EMBRACING DEATH WITH OPEN ARMS
It is interesting that when you do cut all those strings you automatically step into LIFE. You are a part then of the whole and sense that unity with all living creatures.
You experience a TRUE COMPASSION for those Living Dead within Samsara that are staining that natural and beautiful illusion. That compassion rises within you and you wish, without any vestige of Identity symptoms, that not one SUFFER.
You experience a GLADNESS for every one of the Living Dead if, for only a moment, they embrace life and sense a true natural Gladness at being alive.
You experience a BENEVOLENT AFFECT, which has no relation to the "love" of the walking Dead, that wishes that every living creature will dwell continually within a state of WELLBEING.
You experience an EQUANIMITY, inasmuch as whatever you do that is generated with a pure mind free of Identity is free of consequences which either inflate Identity or cause Identity to wince and complain.
Furthermore, when you step into LIFE, you embrace DEATH with open arms.
That does not mean at all that you take a dive off a bridge, but that you understand that life and death are not separate phenomena.
There is no longer a fear of death or a clinging to life... yet every moment of life becomes a treasure.
As a child I learned a poem of Robert Browning and, like many other poems, somehow it was internalized so Death was never felt as a threat.
Prospice
FEAR death? -- to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face, When the snows begin, and the blasts denote I am nearing the place, The power of the night, the press of the storm, The post of the foe; Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go: For the journey is done and the summit attained, And the barriers fall. Tho' a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, The reward of it all. I was ever a fighter, so -- one fight more, The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore, And bade me creep past. No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness and cold. For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end, And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with God be the rest.
So when embracing LIFE one also embraces DEATH in a healthy and sane way.
The only real task is to know when the journey is done and the summit attained.
All the barriers then that normally force one to cling to life will be let go.
But though the mind accepts the inevitable, one must then allow the greater master, the experiences that are subliminal,
true master of body and mind, to fight naturally for survival.
-- one fight more: The best and the last!
If you embrace life, then death can never bandage your eyes.