Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Death and awakening

Prophet  Muhammad (PBUH) says : "Die before you die," Rumi says. "You have lived in agony for so long. You've prolonged it, because you've forgotten the fundamental matter-- which is to die." We die to one form to be reborn in another. Unless we move to a new state we don't get transformed. The willingness to do that is the essence of spiritual training.
But what often most takes us toward spirituality is death or its presence.Gureijeff called Death the fourth way of opening the ego.when you are close to death..for one moment...the story of ego is abandoned.many pople after attempting suicide have said; that at that final moment...above the abyss, a strange peace descended upon them and for a moment the pain stopped.And afterwards, they have been changed human beings.

Noah Levine ;Author of Against the Stream (HarperOne) says ; It was after a failed suicide attempt that the moment of clarity, that spiritual experience happened: the breaking of denial and blaming everyone else for my problems. I couldn't blame this ignorant, oppressive world; it was how I was relating to this world. So much of the suffering I was experiencing was about the past and the future, but that moment brought me into the present and was the beginning of my spiritual practice: meditation, prayer, and addressing my addiction. I was responsible. I was not a victim. I had created the situation and I had the power to get out of it. I had hope.

I've heard there is a Sufi tradition in which one bead is always missing from the prayer beads to signify the mystery of God's true name—which is our true name, and the name we will discover, it is said, when we take our last breath. When my friend Ellen took her last breath, a window opened in my mind for a brief moment. There, on the threshold of life and death, I thought I heard the Name, but before I could know for sure, the window closed, and I returned to the living.

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