Discovering our Deathless Nature
Author Mike Butler
What is our true nature? Is everything that we are doomed to extinction or is there an element in us that never dies, that is deathless? How are we going to find out the answer to this question in a way that we can have no doubt about the answer? This article will explore this question and provide tools to aid our exploration in a way that we can have no doubt that we do have an eternal nature and that this nature is what we truly are.
Before we can explore the nature of deathlessness we first need to think about what is not deathless. If we look around we see that almost all of the objects in our life are impermanent. They are constantly changing, falling apart and disappearing from our lives. We lose jobs, companies go bankrupt, merge or are
acquired. Things are constantly requiring maintenance. If lawns are not maintained, they get taken over by weeds. If houses are not maintained they become dilapidated. There is an active force in our lives that is constantly pulling some things apart and bringing new things together. This is the process of birth and death, cycling, over and over. If we think about it long and hard, can we come up with anything that is not subject to this cycle of birth, decay and
dissolution? As we shall see, this is a very difficult question.
If there is something that is changeless, then it must be something that is eternally present, that is part of our experience here and now, that is already part of our nature. Where else could it be? If this is the case, then it must be something that we can tune into right now. I am proposing a threefold approach to discovering and developing confidence in this unchanging essence. First is the application of study, second we must contemplate what we have studied and finally we must apply the method of mindful presence to the subject of our study and contemplation. Armed with these three tools we shall find that we are not only able to discover our indestructible nature, but we will be able to have confidence in it and actually make our home in it. Beyond that we will discover fabulous realms of experience that we could not even begin to imagine.
So let us begin with study. We must take a logical and rational approach right from the beginning. As we have already discussed almost everything we know about in our lives is subject to change. In fact, we would be hard put to it to name anything which is not impermanent. But let us try to make a list of possibilities. We can see that our bodies are subject to change, they grow up, grow old and eventually, sometime in the long distant future we hope, they will die and even eventually disappear from the face of the earth. If we think about it, even our earth will eventually disappear, if not in a supernova then some other cosmic catastrophe. Even the cosmos will eventually suffer heat death through entropy and become uninhabitable.
Perhaps our minds are somehow immortal and will be able to escape even the heat death of the universe and take root in some future universe. This is pretty speculative, but at least we are heading in the right direction. Of all the things that we would most wish to continue in some form or another beyond death, surely it would be our mind -- for this mind is the very thing that mediates all of our experience. Perhaps this mind has a deathless quality about it. However, a little critical thinking on the subject will reveal that our minds, too, are subject to change. Our thoughts are constantly changing. They are like fickle butterflies flittering through our consciousness, not lasting for more than a few moments. And our emotions, too, are constantly changing. Today we may be in a terrific mood, but
tomorrow we might have a headache and be miserable. Some people believe that our personalities will escape death and somehow "cross over" to some "other side." However, if we examine this possibility, we find that personalities do change. Some people suffer from brain injuries through accident or disease and even lose their memories or the ability to form new long term memories. How often have we heard about some sad case about which people comment that the
individual is no longer the same person.
So are our very minds themselves subject to impermanence and death? As modern science has discovered our minds are very closely linked to our brain. The brain, science explains, is a massively parallel computer that generates all of our experience in a sort of virtual reality in our head that interacts with and responds to inputs from an external world. Of course the world and our brains are constantly changing. According to scientists,
every atom of our brain is replaced over a period of mere
months and every atom of our body is replaced every few years. We are literally not the same person from decade to decade. Thinking about this almost makes us dizzy. It is as if we have nothing to hold on to. We are like a constantly changing eddy in a fast moving stream, a temporary pattern swirling through the cosmos.
All of the things in our life that seem so durable and solid are like cloud patterns in the sky that for a short time might look like familiar objects such as horses or people. Soon, though, the cloud patterns are torn apart by the winds. We don't often think about it, but our
colorful, vivid world of solid objects are just like those patterns in the clouds. We are clouds of atoms living within clouds of brilliant, colorful, dynamic atoms that are just dancing in time and space. Even the atoms themselves are not solid, but are little bundles of energy patterns that are constantly exchanging energy with each other. All of the patterns that form within these "clouds" are forming and being blown apart by the winds of time. They have a longer duration than the sky clouds, but time-lapse photography would reveal them to be just eddies in the stream.
So what then could possibly escape the law of changes? Even though we could speculate about immortal souls and minds, what is to keep these entities from being anything more than figments of our imagination, a straw wall to protect us from the ravaging flames of time? How can we find something that we can have full, unshakeable confidence in it's unchanging, deathless nature? The answer is going to be something that is very close to home, that is with us right now. Let's approach it logically and rationally with no
wishful thinking at all. Let us look at our minds again with the tools of mindfulness, logic or study, and contemplation.
From a logical perspective, what gives us the feeling of continuity? What is it that feels like it is passing from moment to moment, that, even though the contents of the moment are constantly changing, it itself does not? There is an inkling here of the deathless; we have an instinctive, if unsophisticated sense of it. It's possibly not something we could put into words, but there is a definite sense of the changeless. For something to be changeless it must also be timeless. To be timeless it must also be
space less. Whatever it is, it is not subject to time or space. Or perhaps it is spread all throughout time and space. That something is our very awareness of presence. Let's examine it.
Whenever we are aware of something, we are always aware of it now. We are not aware of it
tomorrow or yesterday, those are just memories and dreams, we can only touch it with our minds now. So, in a sense, this feeling of presence is timeless. It is always now. If our sense of presence was subject to change, then our sense of presence
tomorrow would be a different one than today. But as we can see, if we examine it closely, it is not qualitatively different from yesterday, today,
tomorrow or a year from now. This is something that we can verify for ourselves through the practice of mindfulness of presence. Mindfulness of presence is somewhat of a redundant phrase, since mindfulness
is this sense of being present, but it helps to give the sense behind the words that are involved. In fact, mindfulness, presence or any other word that is used to describe this quality of deathlessness can lead us astray since we want to get to the reality behind the words. The actual state, or quality that we are trying to understand is completely beyond any description, so we cannot actually get there at all without the practice of mindfulness. And because we have a lifetime habit of not being present, of dwelling in a world of distractions and fantasies about the past and future, we are going to have to work very hard at being mindful. Otherwise, even though we might get a glimpse of the deathless state, soon our old habits will take us over and we will forget all about it. We will even forget that there is such a thing, or at the very least lose confidence in it.
So, how do we practice being mindful of presence? There is a very simple exercise that we can do to develop it. To begin with, we should start by sitting in a comfortable chair with our backs straight. Next we should have an object to be
mindful of. The very simplest object we could pick is our breath as it is always available. The ultimate object of mindfulness, of course, is the state of unchanging presence, but we need a temporary vehicle to get us there and our breath is a perfect choice. So we begin by sitting comfortably. Next we put our attention lightly on our breath and observe it going in and out. We should actually feel the breath going in and out and feel the rugged
now-ness of it. Next we should try to keep our attention focused on our breath for as long as possible. Soon, however, we are going to find that our attention will wander into distracting thoughts. This is ok, it is natural for us to do this. However, when we discover that we have been distracted from attending to our breath, we should make a note of it by mentally labeling it thinking and then return our attention to our breath. We need to tame our minds gently, like taming a horse by "gentling" it. We notice that we have been distracted, label it thinking and then return our attention to our breath. We are going to need to do this many, many times during the course of our meditation. This is such a simple practice that we can actually do it anywhere, even sitting waiting for a bus or while riding the bus. I recommend maintaining a regular daily practice of this exercise of about 5 to 10 minutes duration. Once you have tried it, you will see how liberating it is from the stress of every day life. Think of it as your little present to yourself every day. You could even do it many times a day if you wish to pamper yourself.
Returning to the actual reason we are doing this, we need to have some tool to uncover and develop confidence in our true nature. Reading about it, while helpful, is not enough. We need to use all three tools of study, contemplation and mindfulness. So, while we are practicing mindfulness, we could also be aware of a sense of spacious presence. There is a simple technique for doing this and that is to let our mind float out on the breath and then, instead of paying attention to our in breath, let our mind rest in and become one with the space that our breath has dissolved into. Then we wait there in that spacious presence until our next out breath and return our attention to our breath. While we are attending to it, we could notice how good it feels as it goes out from our lungs, past our throat and out our nostrils. Then we could feel the liberating quality of the spacious presence that our mind-breath is dissolving into. Feel how vibrant and brilliant that spacious presence is. Even though everything is changing within it, it, itself, is unmoving and unchanging yet dynamic and energetic.
Once we become familiar with this practice and develop confidence in it, we can bring it forward into our everyday life. The benefit of this is that it helps us to be
centered and provides a refuge from the travails of life. It also helps us to develop confidence in our deathless nature. As we grow in this practice of being fully present with whatever we are doing, we will notice that our world becomes more vivid and luminous and becomes suffused with a wholesome freshness and goodness. We will become warmer and gentler and much more competent at dealing with whatever situations life throws our way. And we will start to become more aware of the needs of others.
More importantly, for the purposes of this article, we begin to uncover and develop confidence in our deathless nature. If everything else in our lives is changing, why does this remain a constant? According to Buddhist cosmology, literally everything in the knowable universe, right down to the smallest atom or particle, is in its nature of the mind. In the modern scientific culture in which we live, we are used to separating mind from matter. In this view, mind and consciousness are emergent properties of non-sentient matter. We are used to seeing life this way, so let us do an exercise to help us "think outside the box." Let us flip this view around, a kind of mirror image of this perspective.
Let's visualize the universe as a living, sentient space which is vibrating with energy waves. Let's further imagine that the fundamental nature of this space is the pure presence of awareness and that all of the phenomena within it are the radiant waves on the surface of this presence, like the waves on a quiet, still ocean. So the quality of pure presence is like the quality of the water in the ocean. It permeates all of the phenomena that arise and have their temporary being in it -- and is in fact the true nature of all these phenomena. There is a difference, however, between this analogy and the actual state of pure presence and the phenomena that appear in it. A physical ocean is actually made of individual water molecules that only interact with their nearest
neighbors. The deathless state of pure presence shines like the sun, illuminating the sky. It is everywhere at once. There is an illustration from Quantum Physics that can illuminate this point.
In Quantum Physics there is a curious phenomenon called entanglement. Experiments have shown, and technology is being developed based on entanglement, that we can make changes to one quantum particle that are instantly mirrored in its entangled partner -- even if that entangled particle is on the other side of the universe. What this means, for the purposes of this article, is that, at some fundamental level of reality, there is no time or space. As an aside, some scientists are suggesting that our brains take advantage of quantum entanglement and that it is a factor in conscious experience. Regardless of whether this is the case, or not, this is a useful analogy for our little exercise. All of the phenomena of the knowable universe are at some fundamental level timeless and
space-less. And this is the same quality as our experience of unchanging
now-ness.
To understand this intellectually is the first step. We need to contemplate our deathless nature and also our impermanent nature so that we do not confuse the two. But we also need to have some actual experience of it because intellectual understanding is impermanent. We will forget about our deathless nature. Although, forgetting about it will not make it go away -- we can tune into it at any time because it is always present now. The reason we need to have actual experience of our true nature is so that it becomes an active force in our lives. When we dwell in the state of pure presence, we become less anxious about changes, which are the small deaths and rebirths in our lives. We will be less
grasping and irritated by life's challenges. Life will become much more fluid and our solid fixations will begin to crumble and allow us to move more freely and enjoy more. We will move out of the world of death and into the vast, luminous expanse of the deathless realm.
But we need to continually practice, study and contemplate this because our habit of unawareness and anxiety is long and deeply imbedded in our being. It is as though the servants of our mind have usurped the masters domain. We need to slowly untangle our misidentification with the realm of temporal phenomena. We need to practice and practice until being present becomes our habit and our constant state of being. When we act from this awareness, everything we do becomes meaningful, even glorious, and completely appropriate to the circumstances.
A further benefit of continual practice of mindfulness of now-ness is that it helps to develop an unshakeable confidence in this view of the deathless nature. We will know that it's true regardless of any arguments to the contrary. It will become obviously true. Our thinking will be turned completely around. Instead of dwelling in a dead, empty, uncaring universe fraught with danger at every corner, we will inhabit a pure realm of unceasing joy and bliss. The people and situations we encounter will be friendly and unthreatening.
At first, when we begin our practice, we will fall back time after time into our usual habit of fearful mindlessness. In fact, it will take many, many years, perhaps even lifetimes, before the full fruit of this seed that we have planted and cultivated ripens. But there will be oases of presence along the way to comfort us.
Below is a list of some books and relevant web sites for your continuing study.
Books
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche.
The Physics of Consciousness,
Evan Haris Walker.
Natural Great Perfection, Nyoshul Khyenpo.
The Quantum Brain, Jeffrey Satinover.
The Power of
Now, Eckhart Tolle
Web Sites
Stewart Hameroff
Web Site - Great articles on Quantum Physics and
Consciousness
Rigpa Web Site - Author of Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying Web Site
