Vajra Diaries: My Undying Aspirations

     Though the time of death is uncertain for all but the omniscient, not to be properly prepared for death, anticipated or otherwise, indicates an overweening pride, a runaway self delusion, and an all-around poor spiritual education and training. In the last few years, I’ve been getting a particular feeling about untimely death. I can imagine falling off my motorcycle in front of an oncoming truck and all abruptly ending. It feels like an ultimately incongruous and terribly awkward moment. A kind of primal humiliation where life and being instantly become inert matter. The ultimate waste as a precious human life is loss to tragic, or even blackly ‘comic,’ circumstances. 

     Such unpreparedness of dying, especially as one gets older and privy to death’s degrading ‘striptease’, where all one’s youthful characteristics of physical strength and attractiveness are slowly removed, is cosmically shameful. As even ‘dumb’ animal appear to know how to do it. But it’s also understandable, given the degree of an ingrained, default ignorance promoted by unserious people in unwise cultures.  

     I also have some new feelings and observations about birth. It’s a new everything. It’s blissful and light in body, expression, and mind. And, as all birth is rebirth, it’s an excited, much anticipated, and seemingly imperturbable state. At least in the beginning. But then it appears to wane, as all inextricably depreciates in a low-heat frog boil of fatal decline. Youthfulness itself is also an extraordinarily ‘inflated’ state; grandiose, exalted, and seemingly bullet proof. 

     But why am I only seeing all of this now? Because in one’s later development death and birth/rebirth of one’s ego-driven self can be seen anew in the dramatic relief of a stunning cyclical vacuity. It’s then a fundamentally ‘fake’ quality to all the imagined attributes and elements in our individual and collective ‘realities’ become all too apparent. With age comes the wisdom of discernment as long as one’s ego is dethroned by some kind of transcendent function. 

     In my world, that transcendent function is the Guru, preeminently seated upon a lunar disc and lotus throne atop my crown, dripping his joyful nectar of immortality, the clear light of emptiness, into the holy receptacles of body, voice, and mind below. Whose power of example, by wisely saying less and compassionately showing all, became inseparable from my undying aspirations.