The Vertical Reality

The scene: a bedroom in a house in Hampstead, London, 1982. An elderly woman, small and as fragile as a sparrow, lies curled up in sleep. In the stillness of the night I gaze, not for the first time, around the bedroom. The walls are covered with degrees, diplomas, citations and photographs. Apparently she has received a long series of honorary doctorates, as well as receiving an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II. However, it is a photo that draws me. My client, Anna – slim and longhaired as an adolescent girl – walks beside her bearded father in what appears to be a large garden, much like the one outside her house where I am now, in Hampstead, London.

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Now, her face, resting on the pillow, is framed by cropped, steel-grey hair. Her skin hangs in wrinkled folds on her frame, and each breath is laboured. Yet when we had first met some weeks ago – when she was still conscious and able to talk – she was clearly her own woman, even at 85 and bedridden. Feisty, with intelligent, smiling eyes, she was not remotely cowered by the indignity of being hospitalized. It is a privilege to be involved in these very intimate, last moments of Anna Freud, youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud. Chiefly renowned for inventing child analysis and for her many papers and books on psychological work with children. Now she is dying.

Though I did not know it then, the experience of being at Anna Freud’s death bed was to set me on a course that has led me to where I am today: Using meditation, along with my psychotherapeutic skills, as a way to help people enhance the quality of their everyday living, and of their passing consciously through illness and through dying.

My client died in the early hours of that morning, and by 4.00am I was back in my apartment, a short walk away. I should have been sleepy, yet I found myself wanting to sit, with my eyes closed. Though I had been a meditator for some years, this time as I moved inwards it was not my silence that engulfed me but another, seemingly descending on me from outside. Peaceful, certainly, but this was not the peace of the grave, of death. This was not the serenity of a ‘soul laid to rest’. This was a presence – vital, joyful, and dancing. I am quite certain (though how it could happen I cannot explain), that Anna Freud’s consciousness had visited me while I sat in meditation. I saw that if Anna Freud (who, as far as I knew, was not a meditator) could leave in her wake such a profound silence, then the experience of death had great potential for someone who made their exit consciously.

French philosopher, Robert Misrahi, observes that, “The important thing is to re-endow the living present with all its intensity and richness.” Through my own experience and my work with many meditators, I know that any moment is qualitatively different when we are consciously present to it, as opposed to doing one thing while we daydream about something else, when we are on ’automatic pilot’.

When we taste life’s ‘intensity and richness’ we are in what Osho calls ‘the vertical reality’. Meditators can experience the depth of a single moment, but vertical living also happens in the most ordinary times: when you notice the warmth of the carpet as you swing your legs out of bed, savour the smell of fresh coffee on the brew, or listen to your child chattering about her day ahead at school. You are one with the experience; you feel what it is to drop outside your ‘doing’ mentality and to just be.

If living consciously brings such experiences, why would it be different as we move towards death? In fact, the presence of death can trigger such experiences. Now that we are letting go of life, now that we appreciate its fragility and transience, each moment is revealed as an end in itself.

I do not know if there is life after death. But I do know there is life before death, and that we can live in such a way that when our time is up, we are ready. We have drunk of life with a totality that now allows us to greet death not with fear but with grace and even gratitude. The choice is ours.

Maneesha is one of our regular collaborators. She is now based in Devon, UK and along with an ever-growing team she is creating The Sammasati Project. Based on Osho’s vision the project is a support for those wanting psychological and/or spiritual support in health, in sickness, on the road to recovery or in passing through dying. The first part of the Project is the offering of a year-long training to be a support-person. oshosammasati.org – thesammasatiproject.co.uk – www.corfubuddhahall.com