Fear of Dying

As I’ve said before, when I look back at my life to see what were some of the things that got me interested in the spiritual path, one of the most important things was my fear of dying.

I’d say to myself that the time will come when I’m not going to be here any more and then what will happen to me? I started studying all the different traditions and religions trying to find answers to that question. I went from one to the other to the next trying to make myself comfortable that I would continue.

We want to make ourselves comfortable that we are going to continue. So we pick a particular religion that makes us feel good about this. We pick a religion that says our future lives will be determined based upon this singular life and we will be going to a heaven or a hell or places in between. Or we pick other traditions that say that we have infinite chances of being reborn over and over and over again depending upon what we do in this life.

Reincarnation gives us a feeling that we are continuing. We won’t die in reincarnation. We come back. Maybe we will come back better or we’ll come back worse, but we’re coming back. If we’re afraid of death, it’s a lot better to come back one way or the other than not to come back at all. So the concept of reincarnation is very, very popular because we will be coming back somehow or another.

The other idea that having a perfect life here will guarantee us infinite happiness later is also a very good ideabut absolutely frightening because if that definition of “perfect” is even slightly off we are in for a terrible time forever.

It’s not very fair to suffer in eternity for one life’s mistakes. I don’t think the Beloved demands that. Nor does the Beloved want us to keep proving over and over for ten thousand reincarnations that we love the Beloved. It’s just nonsense. I know that I’m offending some, but those concepts are simply not the way that it is.

I spent many, many years of my life trying to determine these things. I went from one philosophy or tradition to another and back and forth trying to find some kind of composite idea of everything. But I couldn’t find something that was composite.

When I tried to discuss death with Poonja-ji, he basically said that the only way we can discuss death is when there are two people who are dead that are having a conversation with each other about death. When one is alive and someone else is dead, we can’t have this conversation. And this is true in many ways. That gave me a peaceful feeling for many years because it put death into the realm of the absolute and death became the same as the mystery. And I left it at thatthe mystery of deathperiod.

But this question of what happens to us at the time that we are not here has not left me all these years. It left me temporarily and it gave me peace during a time when I needed this peace. But it has resurfaced for the last year or two, and I have decided to look into this much more than I have before.

One of the tools that I have used to look into this further has been the teachings that I have spent years and years and years studying, starting with the Olmec and then the Toltec traditions. In an effort to see things that I have not seen before, I have learned how to dream and I have learned how to take travels that are beyond words. I have seen things that make me comfortable to share now what I hadn’t been able to do before because I wasn’t sure.

Now I am certainwithout a doubt

that death is not the end of things.

It’s an incredible thing to be able to say definitely that this idea of death is not the end. It’s the end of our physical form, obviously. It’s the end of our body and it’s the end of insignificant memories. It’s the end of the insignificant definitions of who we think that we are.

In this life we have structured our personality. We have become what we call ourselves. We have learned things about ourselves and we reinforce these things. We grow these things just like a tree. We start out as a small baby and we get older. We end up calling ourselves by a particular name. We define ourselves by particular ideas and concepts. We defend this ego, this personality, this concept of what we have. We have all our memories. We have our past. We have our history. We have our ideas about the future. We have ourselves in all these great definitions. But at the time of death all these details about who we are will be gone.

What remains is an essence,

a fragrance of our overall entity.

It’s like a smell, an aroma. It’s an energy. It’s something that cannot be defined with regular words but it’s a composite of what represents us. This composite continues.

This composite energy, this composite consciousness, does not have any desire to be defined by the way we have defined things in this life. It does not have a body like the one that we have now. So, if it does not have a body like the one we have now, it does not have to continue in the same way that this energy did in the body.

When this body doesn’t exist anymore,

then this energy becomes something

that is beyond all imagination.

It becomes something that is not to be feared. It is something that is to be welcomed. It is something that is an even greater gift than the one that we have now.

Our energy changes. The best word that I can use for that is that it has a different smell for each and every one of us. It’s like perfume. It smells slightly different based upon what we have or have not experienced or felt through our present energy fields.

Each and every one of us feels and experiences different things and the smell changes a little bit and becomes slightly different with each of these. This smell, this essence, these slight modifications of our energy fields are directly related to how loving and kind one is here. If we become as loving and kind and compassionate and forgiving as we can, then this essence smells very beautiful.

This is also coupled with taking the energy fields that we have and opening them up when we are alive.



Dear Beloved,

I pray to you

and ask you to give us

the wisdom

and the strength

and the love

that is required in this life.

And I ask that someday

I won’t be asking.