant; it opens the door to the sacredness that suffuses the earth and the universe. But self and man must psychologically die for that to be.

Martin LeFevre
lefevremartin77@gmail

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