I've been thinking about death a lot lately. Wondering what it feels like to be at the end of your life. To see death approaching, drawing ever closer, reaching arms up towards you to take you to another plane. Do you go quietly, joyfully, nervously. What if you're not ready. What if the signal comes from your soul that it's time to go back home, and you don't want to go. What if you don't want to say your goodbyes and get your affairs in order. Can you be too scared and reluctant to let go. Can you be too bitter and angry that you resist with arms crossed and a defiant face that says if death wants to take me it had better be ready for a fight.
I am afraid of death. I'm afraid of the hologram faltering and revealing the programmer within. Going from condensed matter to spirit and coming back again. Starting from scratch in a new personality with the cape of amnesia over my shoulders so I have to figure out the cosmic joke all over again. Death feels like a void space. The place that people go to and disappear for good. Or at least that's what it feels like from this point of view. From down here looking up there.
What we don't know is that we actually die and are reborn every day. At any given moment a part of you dies, tissues are replaced, components recycled. You evolve from infant to child, to adult, and to the elder. And perhaps death is a state of evolution from elder to spirt. The ultimate form of oneness and wisdom, a tangible part of all that is. And the dying and the rebirth doesn't stop there. Parts of spirit are fragmented, have their own experience, coalesce with others, and fragment again, reformed into new cliques and dimensions.
I am dying and being reformed as I sit and write this. The old me is succumbing to its last breath and is ebbing away from my grasping mind. Like a fractal upgrade, obsolete software code is being replaced with new firmware, causing glitches in the graphics around me. And I don't want to die. I don't want to take my last breath. I don't want to fade away into the void. I don't want to let go. I don't want to cease to be, to return to aether. Though I squirm and protest at how uncomfortable it feels to walk around in my flawed and incapable skin, I don't want to die. I'm just hoping that my soul feels the same.
In the meditative silence I hear my soul's reply. Not yet. We have work to do. Not yet. The dying that you feel is a purging. Yes, there is a fading away. Yes, there is a ceasing to be. Yes, there is a return to the aether. But not of you. Not of this human life. But of the parts of you that are no longer needed. A letting go of the beliefs, agreements and limitations that keep you confined and trapped. In the meditative silence I feel the power returning. A remembering of all I have lived through and all I am capable of. Just be and live from the heart. The thrumming in my chest is displacing all the anger and all the choking sadness that has hypnotised me into believing that I can't do this. That I'm not meant for this. That I deserve to die. I am struggling to breathe, trying not to panic at the tightness in my ribs. Trying to turn away from the overbearing fear that all this will break me into tiny sobbing pieces. But in the meditative silence I am alive. I am whole. I am love. I am happy. And I know that if I can just look up, have the courage to raise my head one more time and look myself in the eye, I will see my true self revealed in all its glory. I will see the fullness of my dazzling light, and I won't be afraid of death anymore. I won't be scared of the shifting. For death is not only an ending, but a beginning. Death is a revealing, a reorganising, and renewal. Death is the becoming of me. The real me. Death is here to save me. So I breathe. I sit in meditative silence, and breathe. Waiting for death to come. Waiting for death to claim me. Trembling as I feel it approach, drawing ever closer, reaching arms towards me. Waiting for death to lift me up to another plane. And to show me the way home.