“Life begets death; one is inseparable from the other.
One is form; the other is formless.
Each gives way to the other.
One third of people focus on life, ignoring death.
One third of people focus on death, ignoring life.
One third of people think of neither, just drifting along.
They all suffer in the end.
Trusting the Creator, we have no illusion about life and
death.
Holding nothing back from life, we are ready for death,
just as a man ready for sleep after a good day’s work.”
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 50)
“Abiding in the Creator, we do not fear death.
Following the conditioned mind, we fear everything.
Fear is a futile attempt to control things and people.
Death is a natural destination of the Way.
Unnatural fear of death does more harm than good.”
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 74)
Dying and Beyond
On the final journey, with acceptance of the inevitable
fate, there is usually no anger or even sadness—just numbness that initiates
the winding down of the body.
Dying is just something we all have to do. Do you want to
die with grace? Dying with grace is to end well; all is well that ends well!.
A Case in Point
Francis of Assisi, the Italian Saint who chose a life of
poverty in spite of his family’s wealth, said on his deathbed: “Death will open
the door of life.” He died gracefully while singing.
Maybe for a believer, death is, indeed, a triumph, a
meaningful exodus from this mundane world to the eternal world beyond.
A Case in Point
Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his last speech, just
several days before his assassination: “It (death) doesn’t matter with me now,
because I’ve been to the mountain top. . . . and I’ve looked over and I’ve seen
the Promised Land.”
It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strong faith that led him
to believe in the existence of the Promised Land beyond death. Indeed, to many
believers, they are only humans having a brief existence in this transient
material world, and their final destination is the eternal world beyond death.
A Case in Point
There have been many near-death experiences (NDEs) during
which people claim that they have seen strange lights and tunnels, letting them
have a glimpse of the eternal world beyond. Some of these instances have been
written in books and become Amazon’s bestsellers, such as Heaven
Is for Real (2010),
about a child who saw heaven during surgery.
Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon and author of Proof
of Heaven, said in Newsweek in 2012 that his incredible near-death experience
had totally convinced him that his consciousness (the soul or self) exists
somehow separate from or outside the mind, and therefore it can travel to other
dimensions on its own. Eben wrote: “This world of consciousness beyond the body
is the true new frontier, not just of science but of humankind itself, and it
is my profound hope that what happened to me will bring the world one step
closer to accepting it.”
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
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