Death and dying...(Jean Klein)

 

Alice Ouzounian posted (Facebook)

“The real meaning of death and dying is completely different from that usually understood by these words. When one knows the continuum that is life, all perceptions (of which our body is but one) are felt as appearing and disappearing in awareness or consciousness.

This appearing and disappearing is the real meaning of birth and death. We are born every moment a thought or sensation appears and we die every moment the concept or percept disappears.

We die every evening before going to sleep, and we are born every morning. So we need to become acquainted with this dying, this letting-go of the objective world.

We should ask ourselves in our most profound intimacy: What is there before the thought appears? What is there when the thought disappears?

What is there before the body goes to sleep and before it wakes up?

When we observe closely, we will find, not the absence we took for granted, but a presence, a presence that cannot, however, be objectified.

It is too near, it is our nearest. If we really know how to go to sleep we will know how to die.

We will be already familiar with dying, already familiar with the dissolution of the born.

To do this, one must, before going to sleep, lay aside all qualifications.

We must become as naked psychologically as we are physically.

This means that we put aside all opinions, thoughts, worries, ideas before we sleep. It is an offering of all that we are not.

In letting go there is an expansion of mind and body and in all expansion is the fore-feeling of reality, our globality. This should be done each time we sleep until we find that, before the body wakes up in the morning, we are. Presence is already there.”

— The Book of Listening by Jean Klein, volume 3, page 67.