“… and when there is no fear there is love. When there is no anguish there is joy.
And when you are no more separate, there will be no death."
An excerpt of Osho's words about Adima's name, which means "innocent life"

DIE BEFORE YOU DIE

A preparation for dying while living

How we meet loss and the dying process is largely through the lense of our believes and attachments. The main cause of suffering is wanting something that isn't here. Whether that is in the physical or spiritual realm. Aspiring that, which is not here is the root cause of unhappiness.

Every day and truly speaking every moment, is a possibility to let go of our story, our ownerships, our holding ons. Facing loss, relationship break-ups or simply physical weakness, can remind us of dying and invite us to focus our attention to that which really matters. This does not mean to put on a grief face or turn our back to pleasure and comfortable preferences. It means to remember how fragile the life form is and how unpredictable it's setting in time. Some day soon we all transform into a formless, transitional state which brings us supossedly a new form yet again to learn life as living and dying.

The term “Bardo” comes from Tibet. Literally translated it means “an in between state”. It is usually associated with the Bardo of Leaving the Body or the Bardo of Death. There are many “Bardos,” including the transitional states of birth, death, dream, meditation, transmigration or afterlife and spiritual luminosity.

We experience a taste of Bardo many times in our life, for example each time we experience a shock, a loss, strong emotions or illness.

The gift of Bardo states is their immediacy, the NOWNESS they put us into. For example in a shock, when you have just escaped an accident – you suddenly are fully present, fully here, but you are not “your story”, the mind is blank and quiet, the usual conglomeration of complications and explanations is absent. So is control. You simply are now here.

Similar experiences may occur during dream states or also during positive states of physical or emotional ecstasy, but we are usually more aware of the described effects in a shock state. Negative experience stays with our (sub-)conscious mind like German glue, while positive behaves more like dew drops vanishing in the morning sun. We easily stick with negative experience and forget the positive ones, which is how we enter false identification and begin to believe that life is a problem to be solved.

The Bardo Work helps to discern the essential from the unimportant and trust in the power of conscious presence in the now.

“You exist in time, but you belong to eternity. You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time. You are deathless, living in a body of death. Your consciousness knows no death, no birth. It is only your body that is born and dies. But you are not aware of your consciousness; you are not conscious of your consciousness. And that is the whole art of meditation: becoming conscious of consciousness itself.” OSHO