Death is Watching - Part I

When we listen to sounds, we can distinguish between two phenomena: “sounds” and “listener listening to sounds”:
“Sounds” is when we are hearing all sounds indiscriminately, like a tape recorder does; when all sounds are impacting on our awareness with equal vividness.

“Listener listening to sounds” is when we are focusing on one specific sound, and the other sounds are in the background of our awareness. That “listener listening to sounds”– that focus, or sense of there being a detached perceiver there who is perceiving – is what magicians call lower self. At least, that is what dies when the person’s body dies. When there is no longer a sense of a separated perceiver perceiving, when everything is impacting upon our awareness with equal vividness, what is left is a feeling of oneness, a background of peacefulness, which is what magicians call higher self, or death. Death is in the background all the time. Death is the canvas upon which our lives are painted.

When we feel that we are watching ourselves – that there is some part of us that is watching our every move – that part is our death. It is constantly looking over our shoulder; it’s the sense we have that something out there is watching us (the Spirit is watching us too, not to mention lots of other beings, both angelic and demonic; but our root self-consciousness, the sense that we feel within ourselves that something is watching us, is our death).

Observe that this is not the false watcher thought form, which we use to watch ourselves with glory, and exalt in how marvelous we are. That watcher is a phony copy of the true watcher – death – which is utterly cold and dispassionate. The false watcher – our self-consciousness, or need to keep referring everything back to ourselves – is a thought form which takes anything that is going on and glamorizes it, and imagines other people applauding us for it. We learn the false watcher thought form from our society: the false watcher thought form is in fact society’s way of papering over death. We do have a true watcher watching us, and that watcher is our death. The false watcher is society’s way of eradicating death from people’s awareness, to make people act as if they weren’t going to die, to make people forget about death as much as possible. Only by making people forget about death can they be led into believing that there could be anything more important than the fact that they could die in the next instant. And part of banishing awareness of death is substituting a glory thought form of watching (“watching oneself in glory; watching oneself with approval / approbation”) for the true watcher thought form, which is death.

Another way of saying this is: the sense we have that we are perceiving; that there is some detached perceiver there perceiving; that there is some “us” there to which things are happening; is our death. Without that sense of a detached perceiver there, we wouldn’t be able to focus on anything. Everything that we see, hear, touch, etc. at every moment – not to mention bleed-throughs from other lifetimes and probable realities – would bombard our senses with equal impact. We would be overwhelmed with information; indeed, we would have no sense that “we” exist at all (just as an infant doesn’t) – we would be pure perception. This is a common experience when one is tripping on psychedelic drugs; for example, when we take a shower while tripping, we can feel (are aware of) every individual drop of water as it hits our skin as a discrete event. On the other hand we can’t balance a checkbook while tripping because we can’t focus that much attention – there’s too much going on to be able to focus. To use mind – to be able to focus on one thing at a time by separating it out from its background – is to create a perceiver which is perceiving; and that’s what we call death.

When we say that death is watching, what we’re saying is that the act of watching is what we mean by death. Anything that watches will die. This is because watching – separatedness – is a lie which eventually must run out. Separatedness is a lie which all sentient beings tell themselves. That lie is what embeds them in linear time. If a vortex in a river were to suddenly start saying to itself something like “I’m a vortex! I’m a vortex! I’m a unique, individual, separated vortex!” then that vortex would be lying to itself – it’s not a unique, individual, separated anything. But by telling itself that lie, it embeds itself in a linear temporality in which it watches this, and then it watches that, and then it watches the other thing; until the vortex runs out of energy and dissolves back into the river and stops lying to itself about having been separated in the first place – i.e., it dies. But it was “dead” all along. Watching = separatedeness = death; they are just different ways of talking about the same phenomenon.

Our sense of personal continuity in the dream state is not based upon a linear, sequential, unfolding of events, as it is in the waking state, but rather is based upon an awareness of self as experiencer (i.e., one’s death). That vibrant, alive quality that dreams have is actually awareness of death. In dreams we are aware of death every second, willy-nilly, because there’s nothing solid in dreams to cling to: there’s no way of toning down the intensity of what we are experiencing by focusing our attention elsewhere (on our thoughts). We’re face-to-face with death every second in dreams. That’s why we feel more alive in dreams than we do in wakefulness – because we are seeing with the eyes of death; we are one with death when we are dreaming, which is why we can’t die in dreams – we’re already dead. In wakefulness we make a separation between ourselves and our deaths – an absurd pretense, but a useful one for certain purposes (such as being able to focus attention enough to e.g. balance a checkbook) – and that’s why wakefulness is duller, less vivid, less joyous than dreaming.

Here’s the answer to the mystery: what we consider to be “ourselves” is just a given thought form at a given moment. Our lifetimes are like a collection of scenes or tableaux strung together by mind into a lattice of threaded beads. All of the beads (or life events) which directly connect to a given bead are probable realities. From that bead, mind can take any number of directions to another bead. The black threads connecting the beads are death – we literally die from moment-to-moment. We always have to pass through death to move to the next bead (the next scene; the next moment); and if we take a turn which leads to a long run of black thread till the next bead, that’s “real” death and the next bead is birth in another lifetime.

Another way of saying this is, we have ourselves separated into a bunch of little pieces, each of which feels isolated and disconnected from (more important than) the rest. However, within each little piece we have tremendous focus and stick-to-itiveness (“fear of death”) – a willingness to keep up the struggle to stay awake and separated no matter how much of a bummer it is.

(continued)

Article Source: http://www.klienwachter.com

Bob Makransky is a systems analyst, programmer, and professional astrologer. For the past 30 years he has lived on a farm in highland Guatemala where he is a Mayan priest and is head of the local blueberry growers association. His website is: www.dearbrutus.com To subscribe to Bob’s free monthly Astro-Magical e-zine, send an e-mail to: MagicalAlmanac-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

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