Impermanence has already
revealed to us many truths, but it has a final
treasure still in its keeping, one that lies
largely hidden from us, unsuspected and unrecognized,
yet most intimately our own.
The Western poet Rainer
Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears
are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.
The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that
nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come
to discover, our greatest friend because it
drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes,
then what is really true? Is there something
behind the appearances, something boundless
and infinitely spacious, something in which
the dance of change and impermanence takes place?
Is there something in fact we can depend on,
that does survive what we call death?
Allowing these questions
to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them,
we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift
in the way we view everything. With continued
contemplation and practice in letting go, we
come to uncover in ourselves "something" we
cannot name or describe or conceptualize, "something"
that we begin to realize lies behind all the
changes and deaths of the world. The narrow
desires and distractions to which our obsessive
grasping onto permanence has condemned us begin
to dissolve and fall away.
As this happens we catch
repeated and glowing glimpses of the vast implications
behind the truth of impermanence. It is as if
all our lives we have been flying in an airplane
through dark clouds and turbulence, when suddenly
the plane soars above these into the clear,
boundless sky. Inspired and exhilarated by this
emergence into a new dimension of freedom, we
come to uncover a depth of peace, joy, and confidence
in ourselves that fills us with wonder, and
breeds in us gradually a certainty that there
is in us "something" that nothing destroys,
that nothing alters, and that cannot die. Milarepa
wrote:
In horror of death, I took to the mountains-
Again and again I meditated on the uncertainty
of the hour of death, Capturing the fortress
of the deathless unending nature of mind.
Now all fear of death is over and done.
We invite you to read excerpts
from the following chapters of The Tibetan
Book of Living and Dying
We are grateful to Harper Collins
for permission to use excerpts from The Tibetan Book
of Living and Dying.
