Death is surely one of the most common and essential experience in our life. And yet we keep on running away from it because it scares us so much that, when it knocks at the door, we are equally unprepared and miserable about it.
At Business and Values, we consider death to be one of the most serious and transforming experience of our life journey. One of the simplest, one of the most beautiful and one of the hardest to catch as well. So that it deserves all our attention.
It is a must to completely revisit the way we look at it, the way we go through it and the way we speak about it, or not, to ourselves, to our loved ones, and beyond.
What comes to die when we die?
Physicallness.
It is a fact that, at the point of death, our physical body comes to an end.
Since it is obvious, no one challenges it that much.
Consciousness.
It is also obvious that we’re not only a body. No matter how we call the rest of it, there is something else to be considered. Let’s call it “consciousness”.
Our consciousness is who we are, our-self.
And we are interested in the continuity of our-self.
And we are therefore wondering does our consciousness die or not.
What our consciousness truly is?
Our consciousness is the “me”. The whole content of our library of thoughts and images. All our memories, our feelings, our beliefs, our personalities, our tendencies, our reactions, our actions, our sufferings, our fears, our desires, this is the whole “me”, right?
On the surface, it looks like all these “me” are different, unique, unlike each other. You’ve got your ideas and I’ve got mine. You’ve got your history and I’ve got mine. You’ve got your thoughts and I’ve got mine. And we are free to be different, right? This is what we’ve been told. What we heard from our parents. What we heard from society. This is our way of going through life. This is our conditioning, The glorification of our self, of our ego, emphasizing the differences, the contrast between us.
Deeply though, if we look beyond our conditioning with full attention, we realize we’re all the same. You are full of fears, desires, frustrations, sorrows, and I am full of fears, desires, frustrations, and sorrows too. You are ego-centric and I am too. We are seeking for our own comfort and security, ten times more than the ones of our brothers and sisters in humanity. Happy to give a little, to support each other so long as it is not too painful or risky. We are not ready to give it all. We have our daily ups and downs. You are stuck in the middle of your contradictions, and I am too. Look! We are all one and the same thing, irrespective of the nuances, which do not change this core fact, but only do magnify it.
What happens to our consciousness when we die?
On the surface, it ends.
Deeply, it just keeps on going.
My turmoil which is our turmoil continues.
This extraordinary mess I have created, and we have created, continues.
All these divisions, conflicts, habits, tensions, fears, desires, dreams, escape games, within my-self, continue, after my death and after yours.
And our unresponsible way of going through life continues too. Obviously. Look!
We are not guessing. We are not projecting. We are just looking at what is.
Who are we?
We are mankind.
Not only a portion of it. Physically speaking.
We are all of it. I am all of it. You are all of it. Psychologically speaking.
My consciousness is mankind’s consciousness. So is yours.
We’re calling ourselves individuals.
Is my consciousness different of any consciousness?
There may be varieties on the peripheries.
Inwardly, we are all very similar. This is a fact. And we struggle to face this fact.
Cause all our conditioning has said the opposite.
Look at it. Don’t resist it. Don’t run away from it. And, once it is clear, see the simplicity, the misery, the beauty and the immensity of it.
Are we wasting our life?
Have you ever asked yourself this very question?
Please ask it now to yourself.
And find out for yourself.
Are you spending energy and time in things that don’t matter?
Of course, you are! And of course we are!
In some many ways, in so many various occasions!
We have a treasure in the hands,
We’ve been given this extraordinary chance to be living,
And we’re messing it up, big time!
You do agree. Please continue.
You don’t. Please don’t. You’re wasting time, again.
Is there another way to go through life?
If you can clearly see how much we are messing up, how much we suffer, and how much we are stuck, as an individual, as a family, as a team, as an organization, as a society, as a species, then it is your responsibility to enquire if there is a way out of it, if there is an alternative. This is what this journey is all about.
How to go deeper and further?
If we are taken in the spiral of our brain, if we are trapped in the time frame, if we are weighed down by our past, by our conditioning, we won’t find out anything new.
If we think we cannot answer these essential questions on our own, we usually seek for someone else to answer, and here comes to mind the endless list of mushrooming gurus you can think of.
Now, if you reject all spiritual, psychological, scientific and political authorities, all books, all conditionings, all pre-conceived answers, then what do you have left? You have a tremendous amount of energy available. Cause your energy is no longer dissipated in trying to copy, to comply, to compare, to conform.
With that energy, you can begin to enquire.
To which extend do you want to investigate?
If you have not totally understood the whole quality of your-self, if you haven’t resolved the center, the me, the ego, through studying your-self, through enquiring into your-self, there is no chance you will ever find anything beyond your-self. You will keep on being stuck into it.
Why? Because if you don’t get to observe and to understand the whole content of your consciousness, who’s going to investigate? who’s going to answer these very questions? Your-self, your ego, so you’re trapped, can you see it?
You want to put your teeth into it until the point it all comes perfectly clear to you.
You don’t want to seek for nirvana or anything intangible.
You want to stay with the observation of what is.
You want to enquire fully into is there a way to dissolve this mess I am, and I am in.
We’re all going to die. This is a fact.
The question is. How do we want to play it until we die, and what the hell that means and what is at stake, if anything?
Are we going to accept the idea that we cannot do anything about all this?
Or are we going to find out if there is another way of being and living?
What does it mean to die?
We could have started from there.
And this is very simple!
Dying = ending.
Have you ever ended something voluntarily?
An emotion, a memory, a relationship?
An addiction, an intense pleasure, a strong belief?
Your anger, your desire, your dreams, your fears, your suffering?
Have you ever said to yourself “It’s all over, I end it now”?
Have you ever voluntarily given up anything?
Not for the reward, not for the consequences, just for itself.
So that there is absolutely nothing left about it.
So that there is nothing to be brought again from the past.
So that everything starts all over again, from a white sheet of paper.
Comme le premier matin du monde…
We keep so many things. And we usually want to keep them all.
When separation knocks at the door, we keep all kind of memories. We keep regrets, we keep doubts, we keep pictures, anything and so many things. Even when we say we do not, we usually keep a glance of bitterness, of nostalgia, of hope, or whatever.
When death knocks at the door, same story again. And even more. We’re still trying to keep it all. Which is meaningless and such a hurtful manifestation of our sadness, of how lost and incapable we are to face what is. We’re not talking about the emotional shock of meeting death in the now, we’re talking about the brain mechanics afterwards, which usually takes months and years to come back to our so-called “normal life”.
When it is about emotion, reaction, pattern, belief, trait, behavior, we usually say “this is who I am, this is my character” and we keep on carrying this burden until our dying bed, without understanding we do have the choice to end it up.
Why do we try so much NOT to end anything?
Because we are attached.
To our ideas, to our experiences, to our concepts.
To our house, to our family, to our loved ones.
To the known.
What happens when we are attached?
When there is attachment, there is anxiety, frustration, fear, jealousy.
And this is where the contradiction kicks in.
On the one hand, we would like to escape from the consequences of our attachments.
On the other hand, we are doing anything possible to keep and develop our attachments.
We generate fear, frustration, and so on, through attachment.
And we are trying to escape from fear and frustration, seeking for security.
And we seek for security within the known (to escape our fear of the unknown).
But the known is trapped in the limits of time, of thoughts, of divisions and conflicts.
Do you see the absurdity of it?
The impossibility of getting neither any peace, nor any freedom following this route?
What is the point of seeking for continuity and security?
Continuity is the perpetuation of all the memories.
Past, beliefs, experiences, attachments which is the source of inner and outer divisions and conflicts.
Security is keeping and staying with the known.
But anything I’m trying to keep towards my-self generates more anxiety, more desires, more frustrations.
What is a “must” if we truly want to transform our lives?
We’re looping now, as it is dead simple and yet uncommon fact to realize:
We must surrender to all our attachments.
If we ever want to have a chance to put our life in order.
If we ever want to quit this madness and this stuckness that we call life.
If we are serious in our willingness to discover whether there is another way of living.
We must give up fighting this reality.
We must end up everything.
We must learn how to die to anything and everything.
How our concept of “gradation” kills our willingness?
The above proposal is so radical, so far away from the known, so risky as far as our-self can see, that it raises all kind of red flags and warnings in our mind.
So, our thought process will try and do what it is good at, pros and cons analysis, trying to find a compromise to make a tiny step in this direction, why not, without running the risks of losing all our attachments.
Rather than ending a conflict totally, which would mean to forget it fully and move on, we keep a portion of it alive.
Rather than ending fear and jealousy, we’re trying to invent all kind of strategies, to escape from it, to reduce it, but to keep a portion of it alive too.
Rather than ending a grief, we keep the memory of the person who passed away alive. Hoping he or she looks at us from wherever he or she is now and hoping that we will cross each other path again in another life.
How brutal this looks to consider we could ever end the memory of our loved one, if it is the last thing we can hold now that he or she is gone?
Please get back to our blog post about “love” for more clarity. Attachment is NOT love. It has never been and it has nothing to do with it. You don’t need to keep anything, to let it be. To let love be. On the contrary. The less attached you are, the more it becomes possible to meet love.
So, back to our topic. We’ll try to find as much compromise as possible not to totally end anything, and to keep surfing the known and the waves of desires and fears, pretending we’ve done the best we can and that we cannot do more than this.
Which obviously contradicts our so-called “willingness” to end all our attachments.
What death has to say about this?
Death is far simpler and far clearer than we are.
Death says “it’s all over”, “that’s the end of it”.
No compromise. No in-between bullshit.
A nice and simple cut. A nice and simple ending.
We can invent all sorts of funny things, resurrection, reincarnation, hell and paradise, bottom line is that life is a dead end. And that we all gonna die.
Or, to make it clearer, life will perpetuate its danse, of giving birth and ending, and we are a part of this danse.
For the greatest or for the ugliest, depending on us, our mankind consciousness will continue to danse for now.
Can you see the supreme power and the extreme beauty into these facts?
Why have we put death at the end of life?
Same story. We’re trying to keep close and attached to the known as much as possible.
We are full of fear when it comes to the unknown.
And death is the perfect manifestation of the unknown.
So we would rather live with all the turmoil, all the conflicts, divisions and attachments we have, and avoid death and the unknown as much and as long as possible.
What if ending was liberating?
What if we stop trying to escape death?
What if we look at death face to face?
In other words, can we simply live with death?
Can we live with life and death together?
Living with life and death together would mean ending everything from the past.
Death means that. To end everything.
Is it possible?
Like a huge purge to start all over again with fresh air and full energy.
Like a re-birth, every day.
To re-discover life all over again, on and on,
Not a virtual inherited life from the past, full of imagines and thoughts.
Is it possible to learn how to die to every moment when it goes into the past,
and welcome every new moment and to embrace it perfectly and completely?
Is it possible to learn how to leave all what we have accumulated all your life.
We’re not talking here about your house, your job, your family. The point is not to leave everything and live as a monk in the mountains, which also contains all kind of suffering.
Can you live with death all the time?
Not as a reward.
Memories, thoughts have no true meaning, really.
And yet we are full of memories and full of thoughts.
We call it our knowledge.
Can we end our psychological knowledge?
Not our technical one. But our psychological one. that is our thoughts and our emotions.
Can we live without accumulating a single feeling, a single thought?
Not a glance of hurt, not a glance of hate.
Not a drop of power and domination.
Discover what life truly is.
Can you see what it takes?
How dense the journey is?
Can you see the freshness to living a life which is all dedicated to the present?
Once you have ended the past.
Can you see how much beauty there is into it now?
Can you see how much love there is into it too?
Get started.
If you do no longer accept the status quo.
If you are willing to exit this world of hate, of frustrations, of fears,
Move to action now!
Try and see if there is anything you can end to release you from this weight.
And keep on finding places where you can end stuff. Totally.
There is so much on your plate and in your bag pack.
It is much easier said that done. As always, map is not the territory.
And you will have to go on the court of life to realize what it takes.
What is at stake?
Just look at it.
We came to realize the fact that – deeply – we are all one and the same, and that, therefore, you are mankind, as much as I am mankind. We are mankind.
Now, listen and observe the following very carefully, with all your attention.
What if you end your attachment, your suffering, your anxiety, everything?
Not at the point of death. But every single day of your life.
It means that you move away from that entire consciousness, the “me”, the “ego”, the “self”.
If you end it, how important is it for humanity?
It then means that you move humanity out of its present conditioning.
Because you are humanity, right?
One drop of clarity in an ocean of dirt.
This very one drop begins to act.
If you have understood the nature of death, and if you see all the things you are attached to, you only have two options left.
Either you hold on to your attachments, and death has a grip on you. Or you let them go, and you’re living with death.
And if you do it, I may do it too.
Understanding that, if indeed it is a lonely journey, at the same time, it is a journey we can actually go through together, as a team, climbing a mountain. And I will do it too.
And if you understand your-self, you understand mankind too.
So that, before we know it, we will be hundreds, thousands and millions climbing these very mountains and learn how to life our lives together, no longer trapped in our minds, but rather celebrating love and freedom it is to live without attachment anymore.
You’ve got options. Please be aware of the consequences.
Staying in the known is…
The best way to keep your existence as it was, and as it is.
The best way to keep you away from painful realities for a certain amount of time.
Absolutely unsafe. Because life is NOT safe and will never be.
A recipe for a lack of freedom as you’re trapped in the limits of time and thoughts.
A recipe to keep and increase your oldest and newest fears and sufferings about death.
The best way to ignoring what life essentially is and could have been for you.
Embarking into the unknown is…
Not a reasonable thing to do.
Not a smooth and quiet journey to go through.
Not an easy call to withdraw from at a later stage.
Rather painful because the more you look, the more you see how ugly a lot of what we’ve done and what we do is.
Rather lonely journey to go through as a great portion of it liaises into self-enquiry.
Furthermore, be aware there is absolutely no bridge between the two banks.
So, for instance, there is no point to try and seek for peace of mind, for freedom, for love, for God within the known.
This is not theoretical statement at all. This is a fact. And this is rather mechanical.
Living in the world of things, in the world of thoughts, in the world of time, of continuity, in the world of division and conflicts, one would like to enquiry about timelessness, emptiness, meaningless, peacefulness, love and freedom, it is just impossible.
If you are caught in the movement of time, of thoughts, of emotions, there is no way you will ever get even close to anything else but time and thoughts and emotions.
Only if you ever be totally free of fear, of pleasure, of suffering, only if you have understood the whole of it, the nature and the structure of the self, of the me, of the ego, then these things your mind created may dissipate and vanish into nothingness, living you free to be, free to act and free to find out if there is anything else to be discovered.
The extraordinary simplicity and beauty of dying.
Have you ever met a bird, about to die?
His beauty, his breath, and then nothing.
Have you ever paid attention to a leave falling from a tree?
Her extreme beauty, her color, her shape.
The danse she draws while falling, and then kindly landing on the ground, joining all her sisters there, lying on the ground too.
Until the wind pushes them forward to fly and dance again.
Why are we struggling so much?
Why are we, human beings, dying so often so miserably, psychologically and physically?
Why can’t we die naturally, as beautifully as that leave, as that bird?
We don’t seem able to die in great dignity, simplicity.
Is it because we are scared like hell about death?
Is it because of our conditionings of all kind, all these awful representations about death?
Is it because we are frustrated with the impression we wasted our lives?
Is it because were not taught it is possible to live and get familiar with death?
What’s wrong with us?
Why all this sadness?
Why all these protocols?
Why all these black clothes?
Why do we keep our bodies in boxes?
Dying, something essential to discuss with our kids.
The son and his father have only discussed death once when he was 7. The eldest said that, of course, he would die and they would die at some point. The youngest said “no” and cried silently. The eldest held his son softly in his arms and calmed him down. He was not equipped neither to face himself nor to discuss with his son about this. The son became a man and was surprised when he turned 30 and when his grandfather died how deeply his father was moved about it. The father’s attitude towards his family changed significantly. Closer, warmer, more authentic. Talking about life and stuff regularly as he’s never done before. The son didn’t realize at first what happened, while he sees this in perfect clarity now. His father learnt the hard way. So did the son when his father passed away.
Looking backward and considering the impact parents’ death have on their children, as well as children’s death have on their parents may we add, this lack of awareness and responsibility with regards to these serious matters strikes me now. As much as our incapability to put ourselves in motion, when it comes to essential stuff. I am fortunate to have started my own journey. And I’m fortunate too my kids started their own. We’re not there yet. And it is essential for me now to spend as much time and energy as I can to help them and beyond preparing for take-off and landing, to living a life full of beauty, full of freedom, full of passion, full of love.
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With children, as well as with anyone else really, there is no need to start with complex stuff.
Overall, this is all very simple.
Especially for children young age who are not yet totally imprisoned by our conditionings.
We should tell them that dying is a part of daily life. That living and dying go hand in hand.
That birth and death are a part of this beautiful and mysterious dance of life.
That there is nothing to be worried about.
That we can discuss it all theoretically. And that the rest will come with practice. Like anything else, really.
We should connect them to nature so that they can have a sense of what is.
Of the simplicity, the dignity, and the beauty of dying.
We should not worry them or let them worry with this morbid unhappy thing either.
We should simply explain to them gently.
That dying is not the very end. But rather the very beginning.
That it is not something to escape from and to postpone at the end of life.
But rather something to live with and through daily.
A source of beauty, freedom, freshness, love and energy, to go to on a daily basis.
That this is the hidden and extraordinary sense of dying, which is the most beautiful.
That dying to an idea, to an attachment, which is dying psychologically, gives a fantastic opportunity to rebirth and rediscover the world, our relations and everything else and even more, with the eyes and the wonder of a newborn, is a wonderful way of being and living.
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#ExcuseMyFrench
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#Be!