Bardo

A Zen master was asked, on his deathbed, what he had learned from a lifetime of practice - he responded: “all that arises passes away.”

The Upanishads illustrate the cyclical, futile nature of material existence and ambition.

The First Epistle of John states: “the world is passing away, along with its desires; but whoever does the will of God remains forever.” This sentiment echoes that of King Solomon, Isaiah, and other Old Testament wisemen.

Perhaps the most agreed upon reality of all major religions, genuine philosophies, and men who possess a degree of sensitivity, is that the whole material world is in a constant state of formation and dissolution; all that we touch is quicksand. Nothing physical is truly fixed and dynamism is the only constant.

Our instinctual tendency is to fight, to rage against this reality at all costs. We insist on psychological fixation, a need to be “correct” about an existence that is liquid. By any classical definition, this is insanity - in a modern sense, we choose to call this “politics,” or “statistics,”or “scholasticism.”

We talk about “science,” and “justice,” and lofty ideals, and just-out-of-reach paradise - when man’s track record rings resoundingly of otherwise. Man is very, very good at error, confusion, and destruction.

We seek solidity within mist.

We seek “security” in lieu of Truth.

We seek Life where there is only death.

If Truth is lightning, man is hellbent on bottling it - despite the guarantee of error and corruption within this process; this extends from Prometheus to Frankenstein.

As soon as Truth is claimed for oneself, distortion and ugliness take form.

Unitive, living, flowing knowledge is dethroned by compartmentalized, sterilized thinking - I, and me, and mine, and us, and them. Man seeks to build an iron-clad habitation within a landscape of death, to avoid passing through it.

Carl Jung stated that, “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” Perhaps, in this light, man will do anything to avoid entering into, and passing through, death.

Not death of the physical sort - it appears that men will sooner go willingly into physical death than interior death. Countless men have thrown themselves, physically, into oblivion out of spite, or commitment to “being right,” or a number of other reasons. The King Herod inside of us all would sooner have us physically expire than be dethroned.

Psychological death is the final frontier and the portal of Life.

The best philosophies, the finest systems of thought, are capable of leading the individual to this point - the River Styx - but not a step further.

Aldous Huxley wrote that “an intellectual is a person who has found something more interesting than sex.”

What is a person who has found something more interesting, or terrifying, than intellectualism?

“When death comes, it does not ask your permission; it comes and takes you, it destroys you on the spot. In the same way, can you totally drop hate, envy, pride of possession, attachment to beliefs, to opinions, to ideas, to a particular way of thinking? Can you drop all that in an instant? There is no ‘how to drop it,’ because that is only another form of continuity. To drop opinion, belief, attachment, greed, envy, is to die – to die every day, every moment. If there is the coming to an end of all ambition from moment to moment, then you will know the extraordinary state of being nothing, of coming to the abyss of an eternal movement, as it were, and dropping over the edge – which is death.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti