Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Reality is always kind

A quote that I read from Byron Katie's A Thousand Names for Joy.
"If my daughter (or brother in my case) dies, I realize that there is no self to be affected. It's not about me. This is about her life, my child's life, and mind --the unceasing bodiless mind that is finally awake to itself, the mind that never existed as a her, and the her that can never die. In this, we are never separated. And that's just a beginning: it gets even kinder. I get to see what my child's children grow in to because she was not there to teach them differently. Whenever I lose something, I've been spared. Every loss has to be a gain, unless the loss is being judged by a confused mind. I come to see what fills that space in my kindness in my world cannot decrease, because something else enters the space that I held her in. Just when you think that life can't get any better, it has to. That's the law."

I watch and feel some fight in this story. I fight against, "whenever I lose something, I've been spared" I feel like saying that I've been spared from Jason is a very cruel story. And yet I can find where it's true. If he had come home from that battle and been crippled or felt regret or remorse and I had to watch his life crumble and he would just be miserable. I am spared from that. If he had come home and continued to live a wild reckless life where he drank and drove and crashed his car and got arrested and never got back into school and never lived the life that I had perfectly planned for him. I am spared. It feels very selfish to say that still.

I can also see where I have been spared in terms of the death of my ego. As I live day to day with out Jason in my life and I feel the pain and agony of missing him I notice this part of me that misses him, this ego is screaming and crying and dying. As the quote above says, "In the unceasing bodiless mind, we are never separated."
With Jason's death the distinction between my ego and the unceasing bodiless mind has become much more clear. The unceasing bodiless mind hears Jason, feels Jason in ways never before. And the ego feels him as completely and totally gone.
This is what I mean when I say to people that losing Jason has been both the worst and best thing that could ever happen to me. He has crossed over from the struggle between enlightenment and confusion into pure enlightenment and he has tied a rope to my heart to show me the difference.

When I feel the pain and loss of his death, I must with full integrity also explain that this is the pain and loss of my ego. A part of me is dying that should be dying, that allows me such a state of grace and freedom I can't begin to explain. A place where Jason is. So, yes, I have been spared.