HOW CAN I LOSE SOMETHING THAT I AM?

ECKHART TOLLE explains death in ‘The Power of Now’ thus: “The acceptance of suffering is a journey into death. Facing deep pain, allowing it to be, taking your attention into it, is to enter death consciously. When you have died this death, you realize that there is no death – and there is nothing to fear. Only the ego dies.

Imagine a ray of sunlight that has forgotten it is an inseparable part of the sun and deludes itself into believing it has to fight for survival and create and cling to an identity other than the sun. Would not the death of this delusion not be incredibly liberating?

Many people who have near death experiences exclaim that a feeling of peace and lack of pain permeates their body shortly before death. The ego has met its finite end. Your true spiritual self, unchained from physical restraints, can then resume its eternal existence in the spiritual realm with exuberance and relief – maybe saying something like, ‘Wow! That was great but I’m so glad to be home.”

In his book, ‘A New Earth’ he explains the dilemma of ego and death. “Ego comes about through a split in the human psyche in which identity separates into two parts that we could call ‘I’ and ‘me’ or ‘me’ and ‘myself’. Every ego is therefore schizophrenic, to use the word in its popular meaning of split personality.

You live with a false image of yourself, a conceptual self that you have a relationship with. Life itself becomes conceptualized and separated from who you really are when you speak of ‘my life.’ The moment you say or think ‘my life’ and believe in what you are saying (rather than it just being a linguistic convention), you have entered the realm of delusion.

If there is such a thing as ‘my life,’ it follows that I and life are two separate things, and so I can also lose my life, my imaginary treasured possession. Death becomes a seeming reality and a threat. Words and concepts split life into separate segments that have no reality in themselves.

We could even say that the notion ‘my life’ is the original delusion of separation, the source of ego. If I and life are two, if I am separate from life, then I am separate from all things, all beings; all people. But how can I be separate from life?

What ‘I’ could there be apart from life, apart from being? It is utterly impossible. So there is no such thing as ‘my life,’ and I don’t have a life. I am life. I and life are one. It cannot be otherwise. So how could I lose my life?

How can I lose something that I don’t have in the first place? How can I lose something that I Am? It is impossible.”…

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Dan’s Quote: “A spiritual teacher is anyone who gives to others by his word or his manner
______________the spiritual treasures which were originally given to him.”-Vernon Howard

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