A while ago I read about the early life of Ramana Maharshi - how when he was a teenager he was overwhelmed by a sudden, extreme fear of death. Then he lay down on his back and imagined he was dead. I think I read this in the preface to a book of his teachings, but I couldn’t find it. So I did an internet search and found the details of the account on his official website.
It happened in July of 1896, and it was actually the event that precipitated his spiritual awakening. His account is meaningful to me because it has many similarities with the experience that prompted my spiritual awakening.
In this episode I read his account and compare it with my experience. Then I describe a spiritual practice of dying that may help those who are seeking to awaken to True Self.
A while ago I read about the early life of Ramana Maharshi - how when he was a teenager he was overwhelmed by a sudden, extreme fear of death. Then he lay down on his back and imagined he was dead. I think I read this in the preface to a book of his teachings, but I couldn’t find it. So I did an internet search and found the details of the account on his official website.
It happened in July of 1896, and it was actually the event that precipitated his spiritual awakening. His account is meaningful to me because it has many similarities with the experience that prompted my spiritual awakening.
In this episode I read his account and compare it with my experience. Then I describe a spiritual practice of dying that may help those who are seeking to awaken to True Self.
A while ago I read about the early life of Ramana Maharshi and how when he was young he lay down on his back and imagined he was dead. I think I read it in the preface to a book of his teachings, but I couldn’t find it. So I did an internet search and found the details of the account. It happened in July of 1896, and it was actually the event that precipitated his spiritual awakening. That is meaningful to me because it was the same sort of death experience that prompted my spiritual awakening.
Anyway on Ramana’s official website, sriramanamaharshi.org, I learned that one afternoon, when he was only 16 years old, for no apparent reason he was overwhelmed by a sudden, extreme fear of death. Years later, he described his experience. I will read it for you from Ramana’s own writings:
It was about six weeks before I left Madura for good that a great change in my life took place. It was quite sudden. I was sitting in a room on the first floor of my uncle’s house. I seldom had any sickness and on that day there was nothing wrong with my health, but a sudden, violent fear of death overtook me. There was nothing in my state of health to account for it; and I did not try to account for it or to find out whether there was any reason for the fear. I just felt, ‘I am going to die,’ and began thinking what to do about it. It did not occur to me to consult a doctor or my elders or friends. I felt that I had to solve the problem myself, then and there.
The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: ‘Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies.’ And I at once dramatized the occurrence of death. I lay with my limbs stretched out stiff as though rigor mortis had set in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the enquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape, so that neither the word ‘I’ or any other word could be uttered, ‘Well then,’ I said to myself, ‘this body is dead. It will be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burnt and reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body am I dead? Is the body ‘I’? It is silent and inert but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of the ‘I’ within me, apart from it.
So I am Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. This means I am the deathless Spirit.’ All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought-process. ‘I’ was something very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious activity connected with my body was centred on that ‘I’. From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.
His account continues, but I will stop reading here. I resonate with Ramana’s account. When I was 42 years old I had am experience very much like Ramana’s. Ramana describes saying, “a sudden, violent fear of death overtook me. There was nothing in my state of health to account for it; and I did not try to account for it or to find out whether there was any reason for the fear. I just felt, ‘I am going to die.’” That is exactly what happened to me while at a silent retreat outside of Washington thirty years ago.
The difference is that Ramana accepted it and embraced it and it resulted right then in spiritual awakening. He said, “Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.” I reacted differently. I fought it. I resisted it. I did not know how to accept it. I sought spiritual help from the retreat leader and later from my spiritual director. A week or two later I tried to embrace it in meditation. But the sense of dying was still so fearful and lasted so long that I could not take it any longer. So I rejected it. The ego did whatever it could to protect itself. I retreated back into a conservative, evangelical form of Christianity, which I had held earlier before I got into contemplative prayer. That felt safer.
The ego fought its death for twenty more years. Then finally I could run from the Hound of Heaven, as the poet Francis Thompson calls it, no longer. I started a process of methodically dismantling the religious armor that the ego had built around itself to protect itself from the reality of death. That process took about three years, for you see I saw myself as a very religious and very zealous ego. I was a warrior for evangelical values, and it took a lot for me to deconstruct this.
Then finally in 2012 a physician diagnosed me with a terminal disease, and I had to confront death and the fear of death. That finally prompted spiritual awakening twenty years later than it could have been. So much unnecessary suffering those 20 years! The physician’s prognosis of imminent death within months or weeks turned out to be mistaken, disproved by more tests. But his words had already done their work in my life. I woke up from the illusion of separate existence and the individual self.
Just like Ramana said, “Fear of death had vanished once and for all.” That is because I saw that the self that was afraid of dying does not exist except in my mind. And what I really am is not born and cannot die. For this reason Ramana’s description of his awakening resonates with my experience of awakening. This makes me think that perhaps confronting death - intentionally imagining death - might be helpful to people who are looking to awaken.
I still do a spiritual practice concerning dying every day. Nearly every night when I lay down to sleep I imagine not arising from that bed. This is not a gloomy or a depressing thing. It is a daily practice of remembering what I really am. Every night when I fall to sleep I rest into my true nature, the eternal Being and leave the temporal nature behind.
Practicing dying is a helpful spiritual discipline. Falling asleep is probably the closest approximation to dying that we have without actually physically dying. The only thing closer would be a near death experience. That similarity between sleep and death is why the Bible describes dying as falling asleep and describes the dead as asleep.
When I get in bed for the night I just assume that I am not going to wake up the morning. Maybe this is a leftover from that childhood prayer that so many children of my generation learned to pray at bedtime. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” This prayer was written in the 18th century when death – including the death of children – was much more commonplace than it is today.
I can see why parents today may not want to teach this prayer to little children, but it communicates the point I am making. When I am falling asleep I resign myself to not waking up the next morning. That resignation has all sorts of ramifications. It makes me not put off any unfinished business. The apostle Paul writes: “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” In other words do not put off until tomorrow any relationship issues that need to be dealt with today.
It also rids my mind of any concerns about the next day. The mind has a tendency to spin scenarios about the future. You can’t stop it so you just have to ignore it. This is a way of doing that. If you are dead then you do not have a future. So there is no need to be anxious about tomorrow. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount not to be anxious about tomorrow. He says every day has enough worries for itself. He continues, “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
When you consider your bed that you sleep in tonight to be your deathbed, then it changes how you live. You live in the now instead of in a remembered past or imagined future. You live without regrets. You also wake up each morning surprised and pleased at having the gift of another day. Every morning is a resurrection. This is part of the spiritual symbolism of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The death and resurrection of Jesus is symbolic of spiritual awakening.
Practicing dying helps identify that which does not die. You know that death is not the end. When you wake up each morning you know you did not cease to be during the night. And it is not just because you may remember dreams. There are periods of the night when you did not dream. That is deep sleep, but you know you still were then. You know deep down that your essential being – who you really are – is present even in dreamless sleep when there is no individual consciousness. That non-individual consciousness is the True Self.
That Self is what you are after physical death. It is what you were before physical birth. It is what you are now. There is a deep awareness present in dreamless sleep and under anesthesia. It is not the separate consciousness that is active during the day and during dreams. That is the human psyche and the individual self. Just as you do not cease to be during dreamless sleep, so do you not cease to be after death.
Being aware as that Being that which is always present – that deep non-individual consciousness - is spiritual awakening. This is what we are. We have been this always. We are this always. That is what Jesus meant when he said, “Before Abraham was I am.” The people listening to him said, “How can you say that? You are not yet fifty years old? How can you say you are older than Abraham?” They were so angry at him that the story says they picked up stones to stone him to death! It was no revolutionary and even blasphemous in his religious setting. It still is today in my Christian religious setting.
Jesus could say that because he knew he was not just the mortal body and psyche known as Jesus of Nazareth. He knew who he was. He knew his eternal nature. In the same way we can know our eternal nature. Knowing that – not in theory or as a belief but firsthand knowing - is spiritual awakening. Living that Reality is the Self-realized life. This is eternal life.