Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

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as change in evolution. And to secure its continuance in evolution
there takes shape the concept of an underlying substance supporting
the phenomena a soul or spiritual entity which can defy the change
which is cessation, and which therefore can continue underneath all
change. And so, one accepts both life and death as separate concepts,
without seeing life in death, that is, change without duration.
Have we ever experienced death? We may have seen dead bodies,
dying people, but that was not an experience of death. We may
have the slowing down of breath and the stopping thereof almost
imperceptibly; and then a sudden relaxing of all tension. That is
all we know of death. Medical men know more, and so they can
speak of clinical death, when a person has died according to their
text book, or when he can still be revived artificially.
For most of us it means the end of a life, not only the end of
the functions of the organism, the heart, the blood-circulation, the
lungs; but much more than that. It is the end of a life in constant
travail, in search of something which seems so near and yet is never
attained; a life of strife and striving to become more and better, to
continue its search, to survive in order to exist.
But we have not understood life; we do not know what living is;
we only hope and fear, hope for the best and fear for worst. And
between these two there is living, a reflection of one, and projection
of the other. Is that living now? Or isn’t that rather death, which
ignores the present in abuse and exploitation, in self-love and hate
for others, in ignorance preferred to understanding in clinging to
memory and craving for an ideal? Is that living?
What is life; and what is death? The two are not separate as
entities or as opposing states. Life is not existence, for even a rock
exists; and so, death is not non-existence. Life is rather a process
of dying. Life as living must be new every moment, just as a river
must go on flowing. As soon as the river-flow stagnates there is
no river any more, but there is a lake in the making. Similarly,
life must be always a process of living which is new every moment