Learning from Andrew Harvey

THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH AND DEATHLESSNESS 
Selected in memory of David Pinyard 
      
Deathlessness is hidden at the center of the house.  You have to be killed in every room of the house before you can get to the room where deathlessness is.  That is the glory of the process. The mercy is that after the first couple of killings, you want to know that you're being killed into life.  You begin to participate in the killing willingly.  People go into retreat to die in another room, to come closer to that center of deathlessness.  Everyone doing a serious yoga with a master or with God directly is learning how to die in life, how to die into life.  They know that the law is that the more you die, the more you live.... 
  

One way of looking at the body is to see that it is given to us to be taken away, and so to compel us toward liberation.  We have a time bomb within us which is called death.  After a while you hear the ticking of that bomb as it grows louder as you grow older.  The ticking is there to remind you to transcend your identification with the body, to go beyond the body while you're in it....
  
You must think every day that you might not make it to the night, so that everything you do could have the beauty and serenity that you would bring to an action if you were dying. A tremendous gentleness is born from daily meditation on this. 
  
~  Andrew Harvey, "Dialogues With a Modern Mystic", Chapter 8 
   
TALK ABOUT IT:  How is death both a blessing and a curse?  How do we avoid or dilute the pain of death? 
  
DO IT (INNER PRACTICE):  How do (can) we practice dying before we die? 
   
DO IT (OUTER PRACTICE):  How do (can) we cultivate the gentleness and mindfulness of living each moment as if we are dying?  

   

LEARNING FROM ANDREW HARVEY: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION