What is the purpose of death?
from the Epilogue to Easy Death (pp. 403 - 405)
The following passage is an excerpt from Avatar Adi Da's "prose opera", The Mummery Book. The protagonist, Raymond Darling, speaks his final resolution of the problem of life and death, which he has uncovered and investigated throughout his story.
He has consented to be born. He has learned about the ordinary social world of "Mom and Dad". He has fallen in love with his beloved, Quandra, and then faced the sorrow of her death. He has seen and understood the rituals of the mortal self and its religious pursuits.
At last, he speaks the following wisdom to himself. It is a statement that illuminates the true Purpose of death and our necessary voluntary and ecstatic participation in the Divine Process that is Light and Love.
"Death Is a Freedom-Ritual of Self-Sacrifice"
An excerpt from Avatar Adi Da's
Literary Masterwork, The Mummery Book
Death is not an explanation. Life, itself, is never, finally, explained. What follows the present life is not an after-death of explanation—but, only more of life, itself. Continued. Unexplained. And only this — mere more of life. Until, the Living Light — the Brightness That Is Consciousness, Itself — Outshines the ceaseless life-time of separate ego-"I". And Only That Outshining Brightness Un-explains the Unexplainable — by Disappearing all the living mind that asks to be explained. And, Only Then, does Only Living Light Remain.
Therefore — for now — my death exists. For now, my death confronts me. For now, my death is me. . . .
Death requires a loving, fearless, sorrowless, unangered volunteer of me. Death requires the feeling-heart's participation—enamored, self-forgetting, and without anticipation.
Death is an un-selfing kind of wind — a sudden weather, any day. Death is the body's True fidelity to life, to love, and to Reality — regardless of the weather and the day.
To die is necessary, in life's poor Mummery — but, it is not Right and True, unless it is enacted from the feeling-heart. To die by yielding bodily, from the feeling-heart—as when in the Embrace of body-love — is perfect trust, beyond every thought of the little bed of "I"-and-"other"-in-a-room. Such feeling-death exceeds all loss of human love — by means of the human heart's felt constant Un-denial of the Divine Inherent Fullness of Reality's own Love-Bliss.
Next: "Death Is a Freedom-Ritual of Self-Sacrifice"
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Easy Death
3rd edition
by Avatar Adi Da Samraj
544 Pages Illustrated
$24.95
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