Most of us are anxious, frightened & confused about life, aging, sickness & death, so much so, that we try (without success) to not think about or discuss these "depressing matters." Yet it is actually our aversion that keeps us trapped in the thoughts & associated emotions we're trying to avoid.
We hyper-rational, control-obsessed individuals declare that death is "unacceptable!" Our society has conditioned us to consider ourselves bigger, better, smarter, better looking, and certainly independent of everyone else. How dare life slip out of MY CONTROL with all this aging, sickness & death crap! That's for "losers" - NOT "me"!
BUT most of us have failed to learn that arguing with reality is THE cause of needless suffering. Only by "leaning into" the very things that scare us, and learning as much as possible about these, by truly becoming intimate with & directly experiencing these challenges physically & emotionally, can we come to a radically different perspective.
This sounds alarmingly ridiculous to most of us, I know, yet it's true. And you'll only know how true it is AFTER you've given up arguing with & denying reality, have completely accepted the harshest of life's challenges, and awakened to lovingly embracing ALL of life's "10,000 joys AND 10,000 sorrows." Then and only then, can you possibly get how everything is perfect as it is.
“So, what is it that animates this chunk of meat (our body), that makes it vital? The teacher would call it ‘the vital principle’ or life-force. It is in the absence of this that the body is inert.
If there is such a thing as life-force, does it evaporate when the body dies? No. This ‘vital principle’ is present in the very movement of the cosmos: evidently, it is universal and eternal.
So, the teacher would ask: what, then, can we consider real; a piece of flesh which decays and returns to the earth, or the force which is eternally present?
Without the presence of this universal force, the body does not ‘see and hear.’ We cannot rightly say, then, that the body ‘sees and hears.’
That which is seeing and hearing right now is not the body – it is the vital Principle. ‘You’ are that.
When it is indubitably recognized that your nature & the nature of the absolute are fundamentally the same, indivisible nature, this is the ‘recognition of one’s true identity’: the realization that any and all identity is eclipsed by an actuality which renders separative distinctions ultimately meaningless.
Such a realization, or non-dual perspective or awareness, cannot help but have a profound effect on one’s consideration of ‘personal individuality’. One cannot recognize that truth, of all pervasive indivisibility, and continue to maintain the fiction of separate personification – of the ‘me’ that was born and the ‘I’ which dies.
This fruit of realization – that the absolute essence of all being does not ‘come’ from some place nor ‘go’ anywhere – quenches our deepest, final fear, the fear of extinction. Then the liberated may, indeed, ‘take no thought for the morrow.’”
Robert Wolfe. “Living Nonduality. Enlightenment Teachings of Self-Realization.” Karina Library, 2014.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this 47min Robert Wolfe video: