Death Is A Mystery

You’re impeccable in the role you’re playing on the ego/psychophysical plane, but you’re also present on another plane. And I think if I could get the essence of what I have figured out in the simplest early stages of it is that you and I should be living on two planes of consciousness simultaneously. Just two, I don’t ask for the whole shtick. Just two. And you say, “Which two?" And I’d say, “Any two.” Because the minute you can—whether you have lucid dreams, that’s one way of doing it. One way you admit you are in a different reality, and you go from reality to reality, because what that does is it changes the meaning of any single reality.

I’ve just finished a book called 'Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying', because I’m 65 and the boomers are turning 50. It’s a great market. So what I saw in doing this book was that what aged in us was one of the planes of reality we exist on. That is our body’s age, and our mind’s age, and our thought process’s age. But there are other planes on which aging is not a relevant variable at all; where you actually have experiences inside yourself of timelessness. You’re living simultaneously in time and not in time. But see how busy the external chronology of days, months, hours, seconds, time, movement, past, future permeates your mind. In fact, when you look at old people’s consciousness since I’ve been doing that, you see that as people get older and their future gets grimmer (from their point of view), they flip into the past. So then they only tell stories about the past to each other. What they missed on the way through (because of their panic) was the present. And the present was their salvation. Because had they been able to come into the present moment, they would have gone right through the doorway into timelessness. Because in a moment, there is no time. Time is the relation between two moments. When you live in one moment, you’re not living in time. Okay, new moment.

There is a way for the soul to be conscious—and once you’ve started to awaken, this is all you’re going to settle for—where you are deeply involved in the storyline of your incarnation, and yet at the same moment you are perfectly mindful and present and clear. It’s a statement in the Tao: “One does nothing and nothing is left undone.” There’s a place in you that’s absolutely quiet and clear, and that doesn’t in any way detract from the part of you outside that’s doing and changing and all that stuff. Those are two different planes of consciousness. And to rest in two of them simultaneously makes you a reflective person rather than a reactive person.

What intrigues me about the sixties to the nineties that I was talking about earlier is that what happened in the sixties, and what happened with civil rights, with anti-Vietnam, with sexual freedom, with the environment, beginning of the women’s movement, with gay rights, with on and on and on—I mean, that all blew up at one moment. It’s as if something happened at that time, and there were many causes of it, I’m sure. Some of these things had been building for years, like the civil rights movement. There’s some time when we shifted into a relative reality frame, and that freed us from being intimidated by the patriarchal, vertical, institutional structures that we had been living under. And they just began to look like paper tigers to us. And we thought at that time: it’s so obvious how people are caught in their minds. Now that we see it, everybody will see it.

It turned out everybody didn’t see it. And that was the naïveté of the sixties. It was the innocence saying: “Oh my God, we have been living in a mind structure. It’s like in a mind prison defining reality this way, like Plato’s cave or something like that.” And you thought, “This is so true! How can I not act according to this truth? And if it is true that I am also the soul, and so is everyone else, and from this place we can clearly see what we’re doing to the world and each other and ourselves and all that, and this all would change.” Now why doesn’t that happen? Because a lot of people had a big investment in their ego structures, in their power and their security—which is what you try to build when you feel like a vulnerable, separate little entity. Somebody didn’t awaken out of their somebody-ness. They are frightened at that moment, because their somebody-ness is up for grabs.

And what happened in the sixties was: it got so close to what they perceived as chaos and anarchy, that they forgot a lot of stuff in order to protect themselves because they felt the siege. And what we had was many years of the pendulum swing with President Reagan and President Bush and the fundamentalists and the far right. And now, in the nineties, the pendulum is starting to quiet down. And the interesting question is: since many of us, for one reason or another, have an appreciation of the two planes of consciousness—soul seeing how it all is unfolding, ego dancing life. If we see that now, is there a way that we can share that kind of wisdom with our fellow human beings without scaring the hell out of them?

I had an interesting conversation with a man who you might have a political reaction to, but it’s a very interesting man. I’ve become a friend of Lawrence Rockefeller. He’s 86 and he’s the elder of that empire. And at one point he was talking—we talk a lot about the change in consciousness and the paradigm shifts in the culture. At one point he said that he was encouraging different universities to make a professorship of consciousness. It’s his way in through, because he’s straight. So that’s his way. So I said, “Well, it’s not going to work, because they’ll pervert it. You’re not going to get a mystic teaching a course in consciousness, were it Harvard, Yale, Stanford. Tell me.” So he said, “Well, I gave it to them, and then the president of, what, Princeton or one of them, came back and said: we could do that, Mr. Rockefeller,”—since he’s like one of their biggest givers—“but could we recall it this?” And he says, “You know,” he said, “you have to let them do that because the new paradigm has happened, and they’ve already lost, and we’ve got to help them save face.”

People always ask me—or they used to; I don’t think they do so much now—but they used to ask me, “Are we about to have—is this the Armageddon?” Or, “Is this the Aquarian Age?” Is this the age when it’s all about to happen? Or is it about to unhappen; destroy itself? And how the hell do I know? And I realized that, if it were going to be the end—that means I was going to die along with everything else—how would I like to prepare for death? The way I’d like to prepare for death is: stay in the present moment as fully as I could for when the moment comes when I meet the mystery of the unknown. Basically, I say death is a mystery. How would I like to meet a mystery?

Well, I’d like to meet a mystery with a sense of adventure. I’d like to meet a mystery with as much clarity of mind as I could muster. I’d like to meet a mystery free of a lot of forces that are pulling me back into the form I’m leaving, like pain and people. So if it were going to be Armageddon, I’d like to prepare for my own death—which is exactly what in the East they understand their life to be about, because they live in a reincarnational model. So what I would do to do that is: I’d quiet my mind as well as I could, so I could hear as clearly as possible. I would open my heart as widely as I could. And I’d do whatever I could in the meantime to relieve suffering. What else was I going to do? But I’d use it all as a preparation for my moment of death.

Now if, on the other hand, this was the Aquarian Age and this was the Great Transformation, and we were about to move into another collective consciousness in which we would live with a new awareness, what could I do to help that happen? How could I become one of those instead of a dragging of the feet? Well, I could quiet my mind, I could open my heart, and I could relieve the suffering around me. So, you know, it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Because I was going to do the same thing now anyway and live fully in this moment, so that when this moment is that mysterious doorway moment, I’ll be right here. “Ah, dropping the body. Ah, so.”

In 1961, while at Harvard, explorations of human consciousness led Richard Alpert, in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg, to pursue intensive research with psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals. Out of this research came two books: The Psychedelic Experience (co-authored with Leary and Metzner, and based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, published by University Books); and LSD (with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller, published by New American Library). Because of the highly controversial nature of their research, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary became personae non-grata and were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Tim Leary and Alpert then went to Mexico, ate mushrooms, and went from being academics to counter-culture icons, legends in their own time, and young at that. For Alpert psychedelic work turned out to be a prelude to the mystical country of the spirit and the source of consciousness itself. Mind expansion via chemical substances became a catalyst for the spiritual seeking. This naturally led him eastward to the traditional headwater of mystical rivers, India. Once there, a series of seeming coincidences led him to Neem Karoli Baba and the transformation from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass.

https://drive.google.com/file/death_mystery