Q. How can we avoid death?
A. If you are to enjoy eternal life without death, you should realise that you are not alive now, because you can’t avoid death as long as you think that you are alive. From the moment we are born, we start to die little by little. To grow means to be dying. ‘I am sixty years old’ means that I have been dying for sixty years. To be dying is the evidence of being alive since non-living things have no death. So, in fact, saying, “I want to live” is the same as saying “I want to die”.
Life is to death as the right is to the left. Wanting to live without death is as paradoxical as wanting to be on the right without the left.
If you don’t want to be on the left, instead of struggling to stick to the right, you should realise that the right and the left are not real things but just imaginary divisions created by an imaginary line. You are neither the right nor the left until you make imaginary divisions. Whether you are the right or the left is not set or fixed from the beginning but depends on your view. When you erase the imaginary line that makes the right and the left, you are not the right and not the left.
Likewise, in order to avoid death, don’t separate yourself from the universe by drawing an imaginary line of ‘I’ but rather identify yourself with the universe by removing the imaginary line. No one can deny the truth that you are part of the universe. The moment you feel oneness with the universe, you also feel free from death and can be sure that you are eternal like the universe because you are the universe itself.
©Boo Ahm
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway http://ow.ly/i/zhSBQ
Zen Fools 