Searching for the Meaning of life and death.

"How do I find God?" a young disciple once asked a famous guru in India. "I can't see any evidence that He is anywhere around us, and millions of people live very well without him."

"Everything without God happens in space and time. This is the world you are used to," his guru replied. "Space and time are like a hole, jump through it; then, God will be obvious."

Every religious tradition contains such loopholes, escape routes into a world beyond ours.

Much time is spent identifying with a body that is known to be mortal, sooner or later we become preoccupied by a fact that the body is slowly dying.

As we get older we come to realize that all pleasures of a body are fleeting, most times it takes a loss of a loved one or a tragic event to trigger a need for answers to deeper questions beginning a search for something beyond what this reality offers.

Both the hope for an afterlife and the fear of death originate in the mistaken belief that you are a time-bound and mortal individual whose candle will be snuffed out when the grim reaper comes for you.

If you believe that you are the body, then death is absolute.

If you believe that you are a soul residing in a body, you comprehend that a body dies, while that which is essentially 'you' survives.

The antidote to all this fear and speculation is to recognize that what you truly are is outside time, unborn, and undying. You are the energy field in which birth exists, and death appears.

It has been said by St. Francis and others that by dying you will realize eternal life. The Sufis say 'you must die before you die.'

This dying is the death of the illusion of the separate and individual self.

In the removal of the personal reference of "I", death is deprived of its prey.

What it means is that there is no life after the death of a body; the body is an illusion, but the good news is that your true reality - Spirit never dies.

The West in particular has embraced the ego by identifying with it completely, it is life, itself. So much so, we strive to give it eternal life, "be like God".

People who can't let go of their egos, who refuse to die, who can't look death in the eye, don't live either.

The path of letting the ego die which is a spiritual path - is not taken by many, and still fewer take it to the end. Why? Because fear comes before dying.

Dying is the price we pay for an enhanced life. Without the death of a body and awakening to truth, there is no resurrection to a more comprehensive existence.

Death is only a separation of our deep identity from this physical body. Only the form dies, not life, itself. Our true identity lies in the flow of life, creation, itself.

Rather than believing it is a separate mind, it is absorbed into the Oneness it always was. Everything that exists is the sparkle of the Divine.

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