Nothing Has Ever Died

“All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.” -- Adyashanti

Since the beginning of life, nothing has ever died.

This is not some strange philosophy. This is not some weird new-age belief. This is a simple, scientific fact. It also aligns nicely with the whole process of Enlightenment. I have never seen anyone else discuss this, although it is something that I have been teaching for years.

Think about what life is. Really think about it. Take several seconds or a minute and think about what creates life. Think about the biological process. Think about DNA. Think about how things reproduce.

If you have got all that in mind before we continue then the answer is obvious as to why nothing ever dies, nor ever has.

Some time way back in the evolutionary past a soup of amino acids came about, possibly in a warm vent, a hot bubbling pool, some heated mud. Those amino acids came together to form the first life.

That first life then, as it does now, self replicated by dividing its genetic material and making a copy. 

The simplest lifeforms in our world still do the same thing. Everything from amoeba up to bacteria. Also, if you give it some thought, this still applies to humans.

Leaving aside all our ancestors on the trail to becoming Homo Sapiens, ever since the first identifiable member of our species walked upon the earth they have replicated themselves in the same way. The host body creates a copy of its DNA. A sperm or an egg exists that is part of that host, created from the same genetic material as that host, alive inside that host. So the human divides itself and makes copies from its own material, its own flesh, its own self.

In our biological method of reproduction, the sperm from the male is introduced to the egg from the female to create a new life – but is it new? Isn't it really half of the male's self and half of the female's self? So as long as this reproduced version continues, then so does the male and so does the female. They have simply procreated by dividing their own cells and then allowing those cells to combine with those of another organism to which they are related.

I'm not talking about kissing cousins here, I mean in the simple fact that at some point they shared a common ancestor who divided its genetic material and passed it on in the same way and is therefore still alive in them.

So you take it to its logical conclusion and neither of them is a separate living being. 

They are formed of the genetic material from that common ancestor who still lives because all of her cells never died. That common ancestor can be traced back in a line through various species and forms of reproduction all the way back to that primordial soup, that bubbling mud, that heated pool and those amino acids.

The original life which formed in that pool never died – it divided, it copied itself using its own material, its own flesh, its own life. That original life still exists in everything that is alive on this whole planet.

There is only One Life. One original ancestral mud pool. One life that has developed and adapted to whatever environment or situation it found itself in. One life that became you. One life that became me. One life that became the trees, the birds, the fish, the insects, the bacteria, the viruses and everything else that lives, however you understand that life to exist.

Nothing has ever died, because there is only One Thing going on.

The Ego Muddies the Waters

"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'."

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am coming back again to the theme of surrender. To finding the true purpose of one's life by simply living it in full surrender. This may seem an alien concept to many, to most if I am honest, but it is the way that life is actually lived. As long as we pursue the desires of the little me, the ego self, then we are not fulfilling our true potential. Many great men throughout history have realised this, a fairly recent example being Albert Einstein.

So how do we live in full surrender? To paraphrase Wayne Wirs: 'you must become less so that The Source may become more.'

The less there is of you, the more there is of your true purpose.

Wayne always provided evidence for this in what he termed the Siddhis. As far as I know it is a Sanskrit word that does not translate well into English but is usually used to describe the strange effects that occur around those who have passed through the various stages of enlightenment and are living in harmony with The Source.

Things happen. I experience this myself. I tend to call them synchronicities.

Things just fall into line. Life goes more smoothly. It is not always what people would term good and happy, but the concepts of good and happy do not mean anything once you reach this stage. Good and happy are just points on a sliding scale and the whole scale is acceptable because that is how life works.

Contentment best describes the state of the truly enlightened. Everything is okay. The world is pervaded by a sense of okay-ness.

Ideas just pop into your head (feel free to see what Einstein had to say about that). You are pondering something and someone just walks up to you and says something about it that clarifies the situation, without your asking or seeking their input. You are startled by a white crow that flies across the road ahead of you, so you study it for a while. Later the same day the symbol of the white crow pops up again, but this time in a book title or a store sign or a conversation overheard and it proves beneficial to you.

There is no 'woo woo' here. There is nothing flaky about this. It just happens. The universe just lines up to let your life's purpose play itself out. You are not running the show, you never were. You (little ego you) were just getting in the way.

It is hard to explain to someone who believes their sense of free will is actual free will. Again, this is a step that is reached when you are further down the enlightenment trail, for want of a better description. We have a sense of many things, but that is all it is – a sense of. There is no true separation in the world. There are no separate organisms that live and die, there is just one life expressing itself in billions of ways. Human egos like to think otherwise.

Your ego is just an imaginary bunch of patterns that thinks it exists and does its best, out of love for itself, to create the life it thinks it desires. Mainly it just gets in the way. Those desires simply make you unhappy. There is only What Is. There is no such thing as what is not. Most desires are basically an argument with reality, seeking something that does not exist and being sure that it will create happiness as soon it does exist.

Desires are a rejection of reality.

I am sure you can see now why they are a problem, and they all come from that ego that thinks it exists. I'm sure you have read enough books on enlightenment by now and spoken to enough enlightened people to realise that there is no such thing as a single personality in the ego. Carl Jung many years ago identified basic archetypes, each one of which can become the dominant ego at a moments notice when called upon or needed. Every unenlightened human is living with multiple personalities, they just don't realise it.

Language consists of concepts, so I am doing my best to explain this but the reason I usually address myself to people who have passed through some of the process of enlightenment is because it is very difficult for those who have not to know what the hell I am talking about.

(There really is no such thing as enlightenment to those who are living it. When the Zen masters tell us that we are already enlightened, they are speaking the truth, it is just that most people don't know what the hell they are talking about either.)

If you have ever had a time when you were working on something and you lost yourself in that work and found that the work had gone very well; that you could not remember the time when you had been working on it; that you were in the flow - that is the enlightened state.

That is what it feels like when you are not running the show: you – the little ego.

When the little ego gets out of the way the great work happens.