Q: I have just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and though it’s a terrible shock, I am totally at peace with dying. It feels so utterly blissful to surrender to and love my fate. Amor fati, as I have heard you call it – love your fate. I am not angry about the death sentence and am not afraid. In fact I am filled with love so intense it cannot be described, only known. Doctors and people around me can feel it.
Sundari: This love is the truth of who you are, the direct experience of the Self when the attachment to the body is finally lessened. Unguarded, unconditioned. You, the Self, shine forth. It’s powerful stuff. Anyone coming into contact with you will feel it and know it because it does not belong to ‘you’ as the person. We feel this love very strongly in the ‘heart cave,’ located physically in the human heart, but it is not actually located anywhere because it is the non-local bliss of the Self. This is the love you are, and are experiencing. As are those coming into contact with you.
Every major religion and spiritual tradition—Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam—identifies the heart as the seat of the deepest human knowing. The heart is an organ science is only recently fully understanding. Yoga calls the heart the hrydaya, the essence—that without which a thing is not a thing—like sweetness is the essence of sugar. Sugar cannot be sugar without sweetness. Meaning the true essence of everything is Consciousness. You as a discreet ‘you’ or jiva, are ‘melting’ into this all encompassing bliss of the Self.
Whether the body lives or dies, you are very blessed to be having this experience, as it is rare. Some NDE’S have it, but usually not when they are still very much compos mentis, as you are. It’s the high everyone is chasing in the spiritual world, not realizing that the experience is not the aim. It is the recognition of your true identity, which is not an experience. Just the truth of who you are, without anything obstructing that knowledge.
Q: Paradoxically, I am also in love with living and would love to be here ‘in a body’ longer. I have so much to live, and to die, for. So is fighting my sentence fighting Isvara? My question is not coming from fear but the opposite.
Sundari: As with any question that can be asked regarding nondual thinking, it all depends on who is asking it. Or rather, who wants a different result. If you were asking as a fear-filled jiva, the answer is probably yes. You are fighting your fate and therefore fighting Isvara.
There is nothing wrong with death. I am pretty sure it will be the most incredible experience one can have in a body will be leaving it. After all, as beautiful as it is to be alive, it is also pretty hard to be in a body, especially if you believe that is who you are. That you are born and die. Which I know you don’t. So I know you are not asking as a fear-filled jiva.
But even so, life is not easy on the body/mind even when you know who you are. Maya does not disappear when avidya does. The push and pull of duality, the gunas is relentless. Things fall apart and hurt. Gravity still pulls, entropy still marches us steadily back to dust from whence we come. After all, that is why we all start inquiry.
We want freedom from and for the jiva. It is the bondage we want to be free of, not life itself. Life is beautiful and it is a privilege to be ‘in’ a body. So yes, as you are asking as the Self, there are times it is appropriate to say no to Isvara and ‘fight your fate’, even as you love it.
So, the first thing is to be certain that you have cleaned out any anger or unfinished business attached to your life story—people who have hurt you, situations gone bad, etc. If you haven’t, you are not free even if you know that none of it is about you. Which it is not, as the Self. Since we incarnate to resolve our karma, and Isvara is karma phala data, then we are here in a body to do that, and realize the Self. That’s the main purpose of life.
All of our conflict/friction dynamics are driven by the unconscious minds (personal unconscious and macrocosmic unconscious—Causal body) which contain our conditioning and our past. Most of who we are as conscious beings is driven by it, whether we like it or not. Our conditioning and our past weaves its way into our psyche like a parasitic vine wrapping itself tightly around the host tree, slowly suffocating, distorting it, changing its shape. And sometimes totally deforming, even killing it.
The scientific consensus is that the conscious mind—the part of you that reads these words, deliberates, and believes it is making decisions—controls approximately 5% of your cognitive and emotional activity. The remaining 95% is conducted by the unconscious mind. The vast, silent, invisible machinery that operates below the threshold of conscious awareness.
It generates the thoughts you think are yours, producing the decisions you believe you make, generates the feelings you think are yours, and runs the biological systems that keep you alive. All without ever asking your permission or reporting its activity to your conscious awareness.
The mind is truly an awesome and potentially terrifying thing. There be angels, but also, dragons, there. And they can only be slain when it’s their time. So much potential for freedom, expansion and joy. And for imprisonment, limitation and pain. Amazing and scary, being human. Especially when you are convinced that is all you are, which I know you do not.
One has to see it all, understand it, to cut the root of that parasitic invader, to ourselves free of its grip. But because it has no actual substance, you can’t see it until you see it. When you do, it is only knowledge and love that have the power to cut the ties, for good. To burn those ropes so that they no longer have any power to bind. Vedanta gives us that power. Without it, the ‘you’ you think you are is not in charge.
Whether you live or die, now is the time to take a fearless inventory. If there are remaining samskaras, Isvara sends us many messages that we often don’t hear. They have probably been there for a long time. If we don’t heed the whispers, we get the shouts and then the final kick in the butt from Isvara. The cancer itself may well be a manifestation of a deeply buried samskara. Or maybe, it is just the time for you to leave the body. Isvara must find a way to end the game for all of us. Either way, you cannot lose.
Q: I am told to think positively and would like to know what to make of it’?
Sundari. Forget about positive thinking. It only applies to people who think they are the body and have no other option. If you want to fight it, and if you know that there is stuff to resolve in the unconscious, as mentioned, that is where you have to look first. Visualization is the best way to access the that content. See it in your mind’s eye. Paint it, draw it, write it, burn it. Whatever it takes. Drag it out from the unconscious and bring it to the conscious level.
Carl Jung argued throughout his later work that images access the unconscious more directly than language does. What a person responds to visually, before constructing a verbal rationale, reveals something truer about their inner life than what they say about themselves. There is much truth to this, so explore it.
The next step is to talk to Isvara as the Self, NOT as the jiva. Give Isvara a list of instructions. Jobs to do, meaning, reasons why you want to stay and make a contribution to life.
Be very specific and clear about what you want. As the Self you are the boss of Isvara because you know it’s all zero sum anyway. You are the sum of all things. It makes no difference if you stay or leave because you never arrived and can’t go anywhere. You have nothing to gain or lose either way.
Q: Many people, including doctors, seem to be interested in my story. What to make of that?
Sundari: As Vedantins we know that ‘our’ story, while very meaningful to us personally, is not really personal in the big picture. There is only one jiva appearing as many, life is the story of life and death for all. Death is in everyone’s karma stream. No-one gets off the hook! Whether we die now, next week or in 20 years, what’s the difference? There is no time for the unborn Self.
For the jiva, living or dying shining as the Self is the greatest gift we can give to the whole, which is non-separate from us. All for one, and one for all.
Who lives and who dies?
Much love
Sundari
