If not Heaven and not Hell...

[Newest Reality]

32. Well, that's a good question.

What is non-dual? Though we don't remember where we "came from" it sounds like the place to return.

Of course, we use ideas and what we have been told to try to discern where we end-up. Did we start out with all of that obscure, second-hand knowledge?

Coming and going, as well as birth, death and time are all conceptual. Even ideas of nothing are conceptual. Some fear that death, (without an afterlife) is like some black box of nothing and that is conceptual, too. Even that is an idea based on dualistic thoughts.

So, to me, it is ineffable and non-conceptual and the only way you can be concerned, frightened, cajoled, manipulated or anticipatory about death is to not think it through carefully until you get the insight that death, at the least, is the other side of what we are calling life. Everything else is based on other people's ideas, fears and fixations about what is just as natural as "being born", (which we learn concepts about after the fact).

Right now in our current condition, death is a fantasy fraught with interpolations, repudiations and fabrications. From one perspective, it is quite natural for a living creature to have a reaction to its cessation. However, one of the spices of we conceive of as existence is the uncertainty about imaginary endings, extrapolated into the future.

Once you explore the abstractions of conceptualizing everything and actually living in that as real, you come to wonder just how much of life we are actually living in any direct way in the first place. Then, death becomes a issue secondary to actually living without obscuration and as an endless series of problems, frustrations and suffering.

If death can be experienced at all, (as opposed to the process of dying) it may be like any wave function. Living is the upside of the wave and death is the trough, meaning one goes with the other.

Even with the fear, one can go kicking and screaming or calm and open to it. Though exploring the idea of your own death is a useful contemplation that may reveal much, one can always leave the outcome as a mystery that remains to be solved, one way or another, when the time is ripe.