Twice Departed
Have you ever felt a quiet sense of lack or incompleteness, without really knowing why?
Eckhart Tolle would suggest that this is not a personal failing. It is simply the egoic mind doing what it does best.
An aspect of the emotional pain that is intrinsic to the egoic mind is a deep seated sense of lack, of incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people this is conscious. In others it is not. When it is conscious, it manifests as a persistent feeling of being unsettled, of not being worthy or good enough. When it is unconscious, it surfaces indirectly as an intense craving, a constant wanting and needing that never quite finds its source.
In either case, people will often fall into a compulsive pursuit of ego gratification, reaching for things to identify with in order to fill the hole they feel inside. Possessions, money, success, power, recognition, relationships, social status, physical appearance, knowledge, special abilities, personal history, belief systems, and political or religious identifications. All of it, at its root, is an attempt to feel more complete, to feel like enough. But as long as the egoic mind continues to run your life, you cannot truly be at ease. Because the ego is a derived sense of self, it will always need something external to lean on. And that need never ends.
None of these things are you.
Tolle suggests: "You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching."
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. And the secret of life, as Tolle puts it, is to
“Die before you die, and find that there is no death.”
This concept is echoed powerfully in a book called Tuesdays with Morrie, the true story of a sociology professor named Morrie, diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease that destroys the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Facing the end of his life with extraordinary clarity and grace, Morrie says: "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."
Most of us are sleepwalking. We do not truly experience the world, because we are half asleep, moving through life on autopilot, doing what we automatically have to do without ever stopping to feel any of it. But when you strip all of that away, when you are forced to face the reality that your time here is finite, everything shifts. You begin to see differently. You begin to live differently.
The similarities between Tolle and Morrie are striking. Two different voices, two different paths, arriving at the same quiet but simple truth.
And I know this truth holds merit, because I lived it.
In those final weeks with my wife, when only a small and precious window of time remained and the afterlife was drawing quietly near, everything that had once felt so urgent simply fell away. The ambitions, the noise, the endless mental chatter of everyday life, none of it meant anything with that kind of reality. What was left was something I can only describe as pure. It was her eyes. It was the stillness of a room where two people had finally stopped rushing and simply existed together, fully and completely, in the only moment that has ever truly existed.
In truth a part of me died alongside her. Not in the physical sense, but in terms of the egoic fallacy that lives within our dysfunctional minds, although it tries hard to rebirth itself. It is a daily pursuit. And ultimately what once did, no longer bothers me.
That is where we found it. Not in striving, but in surrendering. Stripped back of everything.
Oh, why must it take death to finally bring us here?
