Spirituality Beyond Sorrow

Question:  What is the purpose or reason for living?

Adonis:  Do you need a reason or purpose to live?  Why is it we cannot just live our lives without looking for a cause or validation?  Perhaps, the reason we raise such a question is that we are not genuinely contented in our lives.  We are not living in the moment, free and creative and so life seems to be a torturous thing.  Then all the philosophers, religions and sciences come along and give you a meaning.  How sad, we look for a reason to live instead of living in abundance and contentment.  We do not have that deep quality of being sensitively alive so we look for a reason to exist.  If you are given a reason or purpose to live, is that living?  It is for you to discover the beauty of life and not just survive, not just exist, which is not living at all.

Question:  What is meditation?

Adonis:  To be honest, that is such a strangled word.  Why even bother with meditation when you know nothing about it?  Moreover, those who proclaim to know of meditation, knows even less than you do.  To understand what meditation is, you must look into what it is not.  There is no meditation as long as you do not understand who you are.  Your convictions, desires and fears are the very content of your life.  In the very observation of your life, inward and outward, perhaps you may call that a form of contemplation.  Actually, the core of meditation begins when you, the self, the ego-entity with all its divisiveness, face itself through direct seeing into oneself.

Question:  Why do I fear death?

Adonis:  When you say death, exactly what do you mean?   Are you sure, there is such a thing as death?  I am not evading your question but looking at it without assumptions.  The mortal body that is born must die, that is a fact.  However, I doubt if that is the fear that haunts us within.  Now to understand death, I must look into the truth or falseness of it, correct?  Only by facing it will one ever be free of the dreadful shadow of death that lingers over our whole existence from sun up to sun down.  Without being free of death, are we truly living? 

Now, can we as human beings understand what death is while we are alive and not at the end of our lives?  If I can taste death today then perhaps I will not have fear of death tomorrow.  Do you understand?  Now the entity that I call myself, that is full of fear, does it fear death or the idea of death?  Without understanding myself then of course, I am cramped and distorted by fear of all kinds.  Therefore, what is important is to discover the root cause of all fear, which is thought, which is the very substance of my self.  Only in the freedom from my self, will there be actual freedom of fear and death.  To understand one self is the beginning and end of all fear, which brings light and dissolves the shadow of death.

Question:  Is there life after death?

Adonis:  What would it profit you to know that?  Will it negate your fears or awaken you to the truth?  Can another give you a verbal answer that will solve your problems of life and death?  If you were truly living your life abundantly, I doubt if you would posit such a question.  Are you aware of life in and around you?  Do you look and listen to the trees blowing in the wind, the birds flying high in the sky or the smile of a stranger passing by?    Why do we as human beings concern ourselves with the things we do not see or know and completely ignore the things we can?  As long as you are not watchful and attentive, you will never know.

SPIRITUAL TEACHER ADONIS ALEXANDER
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