Reflection on the transience of all things

A contemplation by Veetman (text and video); “Nothing lasts. Everything is fleeting. This too will pass.”

This contemplation can help to examine our attitude to death. Sit down quietly in the evening and watch the sunset. When the day becomes night and the light in the sky disappears, watch the ending. “The day is over; it has come to an end. The bright promise of dawn blossomed at noon and gradually faded in the late afternoon. The evening has approached in silence, and now the end has come. The day has passed.”

Contemplate, feel it in silence without thinking about it. Realize the transience of all things and let the points of contact of your consciousness with reality become more permeable: Nothing lasts. Everything is fleeting. This too will pass.

This reflection will gradually help you to accept reality. This is the reality: we are all transient. This realization is not intended to make you morbid, nor turn the world into a place of gray despair, but it invites you to use what you really know to liberate your inner intelligence. You will then feel much freer and you will be able to surrender to the big wave instead of wanting to hold on to everything. Look at the clouds: they mass together and dissolve again. Look at the leaves on the trees: in summer they are green and full of life, in autumn red and golden, and even before winter the wind blows them away, leaving the branches bare.

Wherever you are, whatever you do, allow your consciousness to tune into the transience that surrounds us everywhere. It will then relax a little, the compulsive grasping for everything will subside, and you will be a little more relaxed with life.

If you want, you can continue this process and make a list of all the people you know about who have died. “I knew so-and-so, now he’s dead. Yes, we’re all going to die. It’s part of our human lives.”

With the awareness of transience, you free yourself from unnecessary confusion and fixation on death, which you would otherwise probably project on the dying person. You are then free to be with a dying person in a conscious, emotionally clear way and take care of their needs. In the last days and hours of the dying person you should be present in a very real and human way.

This contemplation was first published in Osho News within the article, Helping the dying in their transition