October 9, 2024

So the platform is meant not just for our book but also going forward maybe for your books. Maybe you would like to write shared books, living augmented books, at some point, and then you can use the platform with your group or community to do so. So this has a lot of potential and you’re part of the pioneering work of developing this.

So there was not that much activity in the room this time. But there was some and everything is interesting because it adds to the meandering of what are we talking about and where this is going or not going. And I have the feeling that there’s a core group in of people, they can’t make every week, which would be a lot, but more of the same people keep showing up, which is good. And everything else we’ll see.

We are still, believe it or not, speaking or trying to speak about the unbelievable joy of not needing to be someone, not needing to be a someone. And last time we talked about sharing or shining that joy. We’ve discussed before the problems with with concepts, with words, with thoughts, and communicating this. We’ve discussed various things but what are we discussing today?

I just wanna say that I feel sitting here with a bad conscience that I haven’t even looked at the chats. l I’ve forgotten. And I’m sorry. I wanna be more involved. I know I shouldn’t feel sorry, but I just wanted to say that I do feel a little guilty.

When we start writing together as a group, maybe there will be some form of commitment in the sense of, okay, now I want to be part of the author subgroup or not. I don’t know. It’s just coming up spontaneously right now.

Like I said last week, I had to put down my dog and I’m just noticing I haven’t had much death in my life at all, not been close to death at all. And I can just say that the joy between the tears and the sadness and between everything, absolutely everything reminds me of her. I mean, there is this still this joy in me. There is still the feeling that it’s okay somehow. I don’t even know how to put words on it, but I’ve just noticed it for two weeks now.

The the minute I become sad, I really feel how it’s me doing that. I’m pulling myself out of something into something I, I really can feel that I’m doing this. And of course I’m allowed to be sad but it’s like I can really separate, so even though I’m in this, I can still feel the joy around it. The joy of not having to be someone. Because it’s like death and she’s here, she is literally here, but the emptiness of her not being here is palpable as well, but she’s here.

So maybe today we’re speaking about the joy of death.

I think death is an interesting topic. I one time wrote about death and I got really interesting feedback. And now with everything that’s happening in Lebanon, I’m always conflicted with what that means and how does that impact or doesn’t impact people or me, how does that fit into all of this too?

I think when I wrote about it, I wrote change comes about only with death. And someone felt very offended. I had two reactions which were completely opposite. One which was very offended by it. And someone who I think has faced death more than anyone, multiple surgeries against cancer, and felt it in a positive light and not in a negative light when the term change comes about with death. And it didn’t mean like the end tion for them. And I would say that’s someone who has gone there multiple times.

And, when we talk about joy, like how does that compete? And from a Christian point of view, I’m Christian, it always been that there is a certain passage in death. But right now, I don’t know how to pinpoint it. I can see a lot of it happening in my home country. And last week I had to stop the association whatsoever, otherwise I couldn’t continue. It was just too heavy. I couldn’t watch and I couldn’t listen anymore, and I limited my interaction, like my cognitive load was overloaded that I couldn’t manage it.

Is there anywhere in that, all of that, the overload, that you can feel that joy still?

Feeling wise, I feel hurt. I feel pain. It’s very hard to think when the feelings are so strong and the heaviness of them. Anxiety was so high, I’m gonna have a heart attack or almost like that. I felt only once that in my life before. It was horrible and it was constant, I couldn’t get out of it. I was struggling to get out of it even though I’m not necessarily close to the danger in any way that I should feel like that. And I’m still showing up and smiling and it did not necessarily change who I am. I didn’t change my energy. But that was still there and didn’t go away.

I haven’t had much death experience. Except for my grandmother. All my grandparents died but I was too young. And my 93 year old grandmother died. It’s a decade ago, something like that. But that was a very joyful sadness. Now I would describe it as there was absolutely the joy of this woman in the bed dying. You see the body dying. And it’s sad, it’s extremely sad for the person the interaction going away or not being there anymore, but it wasn’t negative.

I found it all really strange because I haven’t been that close to death, but this year I’ve just lost my dad and now I’ve lost my mom. And when I went in both in the same care home and when I went to see my mom which could have been the way they were talking, the farewell moment. And they took me through into the room, and the carer who took me in just said, You do realize she’s dead, don’t you? And I had no idea because she’d assumed I’d come in response to a message that she just passed away and I was going in to potentially say goodbye, which is from what I’ve heard quite painful anyway.

So it is what it is. And I found the whole thing of losing both parents, I haven’t had any tears or anything. They fundamentally did not want to be in their body. In my mom’s case, she was disabled, and in my dad’s case, he had dementia. The whole thing is not as deeply upsetting. There’s certainly an area I’m going through, apparently going through that grief cycle, but I think the best grief cycle I’ve seen is the one that’s all tied in knots, it goes all over the place.

And probably this week, I am a bit depressed in that stage, but still I don’t feel deep sadness. And last night I was putting up a shrine shelf of all the things that were in their room and some things that had left my wife and a couple of other things. But it didn’t feel deeply sad and some of it’s quite dark. Their ashes were in scatter boxes before we scattered them around a tree in a park and I’ve put the lid of the scatter box with a brass plaque on the shelf as well. But there just isn’t an ongoing darkness, there’s more lightness, not as in blinding light, just a lightness as in weightlessness to it all. And I’m just going to flow with it and see where it goes. But it’s interesting to observe it all.

Do you think it would be different if you didn’t know what you know now, like that you had this non duality?

I don’t feel I’m as far as some of the people in this group. I’m uncovering, but not fully yet. I’m still not 100, still not totally there around separation. The other stuff’s all getting clearer and clearer, like being lived by life. But the separation or oneness I’m not totally there. But I do think where I am, it’s making this probably easier and lighter yeah.

So much around how we react to death or are required to react to death is conditioning. And from growing up in different cultures, it’s very culturally determined how we react to death.

Regarding the death experience I would like to share something with you because In India, the death rituals are very long and they were meant to give a very deep message with these long rituals because in India and in the Hindu culture, they burn the body till ashes. So that’s a very deep experience. Especially when you are experiencing death of your close ones. So being 55, I have seen many deaths in my family, but the closest was of my mother and of course, like every son, mother is closest.

So what I have seen is that the death rituals in India give a very deep lesson of life that what comes, what takes birth, has to go back. So this is from dust to dust. So they make elaborate arrangements. They they wash the body. They put the best clothes for the person who has died. And then they will do a lot of worship. And they will take them to the cremation ground and will prepare the best wood for burning the body. And it is done so slowly it takes everything away from you. Your mind goes blank, totally. You just face as if you are also going to die. It is such a close encounter with death.

So with my mother I had to do a lot of rituals. But my main experience was that when you see the person dearest to you burning in high flames, just before your eyes, you feel that something is going out of you also. They say that this was meant to give a deep message to you that this is how you will be next. So your turn will be like this. So there is nothing in life to feel possessive of because the end will be just burning into ashes. So the death ritual is such that it goes on for 11, 13 days and you have to keep remembering and you have to go to the cremation ground again and again to do rituals.

But the main thing was to remind you that this is how life is and your number is next. So that teaches you a deep lesson that if you are aware enough, mostly people avoid those things, but I used to stand beside the burning fire just to feel that, yes, I will be also next in line like this, I will be going like this, that takes everything away from you, you feel that why was I so much chasing things if the end is like this, and it definitely will be like this.

And that is why they burn the body just to convey the message of how this body, this mind is made of earth and it has to go back to earth. What remains is your awareness. Of course, that’s a different thing. But speaking of the death experience and witnessing it of your dearest ones gives you a very deep message which you never forget. If you really witness the death rituals in India, something will melt in you, at least for those moments. Maybe once you come out, you get again lost in the world, but if you stay with that experience, something will melt in you. You will be a little closer to the reality of life. That is what I have experienced.

Many of the spiritual practices have specific practices concerning being with or thinking about or imagining, visualizing death.

It is said that one of the seers, he used to send his disciples to the cremation ground to witness and stay with the burning pyre for as long as he can so that he just had a first hand experience of his body, how it ultimately ends up there. I think the Sufi ones used to do this. They will send their disciple to the cremation ground and then come back and share his experience, what he felt of his body when he sees the similar body burning into ashes. What did he find? Was there something still there which he could feel detached from the body?

May I just share, I’ve got a slightly different experience. this week about this topic. It’s so interesting. I don’t have any conclusions about it, but my best closest friend, his best friend who I know is dying of cancer and he’s got the money to take himself off to Switzerland (for suicide, euthenasia). And we’ve been discussing in detail the whole process of doing that. And I’ve learned things I didn’t know happened in Switzerland when you do it and how it all works. It sounds, on the one hand, convenient, but I just can’t make my mind up about it at all because it sounds so crazy at the same time, so anti-ethic and anti life at the same time.

But he’s got cancer and he’s not going to recover. So It’s a question of time, really. And it’s easy to sit here in judgement, and I’m not saying I judge him at all, because I don’t know what I would do in his position, but it’s raised the issue. It’sjust raising questions in my mind about what would I do in that situation.

I know this because my mother is a member of this society. That owns this pod that you get into and it kills you. So you can go and commit suicide in this pod. And it’s possible in Switzerland. And my mother is one of the people who is a member of this and actively supports that and wants to do that at a certain point. So I find this a very interesting discussion, with our perspective of the joy of experience.

Is it egoic to do this? In the last critical moment of our life are we reasserting the ego in a big way? Is that the problem? These are the issues I’m pondering, here we are trying to get rid of the ego all our life, but then when it comes to the last few moments, we think now I’m back in charge again. Let’s kill the body.

I’ve really reevaluated the Switzerland situation because it’s not something I could particularly see but both my mum and my dad wanted to die. Because he was asking both my sister and I separately to bring in a small thin long pitchfork and it’s pretty clear he wasn’t looking at doing gardening. He was pretending he was but he spoke a lot of things like I won’t be here next week and the next door neighbor who’s got dementia he tied bed sheets together and hung himself. And I think it just opens you up to people who are fundamentally in so much mental confusion or so much physical pain that they don’t want to be here. It certainly opened my eyes up to it all. I suppose in some ways you could see that as being the ego. But I think even my sister said on a birthday in February, she wishes that my parents were dea,d and within five months, they’re both dead. And I think what she’s talking about is the pain of suffering, but that, suffering is connected to the ego.

I just feel a lot more comfortable with it all than I imagined I would. And I feel more comfortable about Switzerland than I did. Not that it’s something I’m particularly planning to join in and do, but I can see why.

To me, it’s not more or less conditioned than any other aspect of the person. And some people like my mother, they have the conditioning and the personality and the reactions to then come to these conclusions to want to organize that for themselves.

It’s fascinating in a way, because I actually started my career in law. In my first five years I was a lawyer in hospitals. And I also did a two years master in medical ethics. And so this is moving onto that territory because the thing about this medical ethics was that it was completely populated by religious people. So the whole ethics committee were professionals, doctors etc. But all of them were representing either Catholics or Protestants or similar. But they have very clear ethical guidelines around these issues. I eventually left that, and I didn’t finish my master’s degree because I was so sick of the dogmatic, judgmental, rule-based, this is the answer because God says so, or this is the answer because … So there was no discussion possible.

And from this point of view now it’s like there’s no good or bad, there’s just no possibility of judgment. So if my mother ends up doing that, that’s what she ends up doing. If we end up talking to her in whatever way, then that’s also what occurs. And already 20 years ago, already at that time in the hospitals I found it impossible to get into that dogmatic stance.

Is it giving her peace of mind?

Yes, for her it’s like, If whatever happens to me is unbearable, I have this option. Or when I want to leave this life, then I have this option. For her, that is very important. And she’s not even ill, there’s nothing.

I don’t know if any of you are following the political debates in the UK about assisted dying at the moment. So it’s obviously all around, but there’s a lot of debate in the UK at the moment about this. And so we also had a conversation about it and it might change, but my view is that, if we already make decisions about our bodies every day and in some countries, we can decide that abortion is legal, then why can you not decide for your own body?

And why must it only be if you’re ill or if it’s a disease or what about mental illness? And so where do you then stop by saying, when is it allowed and when is it not allowed? And who gets to make that decision? So it’s a lot of gray area in that debate. But at the end of the day, if it’s your body and there is a better way with assisted dying, instead of living in a terrible way, in doing it in a terrible way, then I don’t see why you can’t be afforded that empathy.

I studied and worked in the Netherlands where there was a lot of quite liberal regulation. But before that, when it was illegal, it was happening all the time. So doctors assisted suicide all the time out of compassion. It wasn’t called that and they would never admit it. They had their ways of hiding it, but it was part of their doctor’s code of ethics that in certain cases they would do that. And then it became regulated and it got a lot more complicated.

Exactly like abortion. Now in a lot of countries, it still happens in that way. And many years ago, the same doctors who did it, but there’s an interesting aspect about this, maybe not ego, but the desire of the self and the human to manage and control. And I think you’re fair, you were alluding that death is something, aging and illness and, pain is something totally out of control. So maybe I can get some control back in, determining the time of my own death or taking that into my own hands.

It’s interesting with my mom and dad, that both of them, we had calls about getting them into hospital and sticking tubes in and to keep them alive longer And I remember the first one was my dad and I had the conversation with my sister and she was all for getting him in hospital, but they’d had no resuscitation papers lined up. So they didn’t, and they didn’t want to be here. And I said to her you, you said on your birthday that you didn’t want them to be here. Dad doesn’t want to be here. Let’s just talk this through. Why are we then controlling life, and saying we’ll take him to hospital? And she said, yeah, you’re right. Let’s just go with it and let it happen. And the ego hasn’t beaten itself up about that really. Because I suppose it’s a case of letting life live life.

But the interesting thing is that the attempt at control is also, of course, part of life, living life.

Because that’s the flip side of it, because you’re also controlling and the ego comes in by going to hospital and going to the doctor to keep you alive. So if you just follow life and let life flow and just get assistance when your body wants to die. Then, that’s the flip side of it.

I will share with you experience of my mother, because she was also having cancer. She had to go for this chemotherapy. And after three chemotherapies, she was totally unhappy with it. So she told me, she said I don’t want to go for the next chemo. Oh, I said no, you will feel better. You will. She decided, no, you don’t take me. I will be at home and I’ll wait for my end. That is what she told me. So I think that is what you were saying the urge to control life. So in India, there is a thing that if the medicines don’t work, then there is no assisted suicide kind of thing. But there is this concept that they leave all the medicines, they keep the person at home. They call all his relatives one by one. They say, okay, she wants to see, please come if you can come. So that is how it works.

So my mother also did same thing. She said, let me be at home. I won’t go anywhere. Although I was to take her, but I noticed that she had almost given up, she said she had somehow understood that her time has come, or she surrendered herself to nature. So she was just waiting. And she used to tell me that you go to office, no need to be with me I’ll be okay.

And I will tell you how she passed away. I went to office in the morning. I saw her, she was so calm, so quiet. So all the wrinkles on her face were cleaned and which now I realized later on that perhaps she had already accepted her time has come. So that is what you were saying. If you leave the control then body takes his own course and it goes very peacefully when she passed, when she took her last breath. I was not there. I was in office. People called me. I, but those who are near her, they told me that she was so calm when she went. So now I realize later on that perhaps since she had accepted it, her body is no longer going to survive.

So that is one way of going peacefully. Once you get the signal that, okay, my time is up. So I don’t need to go to the doctors and go into messy things. My mother perhaps got this intuition earlier than us. And I have noticed that if you surrender at the right time, then you can go peacefully, instead of the other things like assisted suicide.

And people told me that she was very peaceful, absolutely peaceful when she passed away, which gave me a lot of comfort, which really I was happy that way that instead of bearing unbearable pain of cancer, she had liver cancer. The way she went, was much better way to go instead of being in the hospital.

Thank you. That’s so beautiful. Thank you.

And on top of this, there is the evolution now happening with technology, extending life as well, on the flip side of it. And what does that look like? And what is possible? Through augmentation of other limbs or regenerating, extending life whatever the means are.

And it’s quite as far fetched sometimes as euthenasia in some cases, just as a conversation, not as a judgment, because I don’t know. And even in changing of limbs and stuff, companies who are building technology, which is able to replace them, and probably it will happen first for people who need it, but at some point it will happen for people who don’t need it as well as an augmentation.

So that’s interesting to when we talk about nature and death and that ends and doesn’t end, do we actually know what we’re talking about? As it still sits within the limits that we consider natural because that’s really the question, where is control and where is no control?

I guess what gets intertwined so much is pain and suffering and death. And then also culturally with this desire to to live longer. I want more of this. If you look nakedly at not being here anymore, not having this experience, I’d say, go ahead. I am perfectly happy to end my existence. If my existence ends right now, totally fine. I guess what makes death so difficult is mixing it up with the imagined or expected pain, limitation, lack of control, suffering, and no longer experiencing the joy.

I think the sense of doership also. You feel I must do this. I have to do this. Once this doership or doer thing goes, then you feel okay if you go, because I was already not doing . So once that insight comes then you know I was already not doing anything. So if I go, that means nothing is lost. So I think that doership thing is very deep in all of us.

In India, there is a practice of celebrating death also. So in two instances, the death of a is celebrated. One, is the death of the person celebrated with full songs, dance, rituals, all that, is the one who has realized his true nature, what they call free of life, alive and still free of life. And second was when somebody has done his worldly duties, if you are married and you have children, you are supposed to get your children married till then it’s your job. So if somebody’s children are married and he dies, then there is no issue. His death is celebrated. Nobody will, complain. But if it is an untimely death, then of course everybody will feel the sorrow. In these two types of deaths, the joy which you talk is there.

The thing that strikes me is that you can’t feel joy unless you’re happy, unless you’ve come to terms with death. Really, can you? It’s not possible. Not deeply, because you’re always going to be harbouring fear and attachment. And that’s the whole issue, isn’t it? And so actually, there’s no way to actually experience joy without death. You have to have death in order to experience joy. Yes, you have to know it’s going to end. The ultimate spiritual lesson.

And in a way, what we’ve done since our bodies have been born is we’ve been dying all the time. And we’re dying every moment. And we’ve probably died a million times since we’ve been children. And every moment is a death in some respects. The whole notion of death is what’s at the root of so much problems in our world, isn’t it? And the fear and the lack of joy. And if we can transform that, if we can surrender ourselves completely so we don’t have any need to attach to our body longer than it wants to be alive. And it will naturally die in its own time. And perhaps we could say that we’ve got to prepare ourselves to die. This is a lesson I think all the time. Non duality in my mind is the ultimate preparation for death.

And that’s why I don’t like it when people say non duality is bypassing, because we’re doing the one thing that most people don’t want to do, which look death squarely in the face, and face the fear of it. Whereas everyone else is trying to avoid it. If you can get to the point where you surrender your body and mind, and the only way you can do that is to realise your true nature. To have somewhere else to go, which is not your mind and body, which is giving you that sense of safety, of being.

Which reminds me of the book, I Hope You Die Soon. It’s by Richard Sylvester and there’s one by Joan Tollifson. Her book is called Death, The End of Self Improvement.

It seems possible that if we just give the option to physically end your life in a very convenient way, we’re avoiding the necessary spiritual preparation for joy, because they’re just making it so there’s nothing more to it than just switching life off. It just feels like that’s what we should be focusing on more, which is how do we transcend death and the fear of death in our daily life, rather than just invent machines and take people out.