… THE PERSONALITY

“EVERY moment as you move through the world you are dying. Your cells are changing – the whole process of living is dying. In order for you to live you must kill living things to eat (whether animal or vegetable). It is not that there is life or death, or that life comes out of death – it’s that life is death. There is no difference. To live is to die.

The living-dying process is like fire. Fire has an energy, a burning quality, but along with it is a residue of ash. It is not that the fire causes or creates ash but rather that they are two sides of the same process. What most of us do is give enormous importance to the ashes of living. The ash of life is memory.

What is this ‘me’? Where does personality live? Have you ever asked yourself who you are? What is this familiar entity that you are always nurturing? Where does it live? The answer isn’t very complicated – it lives in memory. What (we think) we are is memory.

You remember all the pleasures, pains, sorrows, joys, all of the experiences of living – all of the things you internalized out of the past. That is what you are, isn’t it? You say you know yourself, but you know only what you have been and done, what you were. It makes you feel safe and secure to say, “I know what I am and what I am capable of doing.”

That personality that thinks it knows itself, is the ‘you’ that lives in the shadow of death. That ‘you’ is your ego – the accumulation of the ashes of your life – your memories, your past. Your ego does in fact end and so does your body, for they are part and parcel of this finite physical world.

The attempted delaying of death, or the futile wish for immortality, comes from the mistaken belief that you are your ego, therefore you fear the end of this personality you think you are, with all its accumulated ashes of memories.”

But that is not the way it is at all. Death should be welcomed when it arrives. It is the release from the confines of physical life to the remembrance of who you really are – A free spirit playing at being a human being for awhile…

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Dan’s Quote: “Life has a reason and a purpose, we all yearn to know what it is.”- CWG

Inspiration for this chapter came from Joel Kramer’s book, The Passionate Mind.

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