LIFE AND DEATH

Have you ever been close to a person when they die?  Have you ever had a cat or dog die in your arms, watching their eyes grown fixed and turn dull?  Have you felt the life force leave their bodies, grow limp, and then begin gradually to cool, and after a few hours to harden in rigor mortis?

You cry wracked by pain.  Your breath leaves and a darkness descends on you.  You know they are gone.  The lifeless body is still here in this world, but the life force has gone.  The consciousness has gone. Awareness of you has gone from them.  You can no longer feeltheir life force, their radiating presence, energy, and life.  It is all gone.

This is the best time  to realize that what YOU ARE has notning to do with the body except by association.  You loved the life in them.  You, who are the pure embodiment of life misses the life in them.

You as a personality miss their presence and their personality.  Never will there  be another exactly like them.

The lesson is you are not your body in essence, although the body was their and is your instrument of expression and learning.  You as the life force experience the world through the vehicle of your body.  So your body is very, very important, because through it you have consciousness and can feel the life force and personality in others, and they you.  Through it, you feel, see, hear and touch the world around.

The world is as real as you are, no less, not more. When you know this, you realize what is most precious is life itself, sentience, the ability to feel, love, serve, surrender, which appears for a few moments in time then is no more.  Even life itself is temporary, born from matter a half billion years ago, and destined to die as a planet when the sun swallows the earth 5 billion years from now.

A flower blooms, wilts, then dies and is no more.

Given that, your attention automatically turns inwards towards the experience of Self, that divine spark of existence in you, me, and everyone and thing else.

This is the essence of Ramana's awakening experience: he realized he was life itself, consciousness, sentience.