death and spirituality

I love synchronicities! Yesterday I had a few revolving around death. I was checking in books and saw several on poems for funerals, alternative funeral rites etc. Perusing them I saw some wonderful poems, including an excerpt from Kahil Gibran's The Prophet, which contained the line:

life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one

Then, a short time later I found an interesting book by Robert Powell called Discovering the Realm Beyond Appearance, a book on Advaita philosophy, which deals with non-dual realization. On my break I opened it and started reading:

Like the river on entering the ocean loses its identity, so the individual upon entering the stream of consciousness loses his own separate existence.

This is fascinating to me, the correspondence between physical death and the death of the separate-self sense. It makes sense to me that when you die your sense of separate identity dies, and that it would be even better to do this while your body is still breathing. Die before you die, so that when you die you don't die. It ties in well with my recent reflections on the idea that if you identify with the body, then when you die it is a horrible process because you feel yourself dissolving into nothingness, losing everything you identify with. However, if you learn to identify with the deeper Witness which experiences everything and is utterly changless and eternal, then the death of the body is simply another step in the endless transformation of forms; from that perspective life and death are continual and inseparable.

The third link in the synchronicity came when a short time later I was helping a patron who had a hold sent to the wrong library and wanted it redirected: the book was Ernst Becker's The Denial of Death.

I love how the kosmos keeps me on my toes with these little reminders. :)