What Will You Give?

 On the day that death will knock at thy door, what wilt thou offer him? 

Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my Life...I will never let him go with empty hands.

All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days and summer nights, all the earnings and gleanings of my busy life will I place before him at the close of my days when death will knock at my door. 

Rabindranath Tagorehttps://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7491738-on-the-day-when-death-will-knock-at-thy-door

I used this translation for some reason rather than the simple and just as eloquent one found in Life After Death by Deepak Chopra and I don't know why. 

Anyway...what will you give death when he comes a knocking? Have you ever thought of that or are you like  most of us raised with western thought...pretending you are not home? 

When we are unwilling to answer the door for Death...we are hesitant to open the door for Life, are we not? According to Deepak Chopra, the most profound subjects-love, truth, compassion, birth and death-are equal. (page 32) By welcoming death as a natural part of the human experience, we open to love, truth and compassion.  We open to the full experience of being alive. When we shrink with fear away from windows of reality  whenever  the door bell rings in fear that it might be Death, we are contracting away from all the wonderful things Life offers. Can you see that?

Death is not the  enemy we may grow up believing it is.  It is just the opposite.  Ram Dass, in the video, Life , Death and the Cycle of Awakening encourages us to view death as a vehicle for awakening. "Death," he tells us, "is just a process of leaving what you thought you were." It is a shedding of that which was unreal for that which is.  We are not these heavy, dense bodies that keep us here.  We are not all the mind stuff ego created.  We are not the events, and relationships enfolding in front of us either. We are so much more and death offers the ultimate awakening...the ultimate discarding of that which is not who we are so we can experience what we are.

Now...we don't have to die to awaken.  We can shed these layers of little me-ness long before we take our last breath.  But the default is...that death will do for us what we may not accomplish in this life time. It will take us home when this journey of learning is over. 

Deepak Chopra explains that this Earth school, according to vedic tradition,  is just a dense Spiritual world surrounded by higher planes we cannot see (Lokhas). We are all souls/consciousness in dense and heavy garments we call a body that "seems" to localize us in time and space, seperate us and define us in a heavier vibration of energy.  Who we are is not hevay and dense .  It has the ability to evolve into a much higher energy but so often we fail to recognize that and come to beleive we are "trapped" here. But the body is just a suit we, as the soul,  can discard so easily through transformation from one frequency of vibration to the next. 

The transformational process after death is not a movement to some other place or time; it is just a change in the quality of our attention.  You can only see what you vibrate to. (page 6)

It is reported that some yogis can go through a transformational process that is very similar to the one experienced at death by having a deep enough desire. 

Most of us, of course, are not yogis and instead of being open to the idea of death we tend to shrink away in fear. ...erronously believing that if we close ourselves up,  mentally and physically, Death will not open the door when the time comes. 

Our fault is not that we fear death but that we don't respect it as a miracle. (page 32)

What I propose is that we open the door before Death even knocks.  Lets embrace the reality of  the death of the body and mind so we embrace the reality  of Life and learn to do what we are here to do...awaken to the fact that we are so much more than this. 

When Death comes then, (and he will come to all of us no matter how much we crouch and hide) , what will we offer him? A life fully and beautifully lived dominated by love, truth and compassion; a life   guided by Soul's openness  not ego's fear. 

All is well in my world. 

Deepak Chopra ( 2006) Life After Death: The Burden of Proof. New York: Three Rivers Press

Ram Dass/Spiritual Nomas ( July, 2021) Life, Death and the Cycle of Awakening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ__qlDf6WI