Ep. 303 – The Wheels of Birth and Death

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It feels good to GEICO. What preparation to live in the moment now, and now, and now, and now. And then this one's death, but just another now, because the optimum way to go through that doorway is being right here in the moment. And the best practice to get there is to be in the moment now, and now. And now. Because every moment is the moment of death and the moment of birth. The moment of death. It's no more than another one of these moments.

Hi everyone, this is Ram Dass, Here and Now. And I'm Raghu Markus, and I'm going to mention a couple of different things as well as the theme of the podcast, which is taken from, oh, quite some time ago, 1980. And it is— the theme is around death. Now, Ram Dass had a great way to approach all of the different perspectives around this and all of the ways in which we have in the West, certainly, a lot of trouble around being friends with the reality that we will pass. But before I get into it, I do want to say just a couple of shoutouts. And they're both around these in-person get-togethers that we are doing this summer. I'm, where am I now? It's like the beginning of May. And one is this wonderful benefit in New York City on the Upper West Side where Krishna Das does his concerts, his kirtan concerts on a year-to-year basis. And this is a very special event in that it includes this wonderful workshop with Sharon Salzberg and Krishna Das. And Sharon hasn't been out there. For various reasons, in person in a long time. And so this is a very, as far as I'm concerned, she's such a great teacher and the friendship that they have is just so sweet. It really is. So that's going to happen, a workshop, you know, and the thing starts at 1, ends at 10, something like that. You can go to ramdas.org to and you'll get all the info. But it includes also this wonderful movie that we produced, Brilliant Disguise, the samadhi of K.C. Tuwari, who was one of Krishnas and my and many others' mentors with Neem Karoli Baba back in the day. And then after that, there'll be a Q&A with KD and me and the director, David Silver. Of the film, and then a kirtan at night with the entire band. So it's going to be quite a great day, all in support of Love Serve Remember Foundation. And the other, the other in-person event is our annual summer mountain retreat in Boone, North Carolina. It's a couple hours from Charlotte. Krishandas is going to be there. And this absolutely wonderful teacher named Acharya Shunya, who has— she kind of crosses India and America. She spends a lot of time in both. And she was with us last summer. And unfortunately, she had some really, there was some really bad health problems in her family and she had to leave. So we got her back. So that's going to make everybody happy because she's an extraordinary teacher and unique in that she talks, she speaks to non-duality as well as bhakti. So it fits exactly with what Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass is all about. So that's happening. So the New York benefit, maybe I didn't say it, it's June 6th. So in about 5 weeks from when you hear this, I think. And then in Boone, it's at the end of August, 27th to 31st. And I will be there. David Nicktern will be there. there was a wonderful musician named John Pattern who does these extraordinary, compositions using Ram Dass talks and so on with electronic music, et cetera. And, Nina Rao has a new record and she's going to be there and she's going to share that with us. I just made that up. So Nina, if you're listening, what are you going to do? So here's this teaching from Ram Dass around death. And it's, you know, for me in particular, because just literally a couple of weeks ago, a very close family member, a nephew, not a blood nephew, but a nephew to me named Shiva Baum, who was really a mainstay in the midst of this, especially in Southern California, the community, the kirtan community, most especially with Govindas, who many of you know. And if you don't, look him up. He does wonderful, wonderful kirtan. And he came out here to California. He's been taking care of his mom for a few years. And within 30 hours, 30 hours of feeling not well, he passed. And of course, this was a big, big shock to many of us that were close to him and myself, of course. You know, he was 51 years old. So I just wanted to say something about it. I mean, in this talk, Ram Dass talks about understanding the wheels of birth and death. Allows us to appreciate the preciousness of our incarnation, of our life. And I'll just mention one small anecdote. When I was in India, I had an experience in New Delhi at the house, or the mansion really, of the High Commissioner of Canada. I'm Canadian, so I needed a new passport and Maharaji sent me down there to get it. And it's a complex story in that he told me what was going to happen. I was going to meet this incredible Lama, not in so many words, and, but in very exacting words that that was going to happen. And I was introduced by the High Commissioner to one of the great Lamas of the last century. Kalu Rinpoche, extraordinary Buddha-like figure. And I was there actually at a luncheon that they had for him. And I, you know, of course, I was a little bit in shock that how could Maharaji know this was going to happen and blah, blah. And some CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation people were there to interview him and they said, you want to come with us? I said, sure. Maharajji had told me I'd be having teachings from a Tibet Lama when I went to Delhi. And there we were, and they got me to ask a question. And as soon as I thought of something, Lama, the Rinpoche, stood up. Just stood up. I mean, he sat up and he just contacted me like a laser beam. and I asked him stuff about meditation from being in the mountains to being in the city and so on. But the reference that I thought of when I was doing, you know, deciding I wanted to do this intro to introduce this Ram Dass talk, he said to me, Kalu Rinpoche said to me, you have to be very very responsible for your body in this incarnation because he said you don't get a physical body too often when one reincarnates. There are many, many, many, many different planes of consciousness where you can land, apparently. And he said, This is the only plane, the physical plane, this material plane, that one can become free of attachment, fear, uncertainty, all of it. And it was, that's, he said, that's why you need to really take care of that body. And enact whatever it is you can. Enact meaning just absorbing whatever it is you can, which is what Ram Dass is saying, understanding the wheels of birth and death and not waiting till you're, you know, 3 days from leaving the planet or until you get sick and older and all that. Now is the time to investigate, inner investigate oneself. And Ram Dass's whole thing was being in the moment. The best preparation, he said, for death is to live in the moment. And this be here now is real. Anyhow, here is this great talk from Ram Dass around death. It was, well, '80, '90. It's like 46 years ago or something. It's amazing how relevant he is throughout. This is Ram Dass Here and Now. And please join us for this podcast. And you can go to beherenownetwork.com/ramdasshereandnow and tune in and take a look at the show notes for other selections of either podcasts or like Ram Dass, by the way, guys, who are going to put this together. William Buck's version of the Ramayana was a big part, as you'll hear when you listen to this. So we should put a link in there. Thanks, everybody. See you next time.

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You, um, may not be familiar with the Bhagavad Ramayana, but it's an incredible story of Ram and Hanuman and It's based on the Valmiki Ramayana, which is the original Ramayana. And Buck was an interesting fellow that did that. He was a young fellow, married, and he was— he went into the library in Carson City, Nevada. And he came across the Bhāgavad-gītā, and it touched him so deeply that he started to translate the Mahābhārata and the Ramayana, two of the major large volumes of spiritual, uh, root literature, devotional root literature in India, into, uh, books that are very easy to read and understand. He made them simple for us. And beautifully done, done with great poetry. He worked full-time on these pastimes, and when he finished the second one, he then died at 35 years old. And, um, these books have a kind of a mystic quality about them. You can feel that this man who lived in a very worldly domain actually, was touched and he did this work and then he left the stage. And one of the things, I'd read more but I don't have the book here unfortunately, but I will read this one, it's appropriate to what I want to discuss a little bit. In the version, he takes a lot of liberties and in this particular version Lakshman, who's Ram's brother, who is totally devoted to Ram. And Ram is talking with Time, and a sadhu comes who has done much renunciation, and he demands to see the Ram, who's the king. And they say, well, Ram is busy. Rakshman is told to guard the door with his life while Time and Ram, who is God, speak. And the sadhu gets very angry and he says, "I have a right to be fed by God because of the tapasya, the austerities I've done, and if I don't get fed, I will destroy the entire— all the citizens, everybody." So Lakshman, knowing it means his death, interrupts time and Ram and says, So the die is cast, and at this point Lakshman is now going to die. But this is conscious dying in the most essency sense. Ram looked at Lakshman. Farewell, my brother. Lakshman made no answer. He walked 3 times around Ram. And left the palace. He went half a league to where the Sarayu River swiftly flowed. Lakshman sat by the running river with open eyes. He looked around him and saw all things as Ram, thought of them as Ram. He rinsed his mouth with the clear water and stopped his breathing. The luminous person within Lakshman's heart, the soul no bigger than a thumb, made ready to leave this world behind. The life centers stopped spinning and went out, and Lakshman's energy rose step by step up along his backbone, seeking flight out the crown of his head where the skull bone join their seams. Lakshman shut his eyes and watched the lights of his life slowly die. The lights of war long ago, the lights of his first love and marriage, the lights of his childhood. And he thought, it's like something I made once. All of us. In heaven, Lord Indra heard empty stone vault doors closing one after another in echoes. Sight was closing, hearing closing, mind turning away. Spirit was rising and leaving empty rooms. The ether space within the heart was empty. Fires and lamps turned off, locks and threads snapped and untied, all released. Indra swept across Kosala invisibly. He took Lakshman's soul into his own heart and flew to heaven carrying him and bearing light. Indra, the bright king of the skies, sky took him away. Lakshman's body fell into the water and was gone. Now, I don't know by what license I have the presumption to talk about death. I mean, after all, I haven't died this lifetime. I'm not Lazarus returned. And I ask myself, how do I know what I'm talking about? Is this just, uh, psychotic machinations of a megalomaniac mind. And it may be. We have to allow that possibility. But there's a way in which various things come together in your life and lead you to a conclusion about how it is. Some of the things that feed into that are direct experience, like you've had an experience. Like, for example, if I've taken LSD or psilocybin in a room and experienced myself up in the corner of the room watching my body down below making love, except I'm up in the corner of the room and I see a long blue luminous umbilical cord that reaches from the body up to to the corner of the room. I can say drug delusion, hallucination, till I'm blue in the face, but in some way that does something to my sense of my identity with my body. Can you understand that? Can you hear what I'm saying? And so a series of experiences that have been some drug-induced, some through meditation, And other spiritual practices, Kundalini work, have certainly, uh, affected how I understand what life and death is about. The next way is that, um, you study things. You study texts which are like maps written by people whose minds you respect, and what they say fits in with what you sort of know, but you don't know you know, and you extrapolate outward from what you know and you build this kind of image of the universe or cosmos or something. And the third way that you get to know about things is that somebody you know knows tells you. Like Maharaji to me. So if somebody tells me a story about Maharaji walking on a parapet with another man, and who's an old devotee, and suddenly Maharaji leans back and laughs and laughs, and the other man says, what are you laughing about? And he says, so-and-so, this old ma, this old lady down in the plains who was very devoted to Maharaji. He says, she just died. And he laughed. And the man said to him, what are you laughing about, you butcher? And Maharaji said, what would you like me to do, make believe I'm one of the puppets? Emmanuel said to me, death is like taking off a tight shoe. In the Japanese Zen tradition, the Zen monk often writes a death poem, a haiku, to be recited. He recites it at the moment of his death. And there was this monk, and he was particularly fond of a cake that his devotees went and bought, a special cake to give him at the— when he— because they knew how much he liked it. As he was dying. And he ate a big piece of the cake, and then as he died, they leaned forward to hear his poem, and he said, "My, but this cake tastes good." Maharaj is sitting there and he says, "Somebody's coming," and they say, "No, Maharaj, there's a group of them," and Suddenly the servant of one of his old devotees rushes in and Maharajji looks at him and says, "Yes, I know your master just had a heart attack and he's calling for me, but I'm not going to go." And everybody says, "Oh, he's been your devotee for so many years, Maharajji. How can you not go?" Maharajji looks disgusted and finally picks up a banana. He says, "Here, give him this. He'll be all right." In India, when a guru gives you a piece of fruit— if you were a 90-year-old lady and you wanted to have a son and you got a mango after asking for that, 9 months later you'd undoubtedly be pregnant, perhaps with a mango, but something. There's humor in the game too. So they rushed home and they mashed up the banana and they fed it to the man, and he ate it and ate it. It came from Maharaji after all. And he took the last bite and died. Because you've got to remember, all Maharaji said was, he'll be all right. Now you put all that together, I don't know, I put so many thousands of things together, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Mike's Experiences, uh, the, uh, all the different religious traditions, attitudes towards death, uh, standing all night long in the middle of the burning ghats in Benares as body after body burns and they crack the skulls with sticks so that they won't explode and splatter brains everywhere. And it all burns up and you just watch body after body burn, being brought in rickshaws to the burning ghat. Burning God, burning dark. Mahatma Gandhi, who goes out to give a press conference in his yard, and as he goes out, he's shot in the heart. And as he's falling over, he doesn't say goodbye or forgive this man or anything. He just says the name of God. He's got his ticket ready. He says, 'Ram!' Boom! He's just ready to go into God. The Pure Land Buddhists, who at the end of the bed of a dying person put a screen that shows the Pure Land of Buddha, so you'll know where you're going, so you won't get off at the wrong stop. Now, if I were to describe a sequence, I don't know how I know. I'll just describe the sequence. It may be right and it may be wrong. It appears that as the earth element leaves, one feels heaviness of limb. As the water element leaves, one feels dry like a leaf. As the fire element leaves, one feels cold. As the air element leaves, one feels one's breath go out and not come in. At this point, the Buddhists say consciousness is still in the body, and they describe— and this is a Buddhist description that I don't experientially know about— They describe that the, the male and female components that came together to create this being at this point separate, and the male part goes up into the head and the female part goes down into the belly, and then the two of them come back together again and they meet in the heart, and at that point there is an explosion of light. And it is a light that is the brilliance of a million suns. And if in you there is no attachment, you are able to, quote, go into the light. Here's a description from Aldous Huxley's book Island. As the doctor spoke to his wife who was dying, lightly, my darling, lightly, even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous or portentous or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ, or Goethe, or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics, just the fact of dying and the fact of the light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and That's why you must walk so lightly. The light, came the hoarse whisper. The clear light. It's here, along with the pain, in spite of the pain. And where are you? Over there, in the corner. I can see myself there. And she can see my body on the bed. Brighter, came the barely audible whisper, brighter. And a smile of happiness, intense almost to the point of elation, transfigured her face. Through his tears, Dr. Roberts smiled back at her. So now you can let go, my darling. He stroked her gray hair. Now you can let go. Let go, he insisted. Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it anymore. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying there like a pile of worn-out clothes. Go on, go on into the light, into the peace, into the living peace of the clear light. I told you of Ramana Maharshi, dying of cancer, and then when they say don't leave, he says, where could I go? Because if you're already here, where can you go? When I gave Maharaji 1,200 micrograms of acid, nothing happened because He was here. Where could he go? What's high and low anymore when you're here? What's life and death anymore when you're here? The game's all over. There is just what they call dropping the body. It's like selling your blue dress. Nothing more, nothing less. Maharaji said the day before he dies, well, I— today I'm going to— now I'm going to escape from Central Jail. I'm just going to leave this form behind, the limitation of form. Taking off a tight shoe. Now, because most of us have attachments, the light, which is the totality, is too bright. It's why it's good to practice what Steve Durkee once taught me. I used to say— there was an expression in the '60s, a hippie expression, too much. And he used to freak every time I'd say it. He'd say, no, it's not too much, it's just enough. And he trained me, so he got me that I'd say, oh wow, just enough. And I realize now that's preparation for being able to expand outward. I haven't told you about Jean's death yet, have I? The Quaker lady. Jean is in her early 60s. She's a Quaker who's done a lot of Buddhist meditation. She is married to a schoolmaster, a very respected gentleman in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I come back from India last fall, and they say that Jean is close to death, and she's met me twice, and she would like to see me. So I go over, brought up to the room by her husband and by my friend Mary, and then the two of them leave, and Jean and I are together. And Jean says to me, 'Ram Dass, I feel like I have finished my work.' I would like to die, and I would like you to help me. To which I responded, and this will give you some flavor of the kind of work I do with dying people: Who are you to decide when you've had enough life? It's in God's hands. You may have to lose each of your senses one by one. Just relax. 'Stop trying to run the show.' She said, 'But Ram Dass, I'm so bored.' I said, 'Well, the reason you're bored is because you're busy dying. If anybody tries to carry on a single storyline, it's going to get very dull.' I mean, when you're driving a car, if you were busy just being the driver, you get very bored after a while. But you drive and you listen to music and you talk and you do all kinds of things and you go in and out of all the different roles you're in. But somehow when we get dying, everybody's busy dying and you get surrounded by people who are helping you die. And the whole thing is very, very much something. And it gets kind of dull after a while. It's just not interesting enough to die 24 hours a day. You know, you need a little time off. She said, well, I feel this little boy in a tree, and there's a menacing man walking around the tree, and I've been sending light to him to make him less menacing. I feel it has something to do with my death. And I said to her, well, Jean, if you start to manipulate all of the 10,000 horrible visions and 10,000 beautiful visions, you're never going to die. They'll just come Let them come and let them go. Image after image after image will come at you. And then she said, well, Ram Dass, everything— the sounds, people— it feels like it's pushing against me, like it's too much energy. Too much again, right there. It's too much. I said, well, Jean, the reason it feels like too much is because as you start to go out You're tuning into more and more energy, but the model you have of yourself is still like a quart container in which you're trying to pour a gallon of water, and it feels like overload all the time. And what you have to do is you have to expand outward. Let's try it together, Jean. You hear the clock ticking? Let the clock be inside you. You hear the crickets? Let the crickets be inside of you. Feel the breeze. Feel the space of the moment. Let it all be within you. Let my voice be within you. Just keep expanding outward. Every time you experience too much Realize it's because you're holding on and just let go again. Ah, just enough. At that point, Jean sat up and she caressed my cheek and I caressed her cheek and we held each other and we kissed and we were making love. In living spirit. We held each other, and then I said, well, Jean, you know everything I know. See you around. And I left. And that night she died. You hear that kind of work with dying people? So when the light is too bright, what happens is you pass out, and then you awaken into lesser lights. And the lights are pulling and pulling, pushing. Some of them are garish, some of them are warm and seductive and inviting. And you will feel pulls and pushes, and all of your attachments and clingings are determining the realms you're then going through called the bardos. And to the extent that you finish your work in each area of your life, you go through each one and nothing happens. You keep right on going towards life, just keep going. But if there is incomplete work, it pulls you one direction or another and you go, ah, describes the monk who had finished his work so long ago But at the moment of death, he experienced a beautiful fawn in the meadow, and he turned to admire it. And that's like Lot's wife. It's the subtlest clinging. Maharajji said, even if you want a piece of fruit, you will be born again. What preparation to live in the moment now, and now, and now, and now. And then this one's death, but it's just another now, because the optimum way to go through that doorway is being right here in the moment. And the best practice to get there is to be in the moment now, and now. And now, because every moment is the moment of death and the moment of birth, the moment of death, it's no more than another one of these moments. And when there is confusion, there are beings on the astral planes. You come into the astral planes and there are beings you meet who you've met, who you know from, know from, know from, because you and they have been through incarnations incarnation after incarnation after incarnation. And now they were your mother, and now your child, and now your uncle, and now your teacher. And you know them, and you just know them. Just like you meet people now and you know you know them from somewhere, but you never met them before. You just know you are connected somehow. We can say we are old friends. And these beings are drawn by your need and they guide you. And during this period you have clairvoyance, and so you can be aware of all of the thought forms of the people who are left behind on Earth. And sometimes when a person left behind is angry or greedy or hurtful, you may feel anger or hurt as without a body, and then you become what's called an angry ghost. And so for people who stay behind, who are grieving, it's best to tell them to talk to the person who has died, to share with them what they understand of the Dharma, and to tell them to go on with their work, that it's all right, that you're okay, and just send them love. And do this day after day. Somebody dies, do it for 10 or 11 days. And even if a person died 20 years ago, it makes no difference because time isn't the issue. That oftentimes there is confusion. You see, the more a person was of the incarnation where they thought the physical reality was all reality was, the more confused they're going to be when they suddenly find themselves still here but no body. Because there's nothing in their mind that expect— allowed them to expect that anything was going to exist. Somebody who already knows they're not the body goes through and says, well, that took care of that one. And they let go immediately and they say, oh, another incarnation. And Buddha says, do you know how long you've been incarnating? I mean, just to get a little perspective, He said, imagine a mountain 6 miles long and 6 miles wide and 6 miles high, and every 100 years one bird flies over the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak which it runs over the top of the mountain. In the length of time it would take the silk scarf to wear away the mountain, that's how long you've been doing it. This is like those little insects that are born in the morning and die at night, and around noon they say, wow, this is life. To understand about the wheels of birth and death and the nature of suffering leads you to appreciate the preciousness of a human birth, where you have the sandpaper of experiences to do the purification, to become so clear that when it all hits you, all the experiences and images and lights and all that, you don't flicker, you just are. Then you are free. That's what freedom is. A few years ago, I was speaking on death row at San Quentin, and I said to these— they were all so holy, we were sending blessings out to the universe, and they had beautiful cells with pictures of Christ. And I said, you guys can get as high as you want, but when the cyanide hits and all of your mind control lets go, whatever karma is left, uh, over from the fact that you probably killed somebody— that's what you're doing here— that's going to be here. It's not going to go away just because you're imposing some holiness on it. So you better bring those beings to mind and ask their forgiveness and get straight with them, because otherwise when they flash into your mind, you're going to go like that. And if there's anything you push away or grab at, there it is. That's karma. No grabbing, no pushing, just, ah, so So you start with this life. Ah, so, and the only things that in dying are hard to deal with is pain, because pain tends to capture consciousness. And that's why you work hard to learn how to stay conscious in the presence of pain without drugging yourself out of awareness. To stay aware and to work with pain, because it is possible. I, like, I go visit a woman, she's got cancer of the pelvis, which is very painful. She's writhing in pain on the bed, writhing. I sit down next to her and I start to meditate, and I just go out and out and out into a space where it all turns blue light for me, at which point she turns to me and said, all the time her body's writhing, she says, I never have felt such peace in my life. The pain goes on, but she's no longer the experiencer of the pain because the pain only exists on one plane of reality. If you're not busy identified with your sense experiences, Pain is nothing. And when you saw people like Ramakrishna and read the accounts of people like that, and Ramana Maharshi and all, dying of cancer and pain and saying, no, I don't want any painkillers, and they just were staying in bliss all the time. So you practice. You practice when you go to the dentist. You practice with headaches. Like, you get a headache— oh God, I got a headache. Versus, wow, there's a headache. And just keeping a little bit of consciousness other than being the person that has the headache. Just practice not getting sucked in by your physical melodrama. Damn good practice, I'll tell you, so that you can stay conscious through this process. And when those beings that are familiar to you come to help you, also there is a being of rainbow light that appears over your head who is whoever it is that you saw as a vehicle. It could be Christ or Buddha or anybody like that, or just a being of light that is there. And it's against that mirror that you see exactly what your karmic predicament is. It's like the scorecard. Nobody's judging you. You're just seeing how the law is. There is no judgment other than the clarity of seeing the law. And seeing what you did this life and what you didn't do in terms of creating more karma or not creating more karma. Nobody's blaming you. You see it at that moment. The horror is that you see the irrevocability of your predicament, and there's no way to hide. Nobody says, 'Get her to—' You know, it's not that one. For some of you, this life is a hell. For some of you, the story, the lovely story of the samurai that comes to the monk and he says, 'Monk, teach me about heaven and hell.' And the monk says, 'Teach you about heaven and hell? You?' 'How could I teach you? You call yourself a samurai? You're dirty, you smell, your sword's rusty. I couldn't teach you anything. You're too stupid.' The samurai, who is a spiritual warrior, his eyes bulge, his face turns red, and he pulls out his sword to kill the monk, and he's furious. And the monk says, 'That's hell.' And the samurai realizes what a great teaching has been given to him, and he puts the sword back in the sheath, and he bows in honor with just such appreciation. And the monk says, 'And that's heaven.' Your mind is creating your heaven or your hell. It's just old karma running off. If you buy in, you're just creating more of the same stuff. As you awaken, you buy in less and less frequently until finally— drama going down, mellow drama, full tilt marriage, children, family responsibility, failure, depression, elation, cancer, Death, life, excitement, accidents, play, drunk, high, food, wow, oh, eee, and all. Are you here? Yeah, I'm here. Well, I'm here too. Far out, isn't it? Yeah, far out. Well, here we are. See you around. Yeah. Steven and I both tell the other story of the monk and the tyrannical colonel who would kill all the monks in the villages that his army would come into. And he came to this one village and all the monks had fled up to the mountains but one monk, and the colonel was outraged. That this monk had the audacity not to be afraid of him. And he went to the monastery and he pushed open the doors of the monastery and the monk stood in the middle of the courtyard and he walked up to the monk and he said, "Don't you know who I am? I could take my sword and run it through your belly without blinking an eye." And the monk said, "And don't you know who I am? I could have your sword run through my belly without blinking an eye." See what the game is about? I can only tell you that working with the dying is the highest thing I do in my life. It clears my tubes faster than anything else. It brings me closest to God, and I realize that dying is just another moment of a continuous dance of illusion. Nothing special. No big deal. And that every model that I have of how it will be will be knocked asunder. For in Truth there is no form, there is no concept. There is, as they say in Islam, no God but God. And the name of God cannot be spoken because it is beyond words. The most exciting adventure of life is dying. You might as well enjoy it. Remember Ram Tirath: I am without form, without limit, beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything, everything is in me.

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