DEATH: THE END OF SELF-IMPROVEMENT…
Death: The End Of Self-Improvement
by
Joan Tollifson
No one knows for sure what happens after death, and I may be surprised; but I assume that dying will be just like going to sleep or going under anesthesia. Conscious experiencing—my movie of waking life and the experience of being present—will vanish as it does every night in deep sleep or under anesthesia. And, as in deep sleep, I won’t be there to miss myself or my movie of waking life. The fear of dying only exists during waking life, and only as a fearful idea. In deep sleep, the problem—and the one who seems to have it—no longer exist.
The more closely we explore this whole compelling appearance that I call the movie of waking life, the more we find that it has no more substance or enduring reality than a passing dream. We might think of it as a play of the universe, a dance of consciousness, a marvelous and deep entertainment, with no meaning or purpose except to play, to dance, to enjoy and explore and express itself, and then, to dissolve—back into that unfathomable mystery prior to consciousness, subtler than space, in which nothing perceivable or conceivable remains.
In my view, what happens after death is a flat earth question. Worrying about what happens to us when we die is like worrying about what happens to us if we fall off the edge of the earth. People used to worry about that, but their fear was based on a misunderstanding. Just as there is no edge to the earth, there is no actual boundary, no edge where life begins or ends. The things we are worrying about are all conceptual abstractions, artificially pulled out of the whole. Like the lines on a map dividing up the whole earth, birth and death are artificial dividing lines on an indivisible reality. p. 11
This book explores growing old and dying—and more importantly, being alive—both through the lens of my personal story and from the larger, impersonal perspective of what might be called nondual spirituality. And when I use the word spiritual, I don’t ever mean spirit as opposed to matter, or spiritual as opposed to secular. Spirituality as I mean it is a perspective that sees all of life as sacred, and by sacred, I mean worthy of devotion, full of wonder, inconceivable and ungraspable. The kind of spirituality that has attracted me is about direct experience, not belief or dogma, and it is focused on Here-Now, not on some imaginary future. This is the perspective you’ll find in this book, and it includes everything from vaginal
dryness to politics.
