What Does Not Die

What is most essential in you was never born, and so it cannot die.

Your body will die. Your memories, your personality, your name, and your history will not go on unchanged. The old masters are unsentimental about this. They say the body is a guest house, and the guest is leaving.

What they say cannot die is something you are more familiar with than anything else, and have probably never once looked at.

The mirror

All day long, reflections come and go in a mirror. A face, a room, a passing cloud, a lamp turned on and off. The reflections are born and they vanish, one after another. The mirror is not born when a face appears and does not die when the face leaves. It goes on being clear.

Now your experience. All day long, thoughts come and go. Feelings, sensations, sounds, the sight of this screen. They arise, stay a moment, vanish. Your whole life has been reflections arising and vanishing. What have they been arising in?

Something has been knowing all of it. Every thought you ever had was known, every fear, every joy, every boring afternoon, and that knowing was not itself one of the thoughts. It did not appear with the morning and disappear with sleep. It was there for the first memory you have, and it is here now, reading this, and it has not aged a day. It is not tired. It is not in pain. It is not afraid. The fear is happening in it, the illness is happening in it, and it is not itself any of those things.

Your own awareness has never had any cause to die.
The wisdom that arises by itself has never had any cause to die.
The luminous nature of things has never had any cause to die.
See this, and you are free of the demon called death.

— Longchenpa

Not a belief

A belief would not help you. It is one more reflection, and it will be swept away with the others. Looking is a different thing, and a person with no faith at all can do it, often better, having fewer ideas about what they are supposed to find.

Sit or lie however you can. Let a thought come; there is always one on its way. Watch it arrive. Then, instead of following where it goes, turn around and look at what it arrived in. Look for what is aware of the thought. Do not look for a thing.

You will not find an object. What you find is more like open space, awake. No color, no shape, no edges, and nothing could be more present. It is closer than the thought was.

Did this knowing begin when the thought began? Will it end when the thought ends? Let another thought come and go, and watch. The thought was born and died. The knowing did not.

Most people feel nothing special the first time, or the hundredth. The point is to become familiar with what does not come and go, so that when everything that comes and goes finally goes, you are not a stranger to what remains.

Nothing is wasted

If you have very little time, this is for you. There is no amount of resting in that awareness too small to count, and no starting point too late. If you rest for one breath and are then swept off into worry for an hour, the one breath still happened, and it is not undone by the hour. The awareness you meet in that breath is the same one that will be there when the body settles. There is not a small everyday awareness now and a grander one waiting at death. You can start in the time it takes to finish this sentence. Notice that you are aware. Notice that the noticing is clear, open, and not afraid. You will not be strangers.