IN THE EPIC Indian story called the Mahābhārata, the sage Yuddhi-ṣṭhira is asked, “Of all things in life, what is the most astounding?” Yuddhiṣṭhira responds, “That a person, seeing others die all around him, never thinks that he will die.”
Aging is an opportunity to develop one’s curiosity regarding the course of life this body takes. One of the deepest pains of being human is the realization that every aspect of life is undergoing constant change and that everything once born is then subject to decay and death. What becomes a singular life also passes away, and in this way the singular is seen to be part of a much larger, pulsing whole. And each body in contact with its environment runs a specific course, a unique path of aging. There is a primary unwillingness, especially in our culture, to look at aging directly. To be accepting of aging and dying brings us face-to-face with our ongoing and unconscious repression of the awareness of death and dying.
Yoga demands that we look the serpent right in the mouth until we realize it has no poison. We can be present even when death squeezes the last exhalation from the body. It is through a deep investigation of what it means to be structured in a life of impermanence and provisionality that we are moved to open fully to the reality of what is our everyday, every-moment experience. In the face of death, there is nothing left to avoid and certainly nothing left to hold on to. There is a wonderful story in the Srimad Bhagavatam, a collection of eighteen thousand verses about the lives of avatars, yogis, sages, and kings, in which the sage Narada teaches a very basic truth to a confused king:
“All worldly identifications and all attachments that pass as relationships are fraught with sorrow. All relationships are conceptual. They appear and disappear like a palace in the clouds. On account of inherent tendencies that come to life at birth, people think of all objects, relationships and selves as real and indulge in action rooted in this ignorance.”
The king, confused by these assertions, responds by asking Narada why people keep clinging and how to overcome these attachments and delusions. Narada responds,
“The one direct cause for people’s sorrow is their deluded sense that the body is the self. One clings to the body as one’s own. Correct and diligent investigation into the nature of the self is the only sure cure for this malady.”
On hearing this, the king regains his balance of mind. He realizes that what he was most attached to was his sense of self and his identification with his body, and that as long as he identified the impermanent body as being owned by his own sense of self, he remained outside of reality because he thought of others as separate.1
The “I” has nothing to cling to, because all experiences are impermanent. This is most easily observed by watching the sensations in the body come and go or thoughts in the mind appear and disappear. Yoga reminds us that, having been born, we are subject to aging and inevitable death. We might avoid old age, some of us might not get sick, but the body will die sooner or later. Although we know this, the only thing we cannot know is where or when, and life becomes a coming together and coming apart of an ongoing matrix of conditions, intertwined and mysterious, like scaffolds on scaffolds, flowers from seeds, atoms dancing.
There is not much incentive in contemporary culture to contemplate our own mortality. When someone becomes sick or dies, it is a chance for us to recognize that this can happen to us at any time. In the yoga tradition, the teachings ask a basic question: If death is inevitable, why wait until the last moments of life to contemplate death? Why not in this moment? This is why we practice savāsanā (Corpse pose), or as Pattabhi Jois says, “Practicing death, little bit every day.”
Aging and death bring urgency to practice. If the time of death does come soon, what will I regret that I had not done? How would I have wanted to live my life? Am I living my life fully? Do I use every moment as something I can learn from?
When my friend, who is struggling with cancer, described her recent chemotherapy session, she said,
Many people assume that the experience of cancer is overwhelmingly negative, and many people living with cancer feel that their experience of cancer should conform to this concept of negativity. Yes, cancer and the treatment for it can be terrible. But cancer is also amazing because to say that cancer is only terrible is to separate it from all of life that surrounds it. The beautiful people you meet in waiting rooms, the support and generosity of family and friends, the diligent and thoughtful care by so many professionals, the unique opportunity for reflection and contemplation—there is an entire experience of life while we are experiencing cancer. When we say cancer is terrible, where does cancer the terrible end, and all these wonderful side effects we call life begin? All of life with cancer is cancer, and all of cancer is life. Cancer and life are not separate and not distinct. So we can’t categorize our experience. We can just experience it for what it is.2
This also helps us appreciate one another in a very different way. With mindfulness there is a resolution to be more sensitive, more careful. It’s like when we drive in the snow, we take greater care. We don’t get frustrated with the fact of the snow. The snow comes whether we want it to or not. All we can do is take great care with how we drive. We see the snow as an incentive to be present, mindful, and fully aware.
It’s much easier to evaluate experience than it is to accept it. Even in subtle ways, it is hard to allow each moment to be full or enough. Even to let ourselves be ourselves, acting without a persona or attachment, simply being for the sake of being. Isn’t the heart of acceptance rooted in our own hearts? What would it mean to accept every aspect of ourselves? In the contemplation of death we come to see that we don’t need to get things right anymore; instead we can begin to accept each moment just as it is. We can let others be as others are.
Often when we hear of acceptance, we think of surrender or sacrifice. But nothing is unacceptable. Even the greatest suffering in the wider world or the strongest currents of pain within ourselves can be accepted. Acceptance doesn’t mean liking something or agreeing with it. It is rather an allowing. Not shutting things out. Yoga is the practice of allowing things to be as they are and not turning away from any part of reality. If I am in a situation I can’t bear, then it is the unbearable that is to be accepted.
By accepting our aging just as it is, we allow for all that we are. Be with your experience directly. How do you do that? Awareness simply reflects what is there. It reveals all that is there without comment or comparison. In aging and illness, even in pain, we notice how we react in each moment. Are we holding on? Are we pushing away? How does this moment feel in the body? Are we contracting or pulling away? When there is contraction, we can’t see clearly.
Contraction denotes turning away. We don’t need to make aging or illness any different. We can be with the state of what is actually present, even if it is fear, pain, or despair, if we can give that state space without turning from it. When we contract, we cannot possibly notice how things are because we are blocking out our experience at both a sensual and a mental level.
We don’t need to make this body any different—that is the practice of satya (honesty) with the body—we see this aging body for what it is. We can be with the mind state that is there without trying to create a new one. If we can give a state space rather than struggling with it, things begin to settle down on their own. The energy that was defending against what was unfolding in awareness can be freed up. When everything is seen clearly, it is easier to act wisely and accept the reality of our circumstances. Liberation from delusion means precisely the release of our energies of death denial. The repression of our awareness of impermanence eventually yields a release of our strategies against death’s arrival. The symptoms of such repression manifest in us as a deep and outward need for security. Whether we seek the material security of capital, the relational security of romantic love, the ego’s security in fame and notoriety, it really makes no difference. All of the symptoms of attachment and aversion come down to the basic denominator of impermanence that reminds us that all concrete embodiments in any sphere across any species are structured within a limited time span.
No matter how fixed and concrete they appear on the surface, mind states, like the ongoing sensations of the body, are always loosening and passing away. The Ashtavakra Gītā, one of the many anonymous Indian teachings or folk tales known as purāṇas, describes this with great clarity:
All things arise,
Suffer change,
And pass away.
This is their nature.
When you know this . . .
. . . you become still.
It is easy.3
In practice we are including rather than excluding. We expend so much energy avoiding the way life actually unfolds, and most of the time we are not aware that we doing this. This is exhausting. When we begin to see that there can be spaciousness where there was resistance, the contents of consciousness gain less of a purchase on us. Each time we make space, trust grows. The more we trust reality, the more the mind’s habits of aversion lose their footing.
Trusting in this practice is a form of training the heart. Being interested in yoga is being interested in the heart and its opening. Most of us have been through enough suffering, joy, and the range of emotions in between to know that unless there is a context for our experience, it doesn’t lead anywhere. Sometimes I think practice is a way of setting life in context, and certainly many of our psychological ills are more meaningful and manageable when seen in the context of spiritual practice. With a context it becomes more than chaos or more than a routine without solace. The heart knows that life is more than that, and paradoxically this provokes the ego into a kind of anxiousness because when we see the self is a changing and impermanent mechanism rather than an ongoing “thing” in space and time, we see that anxiety is central to the ego, because it is the self’s response to its own groundlessness.
The heart is not just a location or an intellectual place but rather the greater part of us, and it has the ability to feel freedom within changing conditions. As a metaphor in yoga terminology and physiology, the heart is bright and peaceful, but only because it is “unstruck” by the reality of change. What creates our “problems” is the way that we identify with and cling to that which moves through the heart. Identification is the root of clinging. If you understand that, you find the heart of practice. If there is clinging, there is dissatisfaction, and if there is no clinging, there is no suffering. In one of his last poems, entitled “Late Fragment,” Raymond Carver offers this truth in concise terms:
And did you get what
You wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.4
When we practice sincerely, what we want in life becomes simpler and simpler. What yoga teaches us is to stop looking outside the heart for satisfaction. We are so clever at finding external reasons to perpetuate our habits, because even if we see that our habits cause us distress, we keep repeating them because they are known. This is why we practice. Time by itself does not heal these kinds of illusions. If they are not seen directly, time just entrenches them further. We need a strong commitment to letting go and to paying attention to the clinging involved in difficult mental and physical states. Accepting aging and death is a good start.
When we inspect our everyday experience in detail, we see that death and birth occur one after the other in every successive moment. What we see in one breath cycle we see everywhere. Just as a scientist who studies interdependence cannot bring an entire ecosystem into a laboratory, we cannot, on the surface, examine all of the facets of existence at once. However, when you focus intently without too many preconceptions on something as simple as the breath or the changing (pariṇāma) sensations in the body—what Patañjali calls dharma megha samādhi—we get a sense of the truths of existence, especially the truth of change. When we inspect our moment-to-moment experience, we find we are not permanent objects or selves but perceptual elements coming together and coming apart. Some schools of yoga refer to this as “the gunas”—the changing particles that make up the substratum of experience. But there is nothing gluing this ebb and flow together except the ability to see these patterns as ebbing and flowing—what comes together always comes apart. All the basic patterns, constituents, or elements in nature come together and come apart. There is nothing to hold on to and nothing to which we can ascribe selfhood. These building blocks, like atoms, are not “things” that exist but rather the smallest particles of perception available to us. If you look at one moment of sensation in the body, for example, you can see it as a constantly changing configuration of elements.
Anyone who has spent time with the dying knows how life-affirming a close experience of dying can be. And as far as we know, nobody has been able to escape death. Of the current world population of over five billion people, almost none will be alive in a hundred years’ time. Not only do our thoughts, relationships, and bodies have a time limit, so do our conceptions of ourselves. We are in constant motion. Life has a definite, inflexible limit, and each moment brings us closer to its finality. We are dying from the moment we are born.
Impermanence also teaches us that death comes in a moment and that its time is unexpected. All that separates us from the next life is one breath. When we are born, our first autonomous gesture after leaving the womb is our first inhale. When we die, we leave the world on an exhale. In between, however, the duration of our life span is uncertain. The young can die before the old, the healthy before the sick. The physical body contributes to life’s seeming certainty, but its weakness and fragility also reveal its uncertainty.
Worldly possessions can’t help our position in the face of death and dying. Relatives and friends can neither prevent death nor go with us. Even our own precious body is of no help to us. We have to leave it behind like a shell, an empty husk, an overcoat. The form of the body will eventually come apart, like a seed fallen from a tree, and come together again under different conditions in yet another form.
In yoga practice, as we become more and more familiar with the patterns and movements of the breath and the other elements as well, we come into contact with the basic constituents of our experience. The basic elements of reality are called by various names in different systems—gunas, kośas, skandhas, prakṛti, prāṇa vāyuu—all with the same purpose, namely, to offer us tools or strategies we can use to meditate upon and eventually accept the changing reality in which we find ourselves. We see in the elements no place to cling and nowhere to identify an “I, me, or mine.” This process of meditation teaches the practitioner the stages of death and the mind-body relationships behind them. The description of the dying process in most Indian texts is based on a presentation of the winds (vāyuu), or currents of energy, that serve as foundations for various levels of consciousness, and the channels in which they flow. Upon the serial collapse of the ability of these winds to serve as bases of consciousness, the internal and external events of death unfold. Through the power of meditation, the yogi makes the coarse winds dissolve into the very subtle life-bearing wind at the heart. This yoga mirrors the process that occurs at death and involves concentration on the psychic channels and their centers (chakras) inside the body.
At the chakras there are platforms upon which physical and mental health are based. The physiology of death revolves around changes in the winds and one’s attitude in the process of dying. Since the mind is intimately linked with the winds of the breath, we watch them both. Psychologically, due to the fact that consciousnesses of varying grossness and subtlety depend on the winds, like a rider on a horse, their dissolving or loss of ability to serve as bases of consciousness induces radical changes in conscious experience.
Death begins with the sequential dissolution of the winds associated with the four elements (earth, water, fire, and air). “Earth” refers to the hard factors of the body, such as bone, and the dissolution of the wind associated with it means that that wind is no longer capable of serving as a mount or basis for consciousness. As a consequence of its dissolution, the capacity of the wind associated with “water” (the fluid factors of the body) to act as a mount for consciousness becomes more manifest. The ceasing of the capacity in one element and its greater manifestation in another is called “dissolution”—it is not, therefore, a case of gross earth dissolving into water. Simultaneous with the dissolution of the earth element, the other elements also begin to sequentially return to their respective base in the natural world.
All the elements can be found in any phenomenon in nature, whether internal or external. When one pays attention to the body in yoga posture practice, one is meditating on the elements. The earth element, much like the outer sheath of the first kośa, is characteristic of hardness, felt experience, heaviness, density, and defined space. As one begins dying, the bones become heavy, the skin pale, the eyes become difficult to open, and the sensory grasp of the world begins to slip away. As we meditate on the earth element in the form of the body, we feel the body slipping away, color withdrawing from the skin, and loss of control.
As the earth element transforms, we come into contact with the water element. Hearing begins to fade, the fluids of the body are out of our control, saliva drips from the mouth, water appears at the corners of the eyes, and it becomes difficult to hold urine. The lips become chapped, the nostrils cave into the septum, the eyes become very dry, and the fluids that characterize the water element dissolve into the fire element. Death chips away at everything.
The fire element withdraws and the body becomes cool and stiff, the breath becomes cold, the nose no longer smells scent, and digestion is no longer possible. As the characteristics of heat leave the body, we see signs of the dissolution of the air element as the out-breath grows longer and longer and the senses begin to fade away. Other people are no longer recognizable, there is no longer a sense of interest or purpose in the mind, and the ability to perceive begins to fade away completely. Death is always whispering a reminder, however quietly, that there is nothing at all we can cling to as ultimately mine; and in such awareness, life flows along transparently, a bankless stream.
When volition is completely given up, the dissolution of the air element becomes prominent; there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. The in-breath becomes shorter and shorter; the out-breath elongates and so does the pause at the bottom of each breath cycle. The pressures of meaning and purpose, the expectations of being somebody going somewhere, no longer trouble the mind. Gravity reigns over the body. Joan Halifax, in her research working with the dying, describes this process in detail:
As the element of air is dissolved, you are having visions. Your visions may be jewellike and filled with insight that can never be expressed. These visions relate to who you are and how you have lived your life. You may be seeing your family or your ancestors in a peaceful setting. You may be seeing beautiful people, saints, or friends welcoming you. You may be reliving pleasant experiences from your past. Or you may have demonic and hellish visions. If you have hurt others, those whom you have injured may appear to you. Difficult and dreadful moments of your life may arise to haunt you. You may see people with whom you have had negative interactions attacking you. You may even cry out in fear. Do not identify with these visions. Simply let them be.5
The air element dissolves, and there is nothing left to do. Mental functioning comes to an end and so does consciousness. Consciousness dissolves into space, the last exhalation occurs, there is no sensation in the body, the element of wind dissolves completely. The kośas are extinguished and the elements of mind and body return to their source in the ongoing flux of nature.
We imagine this practice as a description of our own death so that we can release our own unique identity into the greater, ongoing universe. Returning these particles called “self” back to their source, even if we have no words for such a source, helps loosen our fixations and entanglements. It took the earth billions of years to establish itself, and here we are, moving about sustained by that billion-year evolution and eventually disappearing back into it. This is the greater evolution: continuity with the genetic and molecular functioning of this immense planetary system of which we are only a small part indeed. When teaching, I almost always read the instructions for dying or these descriptions of the elements during the ten minutes of savāsanā (Corpse pose) when the students are lying down, the room is dark, and the collective breath is coming into stillness. If not treated as a practice of dying, savāsanā is reduced to a relaxation exercise and divorced from its purpose as a meditation on impermanence and, by extension, gratitude.
The contemplation of impermanence and nonattachment, coupled with a meditation on the elements, is not only a meditation on finality—it is also a way of placing the practitioner of yoga in the midst of life. When we complete an exhalation or blink our eyes, this moment of experience is over. Every moment of perception passes away. Being present with the changing nature of reality is in itself a meditation on death, because we are being asked as practitioners to allow each and every moment to pass away. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa states:
When, because of disease or advanced age, one is neither able to perform one’s duties, study philosophy, or pursue spiritual knowledge, one should begin to fast. Properly placing the fires (of the body) within oneself and relinquishing the notion of “I” and “mine,” one should then completely merge the aggregate elements into their causes. The knower of the self (should merge) the apertures of the body into space, the vital airs into the air, the heat into fire, the blood, phlegm and pus into water, and the rest into earth, from whence they came. One should place one’s speech and subject matter of speaking into Agni, the two hands and their crafting capacity into Indra, the feet and their power of movement into Visnu, the Spirit of time, the genitals and sexual enjoyment into Prajapati, the anus and its power of evacuation into Mrtyu, directing each into their proper place. One should merge the sense of hearing, along with sound, in the directions, tactility with the sense of touch into the wind, and form along with vision, O King, into the sun. One should merge the tongue, along with the sense of taste, into water, and fragrance, along with the sense of smell, into earth. Mind, along with desires, into the Moon, intelligence, along with its objects, into the supreme seer (Brahma), actions and self-awareness into Rudra, from who proceeds the action of egotism and self-interest, existence and thought into the individual (knower of the field), and the individual along with the qualities of nature into the Supreme. Earth in water, water in fire, the latter in air, that into space, that into ego, and the latter into the totality of matter, that into the unmanifest, and that into the undying, imperishable. Thus, knowing the imperishable self to be made of consciousness without a second, one should come to an end, like a fire that has devoured its origins.6
This description of death practice leads to the separation of the elements. Traditionally one would meditate separately on each sentence in the aforementioned description not only at the end of life but as a daily meditation. This type of practice is found consistently in meditation-based religious traditions. As we know, when the elements separate, they then come back together in some different form. Molecules continue, water flows and evaporates and flows again. There is an elemental configuration of ourselves in all things. What dies?
Each aspect of life has an intrinsic value when we are paying attention. Each point in the infinitely broad net of Indra connects, mirrors, and is interdependent with all other points of reality. More intimate than sisters or brothers, each aspect of this wide and complex web of life supports and conditions the basic constituent pieces that, when assembled, feel like a self. Though hard to fathom and even harder to practice, there is a fundamental unity that connects not only parts of the body or parts of the mind but each of us to every living and nonliving particle of existence. Each part of this existence has a value as part of an ultimate reality. To let go of oneself in the fullness of the rain, in the pain of loss, in the joy of feeling met is to be part of this ultimate reality. Within change there is connection. Within the many there is one. There is nothing that stands between self and the world, even though on the surface the world often seems outside of our minds and bodies. But yoga teaches us that the world of the mind is the world of the body and that the two are neither two nor one. Enlightenment is not something someone hands to you atop a mountain or something you one day attain, but an offering of centerless responsiveness through the realization of who we truly are. Mokṣa, or true freedom, is the experience of an authorless life into and out of which all things are created and completed.
The term mokṣa originally referred to the last phase of an eclipse, where one body begins to move out of the shadow of another. In a solar eclipse, for example, when the moon and hidden sun start to draw away from one another, revealing again the blazing sun, darkness lifts and the two bodies move in their respective spheres. Like the last phase of an eclipse, mokṣa refers to the freedom that occurs when one creates the conditions in mind and body for the dissolution of the five kleṣas and the end of suffering. The radical theologian Don Cupitt writes,
We seem to have forgotten how to die. We have come to equate religion with holding on, when we ought to have been learning to see religion as teaching us how to let go. Religious belief should be producing a self-emptying way of life: we live by dying, unattached, pouring ourselves out into the flux of life in such a way that death when it comes is not a threat but a consummation.
We should live as the sun does. Its existence, the process by which it lives, and the process by which it dies, all exactly coincide. It believes nothing, it hasn’t a care, it just pours itself out.7
When we give attention to the way the body and mind are made of elements, it becomes easy to see impermanence. When we pay attention to the way the elements come together and when we stay with the changing nature of each element in and of itself, it is hard to find anything to cling to as “I, me, or mine.” This eliminates the delusion of our ordinary perceptual attitude that the body continues in space and time. This body is impermanent.
The only thing Patañjali says about the body at the time of death is as follows: “Once the body dies and is gone, its basic patterns are dissolved in nature and inclined to be reborn.”8
Rebirth in this sense is different from a theory of reincarnation. With reincarnation, “I” get somehow incarnated in a different form or in a future life, whereas in Patañjali’s reference to the body at death, he says that something continues but he does not hint at what. In other words, as the elements separate, they return to their form as basic patterns of nature.
If buried, the skin decomposes, is eaten by worms, the worms in turn die into the earth element, and out of this a flower blooms and is pollinated by bees. Or if the body is burned, the smoke from the body mixes with the earth element, as do the ashes, and the cycle of those particles continues. But what does not continue is the story of “me.” So if that story, which is what is most tenuously held on to (abhiniveśa) dissolves at death, why not begin its dissolution now?
As a puzzle we can imagine it as follows: If death is inevitable, then the only thing we can change, once born, is birth. How can we change birth once we are born? By simply ceasing to construct a self through which we filter our experiences. In this way we die into life. What dies? Our “self” constructions.
When you move the body with the breath, you are meditating in action on the way the elements operate in the body. We stretch the breath through the elements in the same way that we press the breath through the kośas. Like the five elements, the kośas are perspectival glasses through which we can gain insight into the impermanent and contingent nature of the body.
When this same insight is pushed even further, especially in sitting meditation or prāṇāyāma, we see that the body in itself does not actually exist but is a coming together and coming apart of these elemental qualities. It is no longer a body but the arising and passing away of the causes and conditions of the elements. This constant transformation of the elements is described as pariṇāma. Pariṇāma refers to the ever-constant change and transformation of the substratum of material existence.
Human beings develop an inordinate number of strategies to fend off awareness of our mortality. It’s not just the body that is immortal but also every moment of experience. Every breath, thought, action, and deed is impermanent. Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book of 1974, The Denial of Death, describes how our most basic activity is the creation of stories about ourselves that avoid the inevitability of facing death. “The practice of dying little by little, every day,” Pattabhi Jois once said, “brings yoga.”9 Letting go in the face of death turns dying into an act of giving. Dying little by little through giving oneself completely to each and every experience describes in yogic terms how a person finds release from the anxiety and symptoms of repression that go hand in hand with a denial of change. Letting go in each moment urges us to face directly our mortality and allows an awareness of death to purify our motives.
This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is to help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. That suppression of awareness plays a crucial role in keeping people functioning—if we were constantly aware of our fragility, of the nothingness we are a split second away from at all times, we’d go insane. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making us feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. And in Becker’s view, some of the personal and social consequences of this are disastrous.
As we have explored in this book, the personal and relational effects of clinging to permanence create violence, addiction, fear, and suffering. At the personal level, by ignoring our mortality and vulnerability we build up an unreal sense of self, and we act out of a false sense of who and what we are. So yoga takes us to the crucial point: the matter of letting death penetrate the self. The acceptance of death, much like being fully engaged in life, is the acceptance of the perishing of everything that will perish. In this acceptance a person imaginatively and physically experiences the process of the death of the body and the possibility of resting in the unknowability of what comes next. The next moment, even in daily life, is invisible. This body, this ability to be aware, and this precious and complex human intelligence is quite obviously not self-created but given to itself: it has emerged from the same mysterious ground as everything else. When there is attachment, we are visiting, floating, distinguishing ourselves from the ongoing interaction of life’s moments. Actualized by the truth of death, we no longer need to move our lives forward shading experience according to our own ideas. When there is amazement, when there is wonder, then we are present with life and one another. And Patañjali in the Yoga-Sutra says that this world, this life, is here only as a phenomenal experience for us to see through it.10
Contemplation of death, if thought of only in the context of “me,” is depressing and easily slips into nihilism. But a contemplation of death that includes the death of “me,” with a heart that’s open, invites us to connect with the world, and spontaneously dissolves attachment. And when attachment to our ideas about self are untangled, then automatically there is love, there is compassion. Whenever there is attachment, there is no relationship; whenever there is expectation, there is no love. Love occurs when expectation dissolves. Love is the ultimate healer in crisis, because it is letting go of our viewpoint that resolves crisis, and out of that, spontaneously, love occurs, flourishing occurs, and mokṣa occurs. Enlightenment is not someplace far away, it is right here, right now. This practice of yoga is continuously putting us in the present moment, in community. Flourishing is the opposite of nihilism, duḥkha, and the fear of death.
We contemplate death and in doing so discover our own existence to be participation in a reality that has two distinct dimensions of meaning: a dimension of things that perish, and an awareness that seems outside of that which changes. Yoga teaches us that the dance of all we perceive happens in front of awareness, not inside or behind it. Furthermore, awareness is not an “it” or anything that the mind can capture with concepts and words, and even when we rest in the idea that it is not possible to reify pure awareness, the mind comes in and does so anyway, even with terms like puruṣa, Brahma, śūnyāta. The “practice of dying” is a matter of learning to live the tension “in between” these two dimensions of existence. Again, human existence is not just the life of perishing existence; it is not the existence of a stone or a tree. Neither is it a life of a self-sufficient and permanent being. Human existence is a life “in between” these, participating in both because they are complementary opposites inseparable from each other.
By saying that puruṣa (pure awareness) is unchanging, Patañjali describes the human experience as not exactly bound by death, but rather informed by it. In us, the knowledge of death structures a consciousness that reaches beyond the limits of the perishable, because we come to see that even though everything perceptible is changing, that change continues in modified forms beyond any of our ideas about time. Conscious existence is not just mortality plus an extraneous dollop of intelligent awareness; it is a true union of opposites. A human life unfolds within the tenuous domains of perishing and nonperishing reality simultaneously; it is life structured by death.
In order to be authentically human, we need to accept the mystery and responsibility of participation in both of these dimensions of reality that constitute life structured by death. At the end of the day, there are not two categories of experience, only a mind that sets up two categories for explanatory purposes. The heart of yoga is the realization of the inherent flow of life within the reality of a conditional existence. This moves us to become better humans. This also returns us again to the first limb (yama) of practice: the responsibility we all share to contribute to the peace and flexibility rather than the violence and rigidity of this world. If we are to live together in this overpopulated, impermanent, and conflicted world, a meditation on death is a helpful antidote to self-centeredness. Yoga teaches us that, like jewels in Indra’s Net, when we lose our sense of separateness from one another and from the world-at-large, when the conceit “I am” is seen to be nothing other than a fictional creation, we become the net.