Had the pleasure yesterday of seeing a screening of LeVar Burton’s new movie “Reach for me.” A rather interesting experience I have to say. There had been a reason why I had been avoiding Lifetime channel and movies they would show: anytime I see someone cry, I have a hard time not crying myself. Sucky. Especially when watching a movie, the mental body fully aware of being manipulated emotionally with sound and vision, and the emotional body just loosing it… Ahhhhh emotions… Was definitely a good exercise in containment 😉

But that was not the point. The movie dealt with death and described the transformation of a grumpy old  patient in a hospice from waiting to die toward embracing the last moments of his life. In the Q&A afterward LeVar was talking about how he wanted to make the movie because in our society death is a taboo and we don’t deal with it…

Embracing Death

Especially in America, death is hushed into hidden hospices, where nobody can see the dead or has to deal with the notion of their own mortality. Quite a different experience from walking down the street in India last year and seeing the dead body of a man exhibited in front of his house and later on being carried down the street with a large crowd, song and dance.

Everything in this material universe constantly changes. The entropy of our bodies will make them old and will make them die. The more we embrace this, the more fully we will get to live life. In The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda talked about the notion that death is always running right beside you, and if you look really quickly, you can see it. This being a great impetus to enjoy life more fully…

Immortality is not not dying – Immortality is not forgetting when you do…

Another helpful thing in embracing our physical demise is to learn to identify with our higher self, the “I” outside of our physical, emotional, mental or relational bodies. As such, this “I” will sustain beyond the demise of any of the prior. More on the notion of death in a paper I wrote on Goswami’s “Physics of the Soul.”