Maggie: Hello Sundari, I am in my late sixties and observing the decline of the body, mostly with dismay, sometimes with surrender. I know I am not my body but the infinite Awareness that animates it. But I sometimes struggle to come to terms with the inevitable decline of old age. I find it very difficult to stay present with what is, to be ‘in the now’, and the fear of death is hard to eradicate. Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this?
Sundari: Well, first of all, we need to establish who is asking for help because as the Self, you are unborn and never die. If you are identified with the body, then ‘you’, the person you think you are, will die. There is nothing you can do about that, so why worry about it? The Greek philosopher Epicurus famously said, “Death is nothing to us; when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness end with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness”. End quote.
Epicurus did not have Self-knowledge; he was identified with the body and so believed that consciousness ends when it ends. But if he had, he would have ended that statement with:
“The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, Awareness ends”.
Death applies only to the body, which upon its demise returns to the five elements from which it arose. The Subtle body, the blueprint for that particular vasana bundle, is subsumed back into the Causal body from where it originated. And, depending on whether or not that blueprint exhausted its vasanas, it may or may not be recycled in the ongoing apparently real world, mithya. With the emphasis on ‘apparently real’. Real being that which is always present and unchanging, which only applies to Awareness. From the Self’s point of view, nothing ever gets ‘recycled’ because nothing ‘cycled’ in the first place.
What exactly do you take ‘the now” to mean? If by the now you mean Awareness, you cannot ‘be in it’ because you are it. The term ‘being in the now’ implies that you can be out of the now, which is not possible because there is only the Now. The problem with the mithya idea of “being here now” or “embracing the present moment” is that it is often an attempt to avoid or band-aid what is actually going on. The idea implies focusing on the positive and embracing only the nice bits of the present. Also implied is that if you follow the advice of the ‘In The Now’ pundits, you will float contentedly through life, relishing simple pleasures and finding wonder in the everyday. In other words, the advice is about the ideal person you aim to ‘become’ if the body was not losing bits and pieces and you weren’t so conditioned by your likes and dislikes. It’s not actually about embracing the present but escaping it for a better future where you will be living some silly notion of an idealized life.
The emphasis is on the person, the doer trying to ‘be present’, which is impossible because the so-called present instantly morphs into the past. You cannot do your way into peace of mind or the Now. Karma yoga, the spiritual practice of surrendering the idea of doership, is the best cure for this nonsensical idea. Only karma yoga works to neutralize all desires and relieve the pressure of the doer. Another is mind management, observing the guna-created thoughts and to focus instead on the certainty of the deathless Self you are instead of the certainty of the death of the body. The assured mortality of the body is the ultimate reminder that our fantasies of someday finally becoming perfect are inherently absurd.
Apart from the fact that decay and decline will show up at everyone’s door sooner or later, there is no more useless endeavour than the attempt to perfect what is always changing, i.e., not real. Karma yoga allows us to lay down the welcome mat to whatever life has in store for us. If we are convinced that we are the person we show up as, all we have, in place of that imagined progression toward perfection, is a succession of imperfect present moments, until, one day, they end. As we age and the future disappears, we find the immediacy of what we may have avoided all our lives staring us in the face. No place to run anymore.
The truth is that it is in resisting the truth of how things really are which makes life so difficult and painful. It’s not that karma yoga means embracing unpleasant experiences and stops them from being unpleasant. Indeed, accepting their intractable unpleasantness is arguably the whole challenge. But by doing so we relinquish results which stops all experiences from being a problem because we are no longer the problem. It becomes possible to be at peace with exactly how things are, including the ‘not-being-at-peace’ that sometimes arises.
As the Zen saying goes… “Our suffering is believing there’s a way out.” There is no way out of duality other than with Self-knowledge and karma yoga. We hand over the experience and the result of action to the Field. We do not have to carry it. The Awareness you are has always been free of the body/mind. And for the person, there’s freedom from the existential burden of doership, even if there’s no possibility of freedom from the actual experiences you are going through. The freedom is the knowledge that your true essence is immortal, and no experience (object) has the slightest effect on you as the Self. The ability to discriminate Awareness from the objects that appear in you at all times is freedom. The idea of death being just another object known to you.
Samsaris, people under the spell of duality, don’t understand karma yoga and assume that a life of meaning and dignity entails being in control, so of course, death is a fearful thing. But there’s more meaning and dignity in accepting our lack of control and not running from what can’t be outrun. There is no security in mithya. Karma yoga is the only life insurance that matters. As the jiva, we will all grow old, feeble, and die one day. In surrender to that, life is an adventure, even when the adventure renders the body useless and beyond repair or control. To surrender means we are fine with the fading away of the body, of being nobody, and giving up everything as we slowly release every thread that keeps the body tied to us.
Love, Sundari
