Into Great Silence

 


I’ve been reading and enjoying the book ‘Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying’ by Ram Dass and I came across this passage a couple of minutes ago that brought me to a stop. I have learned that it is useful to pay attention to such moments so here is the passage:

“The moment of death does not necessarily transform us; we die, after all, as who we are, no better or worse, no wiser or more ignorant. We each bring to the moment of our passing the summation of all that we’ve lived and done, which is why we must begin as soon as possible to prepare ourselves for this occasion by waking up, completing our business, and becoming the sort of people who can close their eyes for the last time without regrets.”

I wondered what my last words or thoughts might be and thought that, at the moment, they would very likely be something along the lines of the English phrase, “Oh dear!” but a bit less polite. So then I thought about what I would like to bring to that moment, so that I could close my eyes “without regrets” as Ram Dass puts it. And that’s what I’m sitting with right now. What I’ve got so far is that I don’t want it to be clever – the kind of thing that might get included in a book of ‘famous last words.’ What comes to mind now is the word (if there is anyone else present at the time) or the feeling (if there isn’t) of ‘kindness’.

Kindness has not been a major feature of my life to date but I would like it to be, so now I have to consider what would make it so, given that we have no idea when our last breath will be. Whatever it is, I’d better get a move on!

Obviously I wrote all this down and turned it into a blog because I hope that you too, dear reader, will find it helpful to reflect on the words of Ram Dass...


Bibliography and Videography

Dass, R. (2001). Still here: Embracing aging, changing, and dying (p. 161). Penguin Publishing Group.

Key words
awakening, enlightenment, death, consciousness, last words,
 

Image

A royalty-free image representing transition to the afterlife

Link

Forster, P. (2024). Into Great Silence. https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/03/into-great-silence.html

Location: Great Malvern, Malvern WR14, UK

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Develop inner peace and clarity - Tilopa's ‘Six words of advice’, the ‘do nothing’ meditation and beingness

Image
   Some of us have lives that are very focused on ‘doingness’, on being active and productive, setting and achieving goals, spending our days moving from one job to another, perhaps without ever giving thought to what lies behind all that activity. In this post I’m contrasting this with ‘beingness’, referring to the state of simply existing, without judgment, attachment, or aversion. It is the natural, uncontrived state of awareness that is often obscured by our habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. By cultivating beingness we develop: Presence . Being fully present in the moment, without distraction or mental wandering.  Acceptance . Accepting things as they are, without judgment or resistance. (BTW, ‘acceptance’ is not the same as ‘putting up with’) Non-attachment . Letting go of our attachment to thoughts, emotions, and desires.  Non-conceptualisation. Experiencing the world without the filter of our concepts and labels. Unity . Recognizing the in...
Read more

Book review: Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna.

Image
   (This blog first appeared as a book review that I contributed at goodreads.com on 10th November, 2024. There is a small amount of overlap between some of my comments there and previous blogs here. Hopefully the repetition is useful! I also ‘tidied up’ the text of the GoodReads review a bit.)   As far as I know, ‘Jed McKenna’ is a pseudonym and people in a position to know say that the spiritual centre and cast of characters described in this book are all made up. However, the ideas given in the book are worth commenting on anyway, whoever the author is. Rather than keep referring to the author as ‘the pseudonymous Jed McKenna’ I’ll refer to him / them as JM.  For those wondering about buying the book, I’ll mention a few of the points JM made in the book and add a few observations of my own. As the title suggests, the book is about spiritual enlightenment, which JM defines as “abiding, non-dual awareness.” JM also describes a simple technique for realising enligh...
Read more

Ground of all being – part deux

Image
      1. A couple of words about the philosophy of consciousness: Following on from the previous blog ( https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/07/ground-of-all-being-exploring-deep.html ), my research into the ‘ground of all being’ continued... I looked around for theories of mind and consciousness that are consistent with those meditation experiences as I think it might help advance the field if we do more to bring practice and experience together with theory. I ruled out models of materialism some years ago as being too limited for a whole range of phenomena. I’ve also written about some of the alternatives to materialism in previous blogs so I won’t repeat myself here. One option that I still like the look of though is the theory of cosmopsychism, about which Itay Shani 2015 (full citation below in Sources), writes in depth, including the following brief quote: “... the first postulate of cosmopsychism is that the cosmos as a whole is the only ontological ultimate the...
Read more