We are all afraid of death. Yet when we meet this fear and clearly face the reality of our personal end, we have a supreme opportunity to discover what our lives are being lived for. When we don't flinch from the reality of death, then the inevitability of our end serves to focus our attention on what is truly important to us. Death becomes the ally rather than the enemy that haunts us.
Take a few moments to imagine you are in the last hours of your lifetime, and look back over your life. What has it honestly, essentially been about so far?
From the perspective of the end, why in fact has it been important to you to survive? If you made or didn't make a name for yourself, when the last hours are here, what was your life really about? When all possibilities for success and fame, failure and disgrace are finished, what is your life really about?
These questions are relevant for you now, before you are in the last hours of your lifetime. If we wait until the end of our lives to ask the most important questions of our lives, we waste our precious gift of time. A gift that is over too soon anyway.
When we are willing to meet our own death, we gain strength and resolve to live our lives in ways that support what is truly, finally important to us. We decide how our lives will be used, and what they will contribute to. We stop obeying others' notions of what should be important to us and find out for ourselves what is important.
The responsibility that results from discovering what you want your life to stand for is not burdensome. It is light with the spaciousness of freedom. A free life is free no matter what the apparent constraints may be, and these questions can be asked whatever your particular circumstances are in this very moment.
If you want your life to be a beacon of love, where do you find that love?
If you want your life to be an avocation of peace, how do you live?
If you want to know the Truth, what can stop you?
What do you want your life to be about from this moment on?
What supports that?
Gangaji is holding meetings and retreats this summer in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Baden-Baden, London, Dublin, and Dorset. Read more about Gangaji's events and catalog of books and videos online.