acceptance and expansion

 

 

 Suzuki Roshi said that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world,

 but accepting that they go away.

 

 An acceptance of impermanence helps us learn how to die. 

It also reveals the flip side of loss, which is that letting go is an act of generosity.

 We let go of old grudges, and give ourselves peace. We let go of fixed views,

 and give ourselves to not knowing. 

 

We let go of self-sufficiency and give ourselves to the care of others.

 We let go of clinging and give ourselves to gratitude.

 We let go of control and give ourselves to surrender.

"Surrender is not the same thing as letting go. 

Normally, we think of letting go as a release often accompanied by a sense of freedom

 from previous restraints.

 

 Surrender is more about expansion. There is a freedom in surrender,

 but it is not really about setting something down or distancing ourselves from an object,

 person, or experience, as it is with letting go. 

 

With surrender, we are free because we have expanded into a spaciousness,

 a boundless quality of being that can include but not be constrained by

 the previously limiting beliefs that once defined us, keeping us separate and apart.

 

 We release the fruitless habit of clinging to changing objects as a source of happiness.

 

 In surrender, we are reconstituted. We are no longer enslaved by our pasts.

 No longer imprisoned by our former identities. We become intimate 

with the inner truth of our essential nature.

 

 In surrender, 

we feel ourselves not gaining distance, but rather coming closer.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Frank Ostaseski

from The Five Invitations

art by by Antony Gormley

 

the nature of life

 

 

 

 

 

Earth dissolves into water. Water dissolves into fire.
Fire dissolves into air. Air dissolves into space.

Dying [Dissolving], in many cases, does not happen all of
a sudden. It is a gradual process of withdrawing from life
in form.

When I speak of the four elements dissolving, I am not
speaking exactly of physical form. Rather, I am pointing to
the ineffable but observable animating qualities...
The animating qualities also dissolve - apparently missing
when we are left only with the heaviness of the corpse
after death.

There is something beyond the four elements - 

the spirit,soul, or animating presence. 

 The inner dissolution happens simultaneously. 

 Our medical instruments and devices can
certainly measure the physical disintegration, 

but the inner dissolution that happens simultaneously

 is subtle and still...

They are all dissolving - 

the elements and their associated states and as a result,

 the self is dissolving as well. 

 

 This is happening all the time,

 we just see it at the surface at the
time of dying.

Now who are you?

Fragility and impermanence are in the nature of life.

 It's all always coming together and falling apart -

 not just the physical properties of life -

 and not just at the time of death.

Our sense of self is impermanent. 

While illness can contract us into an even smaller sense of self, 

many people who are sick and dying speak of 

no longer being limited by the previous boundaries

 of their old, familiar identities.

We come to embody much wider identities.

 The interior life and the external world permeate each other,
they commingle.

~ Frank Ostaseski
from The Five Invitations

what dying teaches

~ Frank Ostaseski

 

starting with the fruit

~ Jack Kornfield and Frank Ostaseski