Day Shift — Confronting That You Will Die

"Only the body dies; life and consciousness continue."

This is from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj:

"In death, only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not. And the life is never so alive as after death. What was born must die. Only the unborn is deathless. Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of ‘I.’"

“The life is never so alive as after death.” That doesn’t make sense from the perspective of the ego. From the perspective of the ego, this is life. There is nothing other than this. There is nothing beyond this.

Those of us who have spent any time meditating know how desperately the ego does not want us to transcend it. It fights us when we simply want to let go and settle into an experience of being. Imagine how much more desperately it fights when we take on the concept of death. The ego doesn’t want to die. It cannot let itself die, and it insists on never even thinking about death. Just the fact that I’m talking about it here goes against almost everything that we have in our culture concerning death. It’s not something to be talked about; it’s something to be ignored, something to be put off for as long as possible. Then, maybe at the very end, if we have to, we’ll take a look at it and see how we’re going to walk through it. Until then, we pretend it’s not there, or we pretend that death certainly happens but is never going to happen to me.

The truth is, life is energy. Life cannot be created nor destroyed. There is this experience of me, but this experience of me was going on before this body came into existence. It’s happening as this body exists, and it continues when this body falls away. It’s a given that the life of me cannot go away.

The body is dying all the time. We’re losing skin cells constantly, and our organs are replacing themselves. Even our bones and teeth are completely different than they were seven years ago. This body is dying and replenishing itself constantly. And yet, there’s something in me that remembers being six years old and sitting next to a stream, listening to the water flow by and being comforted by it. There’s something in me that remembers being on the hood of a car during the homecoming parade when I was 16 years old. There’s something in me that remembers getting married and getting divorced. There’s something in me that was looking through these eyes at six, at 16, at 35, and is the same today.

That is the truth of me. My job, as I understand it, is to get in touch with that truth, to know myself as that truth, so I can begin to have the experience I’m meant to have here. This part of me is changing all the time, and I want to allow it to change in the direction of evolution. I want it to grow in my ability to take on life, to offer to life, to offer myself to life. I want to live this life fully, right up until the very moment life drops this body and moves on to whatever comes next. It’s really the most perfect design for living I can imagine, and it’s right here for the taking.

I remind myself that this is temporary, that there’s work to be done, and that I’m the one who’s meant to be doing it. That work has to do with love, and it has to do with life—offering that life wherever I can.

Today, I will imagine what life would feel like if I could be free of suffering, free of fear, free of death, and free of the fear of death. I will ask myself to imagine joy everlasting, and I will seek to feel some small part of it in my day, and to offer that small part of it to someone else.

Thanks so much for listening. Have a beautiful day.

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Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.