11. deathandbirth

For all things born in truth must die, and out of death in truth comes life. Face to face with what must be, cease thou from sorrow. -- Chapter 2, verse 27, The Bhagavad Gita (Tr. Juan Mascaro)

We live in, and as an embodying of, a universe forever coming into existence, forever departing. That is true this moment now and all moments ever (for the "ever" of eternity is now).

The truth is that everything born must die: hopes, dreams, bodies, mountains, bears, societies, civilizations, you, me, us, them, planets, galaxies, chickens, cats, molecules, businesses. Everything born must die.

We sometimes focus on the dying and death part, the eternal going-away, and ignore the next part: out of death in truth comes life.

Think of a wave (which you are). The wave may look stable but is being born and dying, arising from the ocean and falling back into the ocean, at every moment. The ocean is birthing it and dying it simultaneously and continuously. This is us this moment now and all that is visible to our senses.

Everything is a vast arising and falling. Our freeze-frame eyes hold it into solidity. We take a snapshot and insist that the world continue to conform to that photo. It doesn't. The cosmos is ceaselessly on the move, folding and unfolding. And we are that.

Sorrow is natural if one is clinging. In the reality of an everchanging existence, sorrow is somewhat beside the point. Face to face with what must be, cease thou from sorrow.

At some point for each of us wavelets, we will crash upon the shore or dissipate in mid-ocean. We fall into the ocean which we already are and open to the next forming.

A way away from fear and sorrow, anger and despair is to identify with the ocean while waving, to release oneself from the separative illusion.

As we will see later in this continued exposition of the Bhagavad Gita, this does not release one from one's work as a wave. Quite the contrary, it gives one renewed and more powerful and discerning energy for its fulfillment.