The evening before Easter I happened to pick up a copy of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra. I'd never really glanced at this book before. The final chapters are intriguing as they are squarely considering time-bound awareness, timeless awareness, the present moment, death and life.
"Einstein himself experienced episodes of complete liberation from space-time boundaries: "At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold and yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable. Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor eternity, only Being." - Ageless Body, Timeless Mind by Deepak Chopra
In honor of the symbol of springtime and resurrection, therefore, a story (I'll also include more of the book in a forthcoming Google document) for your meditative Sunday.
""I'm very afraid of death," an Indian disciple once confessed to his guru. "It's haunted me since I was a child. Why was I born? What will happen to me when I die?"
The guru considered the matter thoughfully and said, "Why do you think you were born?"
"I don't understand your question," the disciple stammered.
"Why do you think you were born?" the guru repeated. "Isn't it just something your parents told you that you took for granted? Did you actually have the experience of being born, of coming into existence from a state of nonexistence, or didn't it happen that one day in childhood you asked where you came from, and your parents told you that you were born? Because you accepted their answer, the idea of death frightens you. But rest assured, you cannot have birth without death. They are two poles of the same concept. Perhaps you have always been alive and always will be. But in accepting your parents' system of belief, you entered into an agreement to fear death, because you think it is an ending. Perhaps there is no ending--that is the possibility worth exploring."
Naturally the disciple was shocked, because, like the rest of us, he didn't see death as a belief he had agreed to. What the guru was pointing out is that birth and death are space-time events but existence isn't. If we look inside us, we find a faint but certain memory that we have always been around. To put it another way, no one remembers not existing." - Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra
And a related video describing "the unborn nature" that is exquisitely present in the present moment (via Adyashanti):
". . . the post-Einstein universe has no beginning and end, no edges in time and space. To join this larger reality, each of us must redefine where our own life begins and ends--or whether it begins and ends at all." - Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
As you look about you today, or hear about you today, or think about you today, or taste about you today.... consider where precisely you the subject ends and the other object begins, and vice versa. Is it that discrete, really? Where does the sky begin and where does it end? Consider many other boundaries of beginning and ending and starting and stopping and solid and hollow... is there really a hard-stop distinction of dark and dawn? Is it perhaps a singular fluid contiguous happening? Happening--has anything happened? Is anything arising? Where? Allow yourself more questions that arise. Contemplate them in lyrics, or imagery, or allow the series of your questions with or without answers to comprise a poem, or....
ART CREDITS Crystal Pyramid and Turquoise Floating I by Marlene Tseng Yu.
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