Click this line to view the article
A book of Yoga states “Death conquers death.” The meaning is paradoxical. There are two types of death: death as release from a limiting form, and death as imprisonment in form. Unilluminated incarnation is a dim and relatively lifeless existence; hence it is the temporary “death” of spirit. But death as freedom from a set form is entrance into greater life and a true action of spirit.
The benevolence of timely death is wide in scope. So, we hold to a certain pattern of thought or emotional identification, then find it no longer serves. We catch a glimpse of the next turn of the spiral. The old patterns fall away as our mind and heart ascends to the next strata of understanding. This is the freedom of death, the action of a powerful and benevolent principle. Hence, “Death conquers death.”
I am a dead person; well, a relatively dead one. I know because there have been times when I was alive–the contrast between the two states is clear to me. Of course dead and alive are not really so binary. The world is full of the walking and talking dead. We all make our contributions to the litanies of the dead. What then is the rhetoric of the dead? It is the rhetoric of symbols larger than meaning where, like gray clouds, dense symbols obscure most of the light behind. All systems, religions, philosophies, all science, all are dead rhetoric if lacking spirit and a good motive. And while we are dead, all the good voices of past and future are likewise dead for us. But when we awaken to life, the best of past and future live in us.
Be wary of the words of dead people, be wary of me, and in this you affirm the primacy of spirit everywhere. In concert with my muses, I may occasionally flicker to life, the rest of the time you can ignore me without loss of much benefit.
I am a shadow of what will be, a suggestion of things to come–so are we all. And in dawn of future light, the shadow looks even less me than I foresaw. And when we start to be, to become in essence what we are, what sacred wonders then unfold! In these we see that space, that communion with our truer selves–along that way of lights is future world, yet present now were we more timeless in our present.