The Passage of Death and Dying: Talk and Guided Meditation
"Life is eternal, whether in a biological form, or in a spirit form, or in being form. Life is the name of Existence.
It is the living Presence perpetuating itself forever and ever! And if we really examine the ego of humanity, the core of the ego... One of the deepest layers in the Ego Structure is what I call the Ring of Terror, and the annihilation space. Deep, deep, deep inside in this Ego Structure there is fear of dying.
And so much of the fear of dying is not about biological dying.
So much of this fear amazingly is about psychological dying, about Essential dying. And what I mean by that is that when we were children we were so full of life qualities, of essence circulating in our system and enhancing our presence and activities with so much aliveness.... little by little, through conflicts through repressions, through all kind of issues, we lose one quality of essence after another.
Each quality when we lose it is experienced as a form of death.
We died. And that is why in psychology they say there are death layers. You go through a death layer.
The death layer is a layer in which one quality of Essence is not flowing and there are issues about it ...fear, anger ,rage, hurt, sadness, grief. And when those issues are released, this layer in the fascias or in the bones or the organs or in the muscles begin to come to life and Essence comes to life, so we resurrect.
We resurrect more and more, we come to life. So we have so much fear of dying due to those experiences of psychological and essential dying that we had in childhood. Because we really don't know exactly what dying is! There is another fear...and it is in the body itself. There is a program for survival. You see it in the animal kingdom and the animal soul of the human. We are oriented towards living. But it is not all just oriented towards living. At a certain age, and a certain stage, it is as if there is also programs in the body to let go, to die, to surrender.
And the elements of the body which are made of earthly elements, it is as if there is in them, an inherent longing to join the earth. My calcium is going to go to the calcium of the earth, my magnesium is going to go to the magnesium of the earth, my water wants to go.... there is a longing we do not feel as we are so terrified to feel a longing to be in the grave....and to have my body disintegrate. If I remove the psychological....which I had experience of.... when I moved those psychological... I felt my body loved it to be mud, to be air... every element in me became more alive because it was enhanced by the earth elements, the magnesium of the earth enhances my magnesium, my calcium! I was surprised that the system is created differently from what we think! This is one.
. . .
1976... I went to a retreat with my teacher, my guru, Tarthang Tulku Rimpoche, to whom I bow and send blessings and long wishes for long life and much gratitude! I received many gifts and one of them was this guiding in meditation.... and that weekend there were many people, and many were also ill and elderly had cancers or other diseases and they came to learn how to die.
And I was fortunate to come at a time when he was giving this... At that time I was living in Kuwait and I came that summer when he was giving that weekend. This retreat I went to, the Tibetan call it Phowa, the art of dying. It is a very sophisticated exercise of how to exit, and how to die. His holiness for example, the Dalai Lama practices it every day for half an hour. Every day in the morning he sits from 3 30 till eight in the morning every day. Does all kind of exercises and one of them is "death and dying". Like chartering the passage how to exit, how to die, releasing any obstacles that might come. Releasing fears, attachments, all of those things. So there is culture, there is richness, there is guidance, there is spirituality that can help us go through this passage...So this exercise I received from my teacher.
And he did it with modification, and I did it with more modification, to make it simpler on the western people, and on humanity of this time.
. . .lean against something comfortable and the body in a most comfortable position.... And as I guide guide you through the different stages of it... if one stage you do not complete, it's okay. You do not have to complete it. Just go beyond it, follow the other steps till you complete the whole exercise. Then when you do this exercise again and again and again, you might be able to go through this passage."
Faisal Muqaddam















