We imagine life and death, as opposites, and as if we can know them for sure. Its like we can live life and die a death. However, you can be assured that no-one ever knows them, at least in death. We can only witness apparent death of 'another' and so it is impossible to experience or know, once own death. We can only see the absurdity of these words and leave it alone.
I must have fainted more than 20 times, that I can remember till date. It was a regular feature due to low BP. However the so called unconsciousness was seen or felt by the onlookers, and the so called victim ‘me’ that seemed unconscious, was always conscious. There was voices heard offering help, making space, sympathising, sprinkling water etc. In fact, I was seeing them too. I surely was pleading with them that I was very peaceful in this place, totally blissful and OK. Nothing need to be done. Of course there was also a knowing somehow that this message cannot be interpreted by the 'on lookers'.Then when I would come out of it, my body would have been sweating to drench my clothing and I would be feeling embarrassed and miserable. In fact during the later times, this happened, I would act miserable. only to keep up the story of unconsciousness alive and attract all possible sympathy. I had no idea of non duality, to back up my experience. But I knew, consciousness can never be unconscious or dead, ans this was ‘my’ own experience of it.
Its only the feeling of a ‘me sense’ to this body, that birth’s and dies. Its birth is after the birth of the body and it can die, before the so known clinical death of the body. , of oneself, where, one fine day, nothing is claiming to be an entity that you always ‘felt’ you were. This feel is what liberation is, when there is a feeling that there never could be ‘anyone’ to be liberated. The person, as a ‘me sense’ is born and dies, but such person to a body is illusory, and dies everyday and every night, as a feel in consciousness that we are.
We believe that each body has an entity or the soul which gets into the body at birth ( nobody knows which birth – either at the time of coming out of the womb or at the inception of embryo or somewhere in between) and leaves the body at death, and having a freewill in between life and death. (no body knows what dies. The body has no knowledge of life or death and dead body parts seem to regain life in other bodies). So death as we think it is, is not what is actually happening at the level of the body. It is what happens to the 'onlookers' 'mind'. Also, life plays the role of 'changing' the body, as if growing or ageing and after the so called death, life continues to play out the body as if shrinking or decaying. So life goes on, after death, decomposing the body, for its next utility. If life stops happening, dead bodies would 'live' a million years.
The process in a living organism, has a unique scheme of cells 'dividing to multiply'. This is a paradox, but true. The old form of a single cells die’s into a new form of double cells. So only forms are changing and the so called ‘life’ that is manifesting these forms, as its source, is changeless.
Assume a single cell that is in the path of life. Let us assume that after a few days ( 10 days) it grows and divides to become two cells. Now both cells, having this division are as old in age as the parent cell. After a few days, they became four cells and so on and so forth. Even the all cells are as old, as the total age of the first cell. No matter, how many cells are born and die, the age of any cell, in the lot of cells that are seen, are as old as the first cell, that we started with. Now even if a part of such cell takes off, to become a separate organism, its start age itself is as old as the first cell of our experiment, because it is the same cell that is continuing to divide or multiply etc. So, in other words, the father and son have the same age. So ageing is illogical, if it is assumed, that different forms have different ages. If all forms of life has the same age, then ‘time’ has no relevance or age has no relevance. Making divisions of the whole, does not alter the whole. It just that, our attention or focus, gets divided to attend on the parts. In absence of focus, all there is –is wholeness.
Birth, which 'we' cannot know appears as the beginning of registration to 'memory', and death, is an experience ( or non experience ) of the 'me sense' to the body. You can die, before your clinical death too. All types of experiences come and go. We experience ourselves every day, and the experience of waking state dies into the dream state, everyday. So we die every day and are born every day, as a nature of experiencing ourselves as this body-mind. Outside of such experience, nothing can be said about life. Life is the experiencing of experiences. So death is an experience and birth is an experience and Life is the one that is experiencing of all of this. That which is experiencing cannot be born or die. It just ‘is’. The context the knows content, is a field and simply 'is'. Contents can all be removed, but the context would still know the emptiness of contents.
There is another way to look at it:
Cells or organic matter is just food material. Life in one form or the other, preys on other forms, in order to continue. Plants lives on air and water, animal on plants, Man on animals and plants etc. Air, water, plant, animals, humans etc, come under this category of being food material in one form or another. Organic matter, dead or alive, supports life, and hence maintains life, as we tend to see life. So if the dead cannot support aliveness, there may not be, something called dead or alive, in terms of life. We are just taught that an individual life to individual bodies that come in at birth and leave it at death, which is just a learnt belief. Even if we go with this principal, if the soul was what was the aliveness to the body or the life to the body, it has ‘safely’ gone out and so cannot die, or be born. In a sense, such a spirit, or capacity to experience life, is what actually life could be, which has a independent intelligence, which cannot be ‘us’ or else, we could go in and out of bodies, as souls, and still know ourselves.
From the point of view of ageing of the body on a cellular level, a lot of cells are dying ( like blood cells) only to be recycled into newer cells. The change is so rampant that not a single cell is older than 7 years, at any point in time, to our body, according to our biologists. Than what could be the age of the body, if nothing is there that is older than 7 years. Who is it, that can be aged more than the maximum age of the oldest cell in the body? Recycling of cells into new cells is a matter of birth and death for them, but to ‘life’ assuming to be ‘in’ the body, that is never a ‘problem’. Similarly, change of ‘forms’ is happening in ‘life’ and that is all there is. Life pretends to act out forms as individual people, poking one another, but wholeness is all there is.
Life is the ‘sensing’ aspect and in absence of such sensing, nothing can be said to be sensed including ‘life’ or ‘death’. Even to know that the contents of sensing are absent or ‘nil’, this sensing of such absence of contents, must be present. So absence of sensing capacity of life is an impossibility, as this event cannot even be a matter of discussion. Even time and space, as sensed, must end with absence of a capacity that is sensing and such a ‘sensed world’ has to end. The world is birthing and dying, daily, as a sensation to ‘us’ -is more accurate, as a direct experience to our life. In absence of such sensing, nothing is happening and no-one to which it can happen. Such world is unreal. Only the sensations of a world, that is happening may stop. But, even this stopping must be sensed to know it as such. Knowing of pain and no-pain are different concepts. There cannot be ‘not knowing’ of pain, because pain itself is some sort a knowing. Its like saying, ‘not knowing a knowing’. This is an impossibility. Knowing of pain itself is pain and knowing of the world itself is the world and such knowing ability is what we are ‘as life’. Knowing cannot stop. Contents to knowing may stop or change. ‘Knowing’ or ‘life’ is always or timeless. Life recreates itself ‘as’ wholeness, every moment, so as to have change, being sensed continuously to what it itself is, as ‘Unchanging’, which is what we are.
Nobody ever experienced birth or death, because such a somebody, as an entity, separate from Life, is just a pseudo feeling, that arises as a ‘me sense’ and feels personal to the body. It never existed as an independent reality.
So when we speak, of birth and death, we are assuming whatever, by seeing others and imagining some state. We do not have a direct clue of experience of our own birth and will never have a direct experience of our own death, because the ‘we’ that we think we are, as an independent entity to this body, simply does not exist. What exists is a capacity to know, visual, audible and emotional experiences, that arise and go away, including the experience of our body, that goes away every night, to be back every morning. What continues in all these experiences is what we are as THIS knowing capacity, not found anywhere in particular, but somehow is everywhere, wherever experiences is happening.
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