This book, written by a very observant woman who has worked with hundreds of dying men and women, is subtitled “A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation.”
Quotes and thoughts about ideas in The Grace in Dying by Kathleen Dowling Singh
Here’s a thought about fairness and hope, from The Grace in Dying:
Hope is confusing and ambiguous. Hope is as confused in our culture as the concept of fairness. Both are entirely of human creation, emotion-infused figments of imagination of the separate sense of self (false self). Both concepts, hope and fairness, are sourced in the mental ego. Both conceive of God as something wholly other. Both arise in situations that are beyond the control of the individual and both beg the notion of God, something larger than the individual that is presumably doing the controlling, to bend to the wishes of the individual, so the individual can continue to control. (p. 95-96)
Hope is, finally, during the course of the transformation of terminal illness, seen for what it is: a clinging to a wish for something other than what is. When hope evaporates, we are left with here and now. Hope, a posture of the mental ego, is transformed into presence, a stance of Spirit. (p. 96)
I think she is describing a transformation from hope to faith (“now faith is being sure of what we hope for” …), and as always, this is a transformation that requires that I give up the reign, the reins, and let the rain come down. It falls on the just and unjust, right? When I get that thoroughly wet, I just can’t help but forgive. In fact, the bitterness is so GONE that I don’t even remember I was unforgiving.
Here’s another piece from Grace, this time about surrender:
Psychological acceptance (in Kubler-Ross’ grief cycle) is the cessation of outward struggle. The inner cringing remains. Acceptance is a state in which it is still felt that which is is other than the self. Acceptance says, “I will not fight what is anymore,” and as such, is rather a neutral state.
Surrender is of an entirely different order. Surrender is a stance of the whole being in which resistance, at any level, ceases – as one willingly becomes active in what is. Surrender is not so much as agreeing to, but agreeing with. With surrender, we cease being a victim of life. Gradually, with spiritual practice leading to stability and growing wisdom, any and every eventuality (including what would otherwise be described suffering and unfair treatment) becomes another opportunity for awakening. Surrender is infinitely deeper and more thorough, and therefore infinitely more transforming, than acceptance …
With this change in voice and in stance, there begins the movement beyond the mental ego (false self). The mental ego is fearful, fragmentary, and can only conceive itself as separate from other. Surrender is an integrative step, bridging the gap between self and other. With surrender and the participatory stance that co-arises with surrender, we face and enter reality rather than trying to deny it or appease it. (p. 158-159)
(This book has a great index; I found these quotes quickly. Wow. I wish every book had something like this. Kindle makes that easy, but real paper books so rarely are this accessible after I read it.)
Bitterness, resentment, unforgiveness … and their opposites – meekness, gentleness, forgiveness only exist because we conceive ourselves as separate beings. They are subsumed in the unified field of Love. Exactly what Jesus calls God, and what he calls us into.
There are some false dichotomies so basic that they go unnoticed most of the time. Ken Wilber calls them the Four Dualisms that create our mental egos early in our human lives. As described in the Grace in Dying:
1) Self/not-self: During my first 18 months of life, it becomes clear that I am separate from everything else. I am subject; everything else is object. Psychologically I am hereby born as a separate being. This is the “Grand Canyon of dualisms: a virtually unbridgeable chasm between self and not-self.” Wilber says, “This boundary is the first one we draw and the last one we erase. This is the primary boundary.” The concept of “space” becomes clear as I define myself as “here” and everything else as “there.”
2) Life/death: Co-arising with the dimension of space is the dimension of time. As soon as the self begins to live in space, it lives in and experiences time: past, present and future. Here is now … there is past or future. This spawns the second dualism, the time-linked recognition of the distinction between life and death. This sets the stage for my (and all of humanity’s) fear of death.
3) Mind/body: psyche/soma – I recoil from growing awareness of the vulnerability and mortality of “my” body.  This “vital shock” forces me into “primal repression” or denial. My “mind” does this work, and thus separates itself from my “troublesome, involuntary, ultimately finite” body. This leaves me self-identified with my mind. My body is not trustworthy.
4) Persona/shadow: My acceptable self-image rejects and disowns those parts of myself which are less acceptable and less functional in society. I build an inner closet where I can hide these things, and then forget that it’s there. This divides me not only from aspects of myself for which I feel shame, but also some beautiful and powerful aspects of myself which seem to threaten my social acceptance or of which I do not feel worthy. This is the last deep narrowing of the self and consciousness Wilber describes. (pp. 31-37 and 70-77 of Grace in Dying.)
What can we do to facilitate non-dual thinking and gradually restore these four narrowings of self? Another way of saying this: how do we move from the personal to the transpersonal, from the false, egoic self to the true self?
One way is to die. In The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh observes her patients, friends, and clients move through the four dualisms in reverse order as they approach death.
She also lists and describes several “skillful means,” or spiritual practices, which she calls the “special conditions” of transformation which can begin to reverse the separations listed above before physical death. All of these are aspects of meditation, contemplative prayer, centering prayer:
- “Taking the one seat:” choosing one practice and focusing attention on that one practice
- Withdrawal and isolation
- Presence: being present to self in the moment, mind-body awareness, being here, now
- Silence
- Mindfulness of breath
- Images, visions and archetypes, not just mythological archetypes (which are pre-personal), but truly transpersonal archetypes
- Surrender
- Self-inquiry: knowing that I “don’t know” (beginner’s mind) and moving on from there.
From The Grace in Dying by Kathleen Dowling Singh
Next to last chapter of book: “Entering the Mystery”, pp. 269-281
I want to encourage you to step out of the normal “bounds” of your life and to begin to see yourself differently. 1 want to encourage you to live your life at the … edge of time, allowing yourself to be born into a new life every minute, I want to encourage you to allow your life experience to be lightly dusted with form.
Barbara Brennan
My work with the dying has been a privilege. I have been transformed by my very participation in the process, becoming “more alert to God,” to mystery. To work with the dying, as Martin Buber puts it in another context, is to know one’s self to be “inscrutably included within the streaming life of the Universe.” Life itself is revealed, in. its immense and pulsating splendor, beyond anything we could have imagined, to be in fact our own Original Nature. The transformation we witness k-dying brings into sharper focus deep currents of Spirit that have always carried us and always will carry us, inward and beyond, on the Path of Return. And on the Path of Return these deep currents of Spirit become increasingly activated in our own. being—crowning human life.The emerging view of dying as a process of deep spiritual transformation is nothing other than an expression of a vast and evolutionary dynamic. This book, with its view of the dying process as a passage filled with grace, is an artifact of our times. It arises as a consequence of our greater willingness to explore death, to bring it in closer to our hearts and minds, to cease trying to hold the reality of our mortality at bay. It arises as we, as a maturing culture, begin, to embrace death as a part of life and more frequently allow our loved ones to die in our midst, allowing the mystery to enter our being.
The imagery in which we as a culture conceive of death and dying has shifted subtly in the last few decades. It is moving from images of enclosing darkness to images of expansive radiance. Our images of death are, increasingly, filled with light Dying is moving out of whispered shadows and into open-eyed sharing.
I have two images in my mind, simple stories from my own family, that in some ways illuminate this shift in our collective way of thinking about and being around death. One is an image of my own dear father, the other of a beloved uncle, both of whom died, decades apart, from the ravages of diabetes.
My father died in 1964 in a glass-enclosed isolation room. As I was still a teenager, the hospital allowed me only one short visit each week. I tried, in vain to figure out how to use the intercom so that we could talk to one another. I was frightened and too flustered. I never did learn to push the right buttpn when he spoke so that 1 could hear him, or to push the right button so he could hear me when I tried to say something to him. Mostly, I remember pushing my face against the hard glass to get a better view of him: far off in the center of what seemed a vast room, sparsely filled with huge machinery, a small, bed, and him. He looked frightened, too, although I remember him trying to give me a smile. Even this close to the end (as I now know), clearly slipping away after decades of illness and a year of medical heroics, no one in the hospital ever suggested he was dying, no one ever breathed a word of death. He had a wife and five young children who would have given anything in the world to have been with him, but he died alone in that cavernous room, in the early hours of a winter morning.
About thirty years later, my uncle died of the same disease. He, too, had his times of great anguish; but, well informed, he was open-eyed when he surrendered into the transformations of dying. All of us in our huge family had a chance to tell him how much we loved him and all the reasons why, a chance to wish him peace, to say our good-byes to him, and to pray for him in his leave-taking. He spent his last few days in a chair in his home, wife and children and grandchildren all there with him, laughing and crying, saying prayers, and loving him. When he died, my aunt called their priest who, together with the family gathered around my uncle’s body, offered Mass for him.
Thank God, we have come this far.
Corning in closer to death allows us to view the fragility, the transience, of the human condition with great compassion, with respectful understanding for the difficulty of being a person, Rilke expresses his compassion for our multidimensional predicament in the following way:
But this; that one can contain death,
the whole of death,
even before life has begun,
Can hold it to one’s heart gently
and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.
The Ground of Being is, in a new round, disclosing itself to us, revealing more of the profound and ceaseless interpenetration of the world of .form by the world of the formless. The implications of such a view, such deep insight and understanding, were once available only to rare individuals engaged in prolonged contemplative discipline. We can now glean not only from the millennia, but from our own lives as we allow death to come in a bit closer and part the veils that have obscured our vision, These insights into the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality dance in our mind’s eye, attracting us with their wisdom, with the intuitive recognition of their truth. We can begin to speak of these insights into realms of longed-for fullness, as we open to life, as we open to death, in contemporary terms that have the validation of centuries and the power of the present.
Witnessing the transformation of the dying process with any degree of receptivity, participating as a fellow human being enters deeply into grace, is unforgettable and inexpressible. With such grandeur,, such solemnity, such awesome revelation, we open to new levels of being. It is the kind of stimulation and input that jars our existing equilibrium and allows the emergence of new levels of understanding and expression, in each of us as individuals and in the culture we collectively create. Looking at ourselves at this point in evolution, we see the opportunity to move into a deeper apprehension of the nature of reality. We see the opportunity to begin to expand our notions about and our experience of Life. Life itself is calling us. Life itself wants to reveal to us the precious, vast, ceaseless, ever present nature of Spirit, Life is welcoming the contraction we call our self to relax.
Most of us who read these words will be present at a death and will be dead ourselves within fifty years or so. We will know the experience of dying from the inside, as our consciousness dissolves out of the body in which we presently live, as we remerge with the Ground of Being from which we once emerged. We will discover for ourselves that the tragedy is not in dying, the tragedy is in living disconnected from Life. I have heard it said. that our culture suffers not so much from the forces of darkness, but from the forces of shallowness. We will experience grace the moment we experience our connection with Spirit, the transcendent Reality, the Center to our periphery. We will experience grace the moment we experience Life beyond our cramped self-definition, the moment we take off the blinders and glory in all that is beyond “me.”
As Marco Pallis, a Buddhist thinker, puts it: “This is in fact the function of grace, namely to condition men’s homecoming to the center from start to finish, it is the very attraction of the center itself, revealed to us by various means, which provides the incentive to start on the way and the energy to face and overcome its many and various obstacles. Likewise grace is the welcoming hand into the center when man finds himself standing at long last on the brink of the great divide where all familiar human landmarks have disappeared.”2
Grace is the common thread linking dying, contemplative practice, and spiritual growth. Grace is the foundation of their essential unity. The essential unity of dying, contemplative practice, and spiritual growth is becoming increasingly apparent. The transformations in consciousness outlined in this discussion and echoed here and there throughout our contemporary mindscape will enter us, fill our own being, and begin to reflect in the culture we daily create.This has vast implications for each of us. It causes us to take a closer look at the nature of death and how we want, henceforth, to approach ourselves and each other at the edge of life. And it causes us to take a closer look at the nature of Irving and how we want, henceforth, to approach ourselves and each other in the midst of life. We begin to claim our birth-right. We begin to claim our death-right. We begin to claim dimensions saturated with the depth of Spirit, connected with Life, as our own.
May it be our legacy to future generations to begin to part the veils and reveal in increasing splendor the Light that is our true nature. May we live each moment in deeper awareness of the unendingly loving patterns of emergence and remergence, the perpetual inhalation and exhalation of Life, May we articulate, so that all can hear, that this life is a gift—and right now, in this very moment, we have it! This consciousness is a gift—and right now, in this very moment, we have it! Consider what it is to BE.
May we undertake the contemplative practices that will nurture our deeper and more inclusive consciousness in the midst of our lives rather than, at its edge, and allow ourselves to be offerings of love and hope for those who live contracted in suffering. May we, in deepening our understanding of death, transform our living, right here and right now, into our expression of grace, into, ever more encompassing dimensions of compassion and wisdom, relaxing—finally—the contraction, and living only “lightly dusted with form.”
In the Midst of Life
Claiming our birthright in the midst of life begins with an illumination, a parting of the veil we have each created before a radiant Reality. Claiming our birthright involves the growing recognition that the Ground of Being is our Original Nature. It is original in the sense that the Ground of Being is our home, in some sense of the chronological past the origin of our being. It is also original in the sense that this Original Nature is the origin of every moment of our consciousness, in every one of us, always totally in the present.
We take ourselves to be so much less than we are. We know best the confined and anxious spaces of the mental ego, but each of us has experienced each level of consciousness at some point in our lives, if only for a fraction of a second. Because we are multidimensional, because we have access—if just for moments—to greater dimensions of depth that arise when we mov inward toward the Center, we witness the humblingly beautiful human qualities of joy and wonder and loving-kindness ,and mercy and playfulness. The qualities of grace, of Being, arise in moments of self-forgetfulness. The Light reveals itself when we take off the blinders.
We see through each illusory level as identity becomes more inclusive, as it begins to merge with the Center. “Reality lies in what now appears to be the direction that we call inward, subjective, towards the very center of our being, a center so deep and profound that it is God’s center as well.” The dynamic of the Path of Return is movement toward the interior: from appearance to the quality underlying the appearance to the Life animating the qualiity. It is a movement from personality to soul to Spirit, We remember who we are, paradoxically, by forgetting, by retracing the steps that led to the creation of the mental ego. The fourteenth century contemplative Christian document The Cloud of Unknowing reminds us that the only way back to union with God is “forgetting, forgetting, forgetting.” This is the emptying of self.
An evolutionary process is occurring, in our time, in all of us. Within this evolutionary process, and without an ounce of arrogance, I believe that we are most certainly a privileged species. Even if every other species on earth, unbeknownst to us, can realize God, the fact that we can realize God is a privilege. We are endowed with a brain and a nervous system that, through feed back loops, allow us to be aware that we are aware, We have the a capacity to be conscious that we are conscious.Wt embody the quality of attention, the very nature of the soul, that can be turned to itself as it discovers itself, moving toward the Center, deeper into theLight that is our very Being.
This is, in the words of Jonas Salk, a metabiological evolution. Human nature has an inherent and purposeful dynamic; there is evolutionary purpose in the unfolding of expanded levels of consciousness or identity. An evolutionary principle, a law inherent in the order of the universe, regulates the Ground’s disclosure of its Being. Integration of the self with that Ground, enlightenment, is an inherited destiny belonging to all of humanity. Spiritual experience is a higher potentiality of human nature for us as individuals and as a species. It is our birthright. And each instance of spiritual experience, each one of us who remerges with the Ground of Being, further advances or facilitates this possibility for more and more of the species.
We create a critical mass in our deeper and deeper apprehension of reality and this critical mass becomes the determining factor in the further progression, the further evolution of humanity. hi this way, human consciousness participates in or co-creates evolution. It would appear, in this metabiological evolution, that the universe has chosen us to be vehicles of further creation. In the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin, growth in the individual human consciousness is the arena of cosmic evolution.
The gift of a human .life is incomparable, a great privilege and blessing. We are organisms created to realize Spirit, to embody the transcendent. In the Gun* Gmnth Sahib, the sacred text of the Sikh tradition, is the line: “Just to define Him, millions more await rebirth.” At the heart of all wisdom traditions is the joyously ringing pronouncement that there is a fundamental truth, and each of our lives is a sacred opportunity to realize it. It is our turn. The privilege of life in human form is great and “death is the price we pay for the gift of a body.”
Each of us has the opportunity to enter the ranks of the graced few who experience transcendent dimensions in the midst of life. Every wisdom tradition offers a path. If you were born into one that speaks to you, pursue it with depth and commitment. Take the one seat. If you are looking for a wisdom tradition that speaks to you, simply look around. We are fortunate that we have access to so many of them. I sometimes think that the universe doesn’t dangle, just a carrot to attract us and lead us home. There are five billion of us. We don’t all like carrots.The universe also dangles pears and kasha and pickles and pasta. Find your own access to depth. Begin a practice before you enter the dying process. Glory in the midst of life.
If you are considering beginning a practice or deepening one, the Four Noble Truths, enunciated by Buddha and universally applicable, outline the dynamics of any path home and are worth contemplation.
The First Noble Truth, the Truth of Suffering, is quite simple. Simple to say, that is—not so easy to embody. The First Noble Truth is that suffering exists. “Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; disassociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering … ” The first step on the path, of truth is experiencing what is in the present moment. The place to begin is the place where we are. We suffer. In our contraction, we suffer. Hidden and alone, behind the boundaries we create, we suffer. The artifice of the mental ego works hard to keep this truth from consciousness.
Many of us actually believe that we are leading spiritual lives, that we are pursuing a spiritual path because we read books about spirituality, go to synagogue or church regularly, attempt to follow the teachings of our religion, or use the words of various spiritual traditions. But operating with these beliefs, we often deceive ourselves. The only way into the transpersonal realms is through a thorough examination and complete surrender of the personal sense of self. There is no other doorway. There is only the doorway of the truth of suffering. It is not strewn with rose petals.
I have witnessed hundreds of people caught in the grip of reality, people who have chosen to enter a transformative experience as well as people who have been chosen by a terminal, illness to enter a transformative experience. At first, most of us cling to the social sham and insist on the initial presentation: eyes darting, body tight, “I am fine, really, just fine.” The unspoken message, the unsounded cry held down in the throat by a tightly shut jaw is, “I feel alone and I am frightened.” The words that are spoken are spoken to move us away from, to deflect us or distract us from, this fear. What is the pressure in our culture, in our being together, that keeps us from crying oat for help or for comfort in our pain?
That in us which can acknowledge our incompleteness and alienation, our basic anxiety and separation, is already beyond the mental ego. That in us which can acknowledge the First Noble Truth, the Truth of Suffering, has already begun to step into the truth of the present. That in as which can acknowledge the truth of the suffering of the mental ego is already more real and more inclusive than the mental ego. With the acknowledgment of the Truth of Suffering, the journey of healing and exploration has already begun. Integration begins with acknowledging the depth of our wounds.
The Second Noble Troth is the Truth of the Origin of Suffering. We recognize that the development of the mental ego is a normal and necessary stage in the unfolding of human consciousness. It is also a stage each of us eventually needs to outgrow or cast aside so that further unfolding can occur. The mental ego, as we all can bear witness, is a place where it is easy to get stuck, to get lost.
It is the belief in the reality of the separate self that is the origin of suffering. It is the desires, both to have and to amid, arising in the ego, the personal sense of self, that are the cause qf human suffering. Desire both strengthens the belief in the menial ego and causes it pain. The origin of suffering is in the thought, “I am separate.”
Many people are aware of the Truth of Suffering but never advance to the second recognition, the Truth of the Origin of Suffering. If suffering raises its leering head, we usually can rid ourselves of the factor we believe to be causing the suffering. We skate so blithely on the surface of our lives that we can actually get away with this for decades. With terminal illness or a deep, stable spiritual practice of unwavering commitment, however, there is a realization that from this suffering, there is no escape. This is where we really begin to understand.
The moment we realize that we identify with a separate and fundamentally illusory level of being is the moment we begin to realize the Second Noble Truth. Here we begin the return to the Center, the process of integration with the Ground of Being. We begin here to recognize that our mind’s struggle to maintain  the illlusory sense of self is the root of our suffering. The recognition of the Second Noble Truth comes with a willingness to enter the truth through the vehicle of attention. Insights come only when there are gaps in out resistance, in our struggle. When we put our attention to the reality of suffering, we then, simply see the nature of thought itself. We begin to pierce ordinary mind. What happens when ordinary rnind is pierced is that Light begins to shine through the holes. This is the beginning of mindfulness. It is also the beginning of spiritual surrender.
The Third Noble Truth is the Truth of the Goal, also called the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering. The Third Noble Truth is this: “It is the complete cessation of that very thirst [the desires or grasping of the mind], giving it up, renouncing it, emancipating oneself from it, detaching oneself from it.” This is called, in Buddhist tradition, dying to the “I.” In the Christian tradition, this is known as “living in the Mystical Body of Christ.” This truth describes the power of spiritual surrender.
Beginning to live in truth, we begin to surrender to the power of the Ground of Being. Spirit begins to infuse the sense of self, helping us to stabilize in our ability to simply “let be.”This surrender is the end of grasping, yearning, and attachment. To be clear, it is not a question of renouncing the ego; it is a question of exploring it, maintaining its competencies, and eliminating its exclusivity. The very act of exploring the ego creates the distance that allows our awareness to move beyond it into transpersonal dimensions, beyond ego.”So we discover the Third Noble Truth, the Truth of the Goal: that is non-striving. We need only drop the effort to secure and solidify ourselves and the awakened state is present.” In Christianity, this is experiencing and then resting in the will of God: “Not my will, hut thy will, be done.”
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche speaks clearly to this point: “But we soon realize that ‘letting go’ is only possible for short periods. We need some discipline to bring us to letting be.’ … Ego must wear itself out like an old shoe journeying from suffering to liberation.” This realization is the Fourth Noble Truth. The Fourth Noble Truth, the Truth of the Path leading to the Cessation of Suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, mindfulness, and concentration. The ‘Noble Eightfold Path is the Buddhist formulation of the Jewish concept of kiddush hashem, daily living as sanctification of the Divine Name, the “Work of God.” It is the Buddhist formulation of the Christian concept of living in, living the, Presence of God.
Each step of the Noble Eightfold Path, taken again and again, each moment doing the Work of God, of living the Presence of God, repeated again and again, simply wears away the separate sense of self, like the endless waves of the ocean smoothing a rock.This approach to living defines the simple, natural unfolding of light into Light. It outlines the parameters and natural behaviors of our Essential Nature as it is being itself. The path home is a Path of Being. This Path of Being is the basis of spiritual discipline in every monastic tradition: rising, eating, sleeping, working, praying—all as meditation. It is the impulse behind stepping out of ordinary life, ordinary mind, into the holiness of the Sabbath; the stilling of the mindless, peripheral chatter with the ongoing interior mantra; the moment-by-moment, breath-by-breath gratitude in making each moment sacred, living each moment in a sacred dimension, here, in the midst of life.
In fact, the path home could be easily traced, much like a mother following her child’s path to bed. She sees what has been dropped on the way. If we were the mother following an enlightened being or the consciousness of one who has entered the Nearing Death Experience, we would see the toys left behind and the shoes that had been dropped; the socks, the pants, the shirt, and the underwear; the body, the emotions, and the thoughts; and last, before the bed, just discarded on the floor, all separate sense of self.
- APPENDIX I
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THE SUFI CARTOGRAPHY OF LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
(N.B.: Derived, reportedly, from a Sufi description of the superseding levels of consciousness one experiences in the course of spiritual, growth, this cartography was orally passed in modem times through the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff and of Oscar Ichazo. These are the words and images that I have come to use over the last twenty-something years, as my interpretation of the teaching I have received. They describe, to the best of my ability, the inner experience, the inner dialogue, at each level of consciousness.)
PERSONAL LEVELS:
BELIEF: I live my life in an unexamined, robotic, reactive way. My ideas are rigid and somewhat superstitious, I am filled with “shoulds” and “musts.” I am most comfortable with people who see things as I do, but I never really experience deep trust. I am completely separate, without awareness of having chosen to be completely separate or having chosen the consequences of being completely separate.
SOCIAL CONTRACT: I can see a tiny bit behind the rules now and choose the path of roles. I have agreements with those in the roles around my role in which we “cover” each other’s pain and believe in the reality of each other’s egos and dramas. I am angry when those usually unarticulated contracts are not honored.
EGO SAINT: I am convinced the ego I have constructed is better than the egos other people have constructed. I believe in my personal power to deceive other people into believing that my act is who I am and that I am totally “together.” I do not believe that the rules created for others necessarily apply to me. Everyone else is there for me.
PHILOSOPHER CHARLATAN: A profound disappointment has seeped into me and a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction. I see other people believing in the dream and the promise, but I can also see how they are duped. Isolated in my head, in perpetual existential angst, I hide behind cosmologies and words.
DISILLUSIONMENT: I feel humiliation, regret, self-loathing, and utter despair. My words and my cosmologies no longer support me. I am lost, spinning, drifting, and in chronic psychic pain of a radiating nature. I am filled with remorse and deeply depressed.There is nothing in the world that interests me.
SUICIDAL PANIC: My psychic pain is now shooting and searing—unbearable. I feel as if I cannot stand it for a second more. There is no relief from the pain. It has to end.
THE TRANSFORMATIVE FIELDS:
(We circle through these fields many times, each time healing a boundary. These fields are the entrance to transpersonal dimensions.)
EXPERIENCE: I have now become my pain. I am nothing but the pain. And, somehow, in merging with it, in being it, the pain lessens or dissolves and just is. I am what is, but I don’t know that yet.
EMPTY MIND: I am quiet. I am behind my experience, my emotions, and my thoughts, just watching.
WISDOM: I am beginning to recognize the nature of mind and the nature of what is. In the light of this clarity, crystallized patterns I used to think of as myself begin to dissolve. My sense of self has expanded greatly and I am aware of a new openness, compassion, wonder.
TRANSPERSONAL LEVELS:
THE WITNESS: I am aware of the succession of events, arising and falling and of the connection between events and between beings. My awareness, as I live each moment, is of wholeness, of interrelatedness.
DIVINE LIFE: Increasingly self-forgetful, I am aware of the dance of the infinite universe with each breath. I feel all of life flowing in, around, through me. Grace, fluidity, gratitude … words begin to fail here. I am getting a feeling for the word “is.”
DIVINE LOVE: My heart breaks open with fullness. My mind empties.
DIVINE CONTEMPLATION: Only two … the veil is a cloud of smoke, a thought, an image, a fleeting longing, I pulsate between the most subtle relaxation, the most subtle contraction. I am in awe.
UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS
From The Grace in Dying by Kathleen Dowling Singh
