The warty frog and the prize goldfish met one summer afternoon in the temple pool.
“Don’t you realize how beautiful I am?” bubbled the goldfish flashing her wispy tail.
The frog made no reply.
“I can understand your silence,” gloated the goldfish. “I am not only graceful in my movements but I also enhance the golden rays of the sun.”
Again, neither answer or movements from the frog.
“Say something,” demanded the goldfish just as a waiting crane speared the sparkling fish and flew into the sky.
“Bye bye,” croaked the frog.
Learn To Die
Bye Bye – when the frog was not answering the fish was more proud of herself, her beauty, smartness to express herself and most important thing she was thinking that frog is dumb. She was so much involved in her own praise that she was not aware of that death is reaching to her. Death knocking on her door.
This is our story also. We are so busy in our identity that we are not aware that death will knock any time.
Death is a great opportunity because death is one way in which the formless dimension comes into this life. It’s precisely at the moment of the fading of the form, that the formless comes into this life. But if that is not accepted, and the fading of form is denied, then it’s a missed opportunity.
As people around you pass away, you become increasingly aware of your own mortality. The body will dissolve. Many people still, in our civilization, they deny death. They don’t want to think about it, don’t want to give it any attention.
There is enormous potential there for spiritual flowering. Even in people who, up to the point of the beginning of the fading of the form, were completely identified with the form. It’s your last chance in this incarnation, as your body begins to fade – or you are becoming aware of this limited lifespan. It’s your last chance to go beyond identification with form. This is true whether it’s to do with your body, or somebody else’s body.
One of the factors in death is the mind is so frightened. We are so frightened of that very word and nobody talks about it. I mean it isn’t a daily conversation. It is something to be avoided, something that is inevitable, for god’s sake keep it as far away as possible.
The understanding of death, its relation to living and this thing called love. One cannot possibly understand the immensity, and it is immense, this thing called death, unless there is a real freedom from fear. That’s the problem of fear. Without really freeing the mind, unless the mind frees itself from fear there is no possibility of understanding the extraordinary beauty, strength and vitality of death.
Learning from the story Bye Bye: Learn To Die
Experience Learning
That’s a very, very, remarkable way to put it – the vitality of death. And yet normally we regard it as the total negation of life.
The negation of life. That’s right. So if we are enquiring into this question of death, fear must be completely non-existent in us. Then I can proceed. Then I can find out what death means. We have touched a little bit on reincarnation, the belief that is maintained throughout the East which has no reality in daily life. It is like going to church every Sunday and being mischievous for the rest of the six days. So – you follow? – a person who is really serious, really attentive, goes into this question of death, he must understand what it means, the quality of it, not the ending of it. That’s what we are going to a little bit discuss.
The ancient Egyptians, the pharaohs and all the first dynasty till the eighteenth and so on, they prepared for death. They said we will cross that river with all our goods, with all our chariots, with all our belongings, with all our property; and therefore their caves, their tombs were filled with all the things of their daily life, corn, you know all that. So living was only a means to an ending, dying. That’s one way of looking at it. The other is reincarnation, which is the Indian, Asiatic outlook. And there is this whole idea of resurrection, of the Christians. Reborn, carried, by the Gabriel Angel, and all that, to heaven and you will be rewarded. Now, what is the fact? These are all theories, suppositions, beliefs and non-facts. I mean, supposed to be born Jesus comes out of the grave, resurrected physically. That is just a belief. There were no cameras there, there were no ten people to say, yes I saw it. It is only somebody imagined. We will go into that a little bit a little later.
So there is this living and preparing for death as the ancient Egyptians did. Then there is the reincarnation. Then there is resurrection. Now, if one isn’t frightened – you follow, sir – deeply, then what is death? What is it that dies, apart from the organism? The organism may continue if you look after it very carefully for eighty or ninety, or one hundred years. If you have no disease, if you have no accidents, if there is a way of living sanely, healthily, perhaps you will last one hundred years or 110 years. And then what? You follow? You will live one hundred years, for what! For this kind of life? – fighting, quarrelling, bickering, bitterness, anger, jealousy, futility, a meaningless existence. It is a meaningless existence as we are living now.
The dying is the living, when the content is totally emptied. That means no attachment. It isn’t a brutal cutting off, but the understanding of attachment, the understanding of dependency, the understanding of acquisition, power, position, anxiety, all that. The emptying of that is the real death. And therefore the emptying of consciousness means the consciousness which has created its own limitation by its content, comes to an end.
Tags: Learn To Die
