Suha shares some considerations on death
As a teenager, I used to ask perplexedly, “What am I doing on this earth? Why live?” As a grownup, I no longer thought about it, but the seed had now been sown by my soul. In the mysterious and lively mess of an untended field, the scent of the earth, the whiff of the wind and the tears of the rain have nurtured, cradled and caressed this seed so that it would not be afraid of growing and making its shy way out with its first shoots. A complicit silence covered with its wings the opening of the buds into transparent flowers of light.
A first answer to my question manifested itself in adulthood in an unexpected form and place. Pensive and motionless on a large rock in the forest of Fontainebleau, where paths of sand left by a vanished sea recall lunar landscapes, I felt strangely and insistently watched. I turned suddenly to discover behind me – at a due distance – a motionless, faceless figure, completely embraced by a black cloak. I was about to shout a frightened yelp to my travel companions, but the apparition, which had nothing unreal or threatening about it, had chosen a moment when I was alone. It seemed to me it was in an attitude of patient and relaxed waiting.
Death has since visited me, appearing not as a bogeyman, but as a friendly figure, from time to time when I least expect it. I sense it out of the corner of my eye as it lightly slips from my shadow, and I barely have time to greet it respectfully before it disappears again.
With death I have a special connection: I observe its process in very small things in life, how it transforms them in an endless cycle. For example in food preparation: I buy, prepare, cook, eat, digest and eliminate. Death is apparent too in the ups and downs of friendships.
Or with loved ones who are gone: the dead do not give me sadness. I feel and talk about those loved people as if they were just ‘differently’ close. Living or dead, we dwell in the same experience, and are present in memory’s womb.
But that apparition in the forest had raised a question in me, “How can I learn how to die?” I soon understood at my own cost that before learning how to die I first had to learn how to live – but not in the way I thought I knew. So – what could I possibly change in myself?
I began to observe with amazement that some of the ‘clothes’ I was wearing were becoming a bit too tight: thought patterns borrowed from others, professional deformations of the perfect secretary, remnants of the good girl bearing splinters of past wounds, manipulations of the accommodating woman – to name but a few.
Wasn’t this noticing itself a kind of voluntary death? Wasn’t I deep into the paradox of living to learn how to die, and be reborn from one’s own ashes? A way to discover the mysterious being – who borrows my name and face – and who is also the ‘facelessness’ of the apparition itself?
That’s why I call death ‘my faithful companion’, although it has not visited me for some years now… is it perhaps because it has realized that I am on the right path?
First published in the June 2016 issue of the Italian Osho Times (oshotimes.it) – featured image istockphoto.com
Comments are closed.