Death and the Deathless
Selection from new book in-progress
Bubbles
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because
dawn has come.
-- Rabindranath Tagore
How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?
--Rumi
The temple bell stops—
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
--Basho
Giving up the body is a great festival for me.
---Nisargadatta
To ask whether there will be everlasting life or whether this mind or this self will remain, disregards everything else that you already are. The question of death can be asked only from the contracted state; it has no meaning from the whole.
--Steven Harrison
The day my 95 year old mother died, we blew bubbles over her bed, her Lift Off Bubbles, we called them. It was an extraordinary day, full of love and joy and laughter and tears. It was her last party, and she died just as the sun was setting. She lifted off, nothing to nothing, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. I sat with her cooling body, holding her bony hands, touching her face. Although we called them her Lift-Off bubbles, it was utterly clear that there was no-thing apart from everything that dies or survives death, no-thing that lifts off and nowhere to go other than right here. The bubble of apparent encapsulation burst, the dawn came, the Dorothy Show is finished and yet never finished, for it can also be said that it never began – Dorothy is everywhere and everything, sparkling in this new November sunshine, dancing in the leaves. Each life is like a bubble, inside and outside are the same always. When the bubble pops, all is One as it always was, and there is no more imaginary separation. Inside the bubble is empty; outside the bubble is empty. Each bubble is brief and fragile, but immensely beautiful. Shimmering. Wobbling. Billowing. Expanding. Popping. Oh, how I adored my mother's smile, her voice, her hair, her face, her nose, her hands – the Dorothy Show, ephemeral and precious. Pop! Gone now, and always right here.
What Remains
Where is Dorothy? Gone! What was Dorothy? Nothing can be grasped. And yet, Dorothy can't be denied. Form and emptiness, relative and absolute. Ocean and wave.
I cry and feel grief, but it is a pure grief, like a clean fire or a cleansing rain, almost an ecstasy at times, and I feel a great peace and love and groundedness, a new strength. Bits of my mother's life are migrating into my apartment now....a few red pillows, a purple sweater, her fuchsia colored shawl.....and already this place is changed. And I am changed. Nothing seems real now except the absolute simplicity of what is minus all ideas about it. Her death re-turns me to what is real and authentic, to ground and groundlessness.
Leaving my last class at the college where I teach before Thanksgiving, I see out the huge picture window in the hallway that winter has arrived with wild ferocity. Wind is raging and it is dark and bleak looking out there. Snow is blowing furiously by the window, the first snow. Outside, as I walk to my car, it is cold and dark and bare branches are tossing in the wind. And now, on Thanksgiving morning, the sun is out and the world is white and glistening.
My mother, who was so utterly real only a few months ago, and for as long as I can remember before that, is absolutely gone. And in my living room is a small cardboard box with a label that says: "This package contains the cremated remains of Dorothy A. Tollifson."
It's more like gravel than ash, and it's inside the box in a plastic bag not much bigger than an eggplant. A small parcel really, it weighs about 10 pounds maybe -- all that remains of an entire woman.
She's absolutely gone, and yet, she's right here. Not as a disembodied spirit waiting to ascend or reincarnate as some folks imagine, but as the entire universe: undivided, un-encapsulated presence, energy, beingness, consciousness, space, life itself.
Of course, the Dorothy A. Tollifson who played with me as a baby has been dead for decades. I barely remember her. Without photos, I probably wouldn't be able to picture that young woman at all. The Dorothy who saw me off to college 35 years ago is also long dead, a dim memory, as is the 70 year old Dorothy who lived so openly and gracefully through the death of my father, the man she loved with all her heart and soul. In fact, death is happening every moment. Continuity is an illusion. Some pattern apparently persists, something that allows us to recognize someone on the street whom we haven't seen in decades. But every cell in their body has been completely replaced in the course of those decades. There is literally no-thing left of the person we knew before. And yet, we think it is the same person.
Dorothy waving from atop an elephant in India. Dorothy in a huge-brimmed red hat in the Gay Freedom Day parade in San Francisco. Dorothy marching for peace in Washington, D.C. Dorothy moving mysteriously from youth to old age. Dorothy smiling at me from the photo on my wall. Dorothy in a small box. Dorothy embedded forever in the very fabric of my life.
I sort through her possessions. Her clothing. Her jewelry. The art she collected. Her books. Her wine glasses. Her cereal bowls. Her teacups. Her napkins. Her towels. Her sheets and blankets. Her bags full of old birthday cards and letters from her daughter. Her prayer wheel. Her hearing aids. Her table clothes. The remains of a life.
Her middle-aged daughter going forward. Walking on into her own crumbling away.
Life After Death
Earth, river, mountain:
Snowflakes melt in air.
How could I have doubted?
Where's north? south? east? west?
-- Zen Master Dongai’s poem on his deathbed
Nothing is ever lost. That which took the shape of the object then, is taking the shape of its "recollection" now.
--Rupert Spira
When form disappears, there is no emptiness to speak of. When the illusory mind disappears, true nature disappears as well. When the illusory mind does not move, true mind is not there. ….neither illusory mind nor true mind exists.
--Sheng Yen, Song of Mind
Nobody dies, death means finished; for example, a drop of water when it evaporates has become infinite. There is no death for anything, everything finishes to become infinite…..The idea of rebirth is a concept, because for something to be reborn something has to die. What is dead? Nothing is dead. Who is there to be reborn? No one was born.
-- Nisargadatta Maharaj
The question of what will happen to me when I die is indeed as misconceived as the question of what happens to my lap when I stand up or to my fist when I open my hand.
-- Ramesh Balsekar
The body exists, or seems to, because you believe in death. Body and death are part of the same illusion.
--Eckhart Tolle
Reincarnation is a fantasy. Existence has never had a form that could be repeated. It’s forever unformed. The shifting of galaxies on the far side of the universe is the same shifting event of our bodies and minds. This happening has never become anything in particular; it’s only shift and flux. There’s no thing becoming some other thing; there’s one great unformed presence remaining unformed.
--- Darryl Bailey
Form is precisely emptiness,
And emptiness is precisely form.
-- the Heart Sutra
If nothing is permanent, what can be impermanent, both, or neither?
-- Nargajuna
It’s astonishing how many people believe Mom is in heaven now, or floating around the room somewhere, or that she’s been reincarnated in a new body. It’s all about the notion of a self or a soul – a discrete unit that has continuity – the “me” that we think and imagine that we are. Does such a “thing” as this exist or is it more like a mirage?
It has been said that a true and complete understanding of impermanence reveals that nothing is impermanent, for in actuality, there are no persisting things that come and go – there is nothing solid here in the first place to be impermanent. Thought and imagination create the image or idea of various seemingly solid, independent, persisting things (me, you, table, chair, mother, father), objects that appear to come into existence, persist in some continuous and essential way for a time, and then go out of existence. But if we investigate directly, with care and close attention, letting our ideas of how it is fall away, are any such solid and persisting things actually found?
The wave is something the ocean is doing – it is waving. Language makes it seem that “a wave” is some thing that can be separated out from some other thing, “the ocean.” Is it true? When a wave breaks on the shore, what happens to it? Does it go to heaven? Does it float around ghost-like on the beach? Does it reincarnate as a new wave? Or are all these questions misconceived? Has any-thing actually died on the beach? Was any-thing there to begin with? When you open your hand, what happens to your fist? When you stand up, where does your lap go? When the bubble pops, what happens to the space that was inside the bubble?
“If everyone is up in heaven, it must be getting pretty crowded up there,” Mom once joked.
A so-called “person” is really more like a verb than a noun, more of a process than a solid and enduring thing. And this process is an activity of the boundless Whole, inseparable from everything else in the whole universe. An activity that is without beginning or end isn’t a “thing” that can reincarnate, but we could say that this boundless wholeness reincarnates endlessly as everything (one undivided waving whole, a boundlessness “which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment,” in the beautiful words of the late physicist David Bohm). Dorothy has not disappeared because the activity or process that was called Dorothy actually has no beginning and no end. It never really had solid boundary lines around it; it just seemed like it did.
So what has actually died? It seems like something has very definitely come to an end, but what is it? After all, there were many times when she was alive that my Dorothy disappeared (whenever she went into another room, or I was in another city, or my attention was elsewhere), and so what’s actually different this time? And is my Dorothy the same as someone else’s Dorothy, or Dorothy’s Dorothy? In fact, I knew many different Dorothys over a lifetime or even in the space of an hour, and Dorothy undoubtedly did too! Which was the real Dorothy? And what exactly is it that would go to heaven or be reborn?
At a quick glance, and because we have a word for it and a mental image and an idea of it, a whirlpool in a river looks like a solid something. At first glance, we see what we think is there. But if “the whirlpool” is carefully observed as it actually is, it is discovered that there is actually no-thing there. The so-called 'whirlpool' is constantly moving, changing shape, being reconstituted. And there is no real separation between whirlpool and river. There is simply a fluctuating pattern of water in motion that is actually not solid or separate or autonomous in any way. We could say that the whirlpool is an activity of the river. And then when we carefully observe the so-called “river,” we again find no-thing at all, only continuous movement and change, and the same when we examine the “water” or “the pattern.” Even closer in, we find empty space and subatomic particles or wavicles that flash in and out of existence in a quantum world where apparent solidity seems to be contingent on (or a function of) observation. Is there an observer and something else apart from this observer that is being observed? Or is there only observing, only being?
By paying careful attention to actuality (not our ideas about actuality, but actuality itself), it is clearly seen that there is no particular solid or enduring thing to be found anywhere, and there is no real separation (or duality) either. Seeing this is profoundly liberating. Although if we ask, “What does this do for me?”, the answer is, it doesn’t do anything for “me.” It reveals that this “me” is a mirage. And ultimately, even that mirage is something that the totality is doing in the same way the ocean is waving. But we have to be very careful with words such as “Totality,” or “Being,” or “Consciousness,” or “the Whole,” because again, is there really any such thing to be found?
When form disappears, there is no emptiness to speak of.
In paying careful attention to this so-called bodymind, this apparent person, it is discovered that this, too, is actually no-thing. This bodymind that seems so separate and solid and discrete and autonomous and independent appears to be a permanent something but is actually like the whirlpool or the wave or the river. It is a constantly changing functioning, an activity inseparable from the entire universe. Inside the bubble and outside the bubble is one and the same space, one and the same energy. And if we look for the operator or the creator or the observer or the owner or the source or the substance of this functioning, what is found?
We may find ideas like "me" or "God" or "Consciousness" or “Intelligence Energy” or “The One Being” or “The Self” or “Totality” springing up as possible answers to this question. But if we are not satisfied with ideas or concepts or subtle mental pictures, if we let them all go and fall back into not knowing, into simply being present with the openness of the question itself, what is found?
Rather than seeking a mental answer (a word or an idea or a “thing”), perhaps it is possible to live with that question, allowing it to dissolve all the possible answers.
What remains is not a word. And it is not nothing (in the sense of void). It is simply not something that can be grasped or contained by any word or concept. It is not “an answer.”
Liberation is a dropping away (or seeing through) rather than a picking up (or finding). It takes away everything and leaves no-thing at all. And this no-thing-ness is vibrantly alive. It is clouds blowing through the sky, trees bursting with leaves, snow falling, the taste of tea, the warmth of the sun, the smell of wet earth, the sounds of rain, tornados whisking away houses, bombs dropping on innocent children, ant hills being crushed under people’s shoes, colors and sensations, the whole amazing show with all its delicate beauty and all its horrific violence, all the sorrow and all the joy. Just this, exactly as it is.
I hope that this book will invite you to explore for yourself, to question, to stop, look, and listen. Endlessly interesting to wake up to what actually is. Endlessly liberating to let all the answers go, and to discover what's left.
---copyright Joan Tollifson 2009--
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