The Last Day of Your Life

by Gregory Allen Butler

Have you ever imagined the last day of your life? I find it to be a helpful exercise. It seems the wisest people alive are the ones that are so close to death. They experience a peace that seems so elusive to everybody else.

I once lived through a night when I was convinced I would not see the sunrise the next morning. It was a night of sweet surrender. It was a night of letting go. It was a night of transcending form and connecting with the formless. It was a night of bliss.

To fully grasp the significance of being at life's end is to transcend the suffering that plagues so much of the planet. This is the peace that surpasses understanding.

If you were not expecting to live to see the sun rise tomorrow, chances are you would you live your last hours in an entirely new mode of being. But the good news is you don't have to be at death's door to live with this awareness.

If you were on your deathbed and someone came up to you and told you that you were the world's biggest idiot, chances are you would not react. The reason you would not react is that you would not have attachment any longer to your physical form.

You might say to yourself, "Thank God, I won't have to put up with this jerk much longer." But most likely, you will let the remark roll off you like the rain that rolls off the back of a duck. You would have undergone an identity shift and insults would no longer affect you.

If on your deathbed, someone told you that the stock market had just suffered a huge crash, would you become stressed? I don't think so. What's it to you if your final net worth is $1,000,000 or $20,000? Your essence-consciousness-has not been diminished. You are detached.

If on your deathbed someone asked you for forgiveness for something they said to you 30 years earlier, would you give it to him? Of course. With the transcending of the transitory, all wounds are healed.

When you approach death, you are able to transcend form. There is nothing to defend, there is nothing to hold onto, there is nothing to fear, nothing to hate, nothing to avoid.

Without clinging, without fear, without attachment, it is possible to get beyond the mind and experience that which is beyond form-consciousness.

But what does this have to do with you? You're not dying. Well, it has everything to do with you. Why would you want to wait until you're lying on your deathbed to connect to consciousness? These are lessons you can learn now.

The False Self

You don't have to die to connect to the truth. Your physical body doesn't have to die--just your false self.

What is the false self? Let's go back to the example of lying on your deathbed and someone comes and asks forgiveness for a comment they made 30 years ago. The false self, holding onto pride, would respond, "Hell no, I'll never forgive you. I hate you."

That is the false self-holding onto a wounded self-image. If you were able to allow love to awaken in your heart, your wound from the past would heal. The false self would then die. A new mode of life becomes manifest when the light of love vanquishes the darkness of the false self. Meher Baba put it concisely when he said, "Being is dying by loving."

You don't have to die physically. But death of the physical body can be a great metaphor for the death of the false self. We can have that as an intention everyday. That is the epitome of the spiritual life-tearing down the false around you, transcending form.

By imaging your physical death, you are able to get clarity on what is transitory in life. And by a having a clear perception of what is transitory, you can perceive what is timeless and eternal. You can glimpse your true nature as consciousness--beyond form.

When we can see the transitory nature of things, we can become free of clinging, and thus free of suffering. We can be free to enjoy the present moment-without labels, without clinging, without expectations.

On your deathbed, nothing is good or bad. That's because there is no attachment. Someone could give you a $1,000,000 and it would be less significant than a fragrant flower. Someone could give you a smile and you might forget all of your accomplishments of a lifetime-so caught up in the beauty of that moment.

The silent exchange of love from heart to heart becomes more significant than a Nobel Prize. Remember the phrase, "Being is Dying by Loving." When we are able to enter that consciousness where detachment is possible, that which is real rises to the surface. Unmanifested existence becomes manifest. We experience heaven on earth.

Don't wait until death approaches to free yourself of the attachments that keep you bound to this world of form. Seek the joy that comes from transcending form. Know yourself as consciousness. Know yourself not as a form, but as the formless ocean of limitless bliss, love, power and understanding.

Our relationship to form is a blessing when we can use it as an expression of love, truth, and beauty. But form is a hindrance when we become identified with it--when it is nothing but a claim of the ego.

Death has a knack for sorting this issue out. It's a shame, though, if you wait until the last day of your life to follow the dictum: "Live in the world but not of the world." The sublimity of life does not have any requirements that we wait until life's end. It will embrace you right now, if you've had enough of the suffering that comes from attachment to form.

And that embrace just might be all that is needed for your consciousness to be illuminated by the truth of who you really are.