imagine this room with 30 or 40 people living and dying together ...

 

  

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Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own? 

—Sogyal Rinpoche

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

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The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. 

Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. 

Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.


—Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy 

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Master Lu Tzu said : That which exists through itself is called Meaning (Tao). Meaning has neither name nor force. 

It is the one essence, the one primordial spirit. 

Essence and life cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the Light of Heaven. 

The Light of Heaven cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the two eyes.

—Richard Wilhelm, Carl Jung

The Secret of the Golden Flower

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