When we where young we might have been curious about where grandma or grandpa had gone after they had died. Later we forget about this question and even more later it comes back on the horizon as we see good friends dying, and our own death comes closer: ‘where will I go after this live is completed?’ The early discourse series by Osho: ‘And Now and Here’ is a notebook for the travel beyond our bodily world. In his talks Osho draws situations and consciousness for the ‘beyond’. When I started to read this book years ago, it was because a close friend had died untimely. I suddenly felt fear that also I could loose my body and where would I go? Osho’s describes the situation after death in pictures. His message supported me to use my energy for meditation instead of getting stuck in fear. ‘The world we live in is a world of physical bodies. As we leave this world, the incorporeal world begins – a world we have never experienced. It is even more frightening, because in our world, no matter how strange the place, how different its people and their ways of living, there is still a bond between us and them: it is a realm of human beings. Entering into the world of bodiless spirits can be an experience frightening beyond imagination. |
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Ordinarily, we pass through it in an unconscious state, and so we don't notice it. But one who goes through it in a conscious state gets into great difficulty. So in Bardo there is an attempt to explain to the person what kind of a world it will be, what will happen there, what kind of beings he will come across. Only those who have been through deep meditation can be taken through this experiment – not otherwise.’
The series of talks is started during a mediation camp in 1968. Osho sets the theme, ‘Living and Dying, which the participants take by surprise, as some questions show. He talks about the connection between death and birth, the meaning of the last thought of a dying person for his next birth, and the remembrance of past lives. And of the important question to search for the right parents to find, which will be supporting a life in awareness and meditation.
One participant asks: ‘Why are you teaching people how to die? Are you teaching death? You should teach life instead.’
This question could be also asked while reading the book, should one read more than 600 pages about death?, but maybe it is just to read:
‘We have become extremely attached to life. And this attachment has become very unbalanced. I can call it the art of living too, but I won't, because you are too attached to life. If I should say, "Come learn the art of living", you would come running because you would want to strengthen your attachment to life. I call it the art of dying, so you can regain your balance. If you learn how to die, then life and death will stand before you equally; they will become your left and right foot. Then you will attain to the ultimate life. In its ultimate state, life contains neither birth nor death, but it is made of the two aspects we call birth and death.
The Eastern concept of re-birth is the base of this book where Osho asks us not to believe in, but to make our own experience.
The including cd with the guided meditation Relaxing Body & Mind, is a well done tool to start experimenting. Way back during the camp, every morning and every evening Osho guides the participants through this process. Three steps lead to a feeling of freedom from the body/mind.
In three steps our activities (outer as well inner) are lead to a stop, so that a deep silence and relaxation happens. It is a journey leading into let-go, a modern short version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo.
Later Osho talks more precisely on how Bardo can be used in our times, to help a dying person with speaking to his consciousness, but ‘Without awareness training, Osho says, one loses his consciousness while dying’.
Through practising meditation we can remain the watcher, while the body is dying. Our body is going, but our being is set free and can go on its unburdened journey. A person, who in this situation wants to avoid being driven by an autopilot and wants to remain the watcher, can use meditation as way of fitness for the witness.
Maybe just now is the time to realise that dying is part of live, and admit that accepting death is liberating.
In And Now and Here Osho describes the stages of a life based on meditation, and in a later discourse he suggests: ‘Every hospital should have a special ward with all facilities so that death becomes a pleasant experience, enjoyable.
Instead of medicines, a meditator should be there to teach the dying man how to meditate, because now medicine is not needed, meditation is needed – how to relax and peacefully disappear from this body. Every hospital needs meditators – they are essential – just as it needs doctors. Up to now meditators were not needed because there was only one function: to save life. Now the function is doubled: to help people die. Every university should have a department where meditation is taught so that people themselves are ready. When the time comes to die, they are fully ready to die with joy, with celebration.
…It is a departure: all the friends can be invited, all those who have loved the dying man can be present. He can say goodbye, thank all those people, can have another look, because he will not be meeting them again.
If a man can die with meditativeness, then he is going to become part of the whole. No more will he be imprisoned in a small body. He will be as vast as the universe, and that is the goal of true religion, to help you to become part – organic part – of the whole existence’.
from Osho: and NOW and HERE - Beyond the Duality of Life and Death
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