Let's go fly a Kite!

A close friend passed away today, I felt a lot of mixed feelings about myself in my relationship with others especially those who I have known do more than ten years here in Georgetown. This friend whom everyone calls Nona, passed away last night and was buried this afternoon and I did not know about it until just now, about midnight tonight. None of my other friends told me or called me about it, so I missed my chance to bid my final farewell to this man whose life I had shared over the years. I feel like i have deserted him in his finals days by not being with him in his hours of need. I will miss him now that he is gone but I also felt it was time to for him and there was nothing I could have done and worse give some false hope. My bad Perhaps I was not being compassionate enough, this is my guilt feeling of losing someone and being hopeless and helpless to do much about it. I will have to live with it. Every now and then death knocks on your neighbor's door and you are reminded that your turn is not too far away from the same knocking.

It does not take much to trigger my mind into all kinds of mental discussions when it comes to death and the same question has always presented itself, am i ready for it. The answer is as always i do not really know the answer to that but I do look forward to it when it happens. What must it feels like to be set free from this physical body, to be formless and yet to be conscious of one's beingness. To be liberated from the confines of this breathing in and out, of being trapped in a mental conditioning that is afraid of death and dying. I hope when I die I will be accompanied by the musical score .Pandora conducted by Hans Zimmer in my mind's consciousness, Kitaro's . Heaven and Earth is no bad either. It is said that the sum total of your consciousness is exposed to you at your first moment of death , it is so overwhelming that it is just like a blinding light, a flash of lightning that erases all that you think of who you are and leaves you hanging in the limbo of emptiness.

Maybe so, scary to think of it but interesting nonetheless like the vision quest of the Navajo Warrior, one can never be prepared for what one is going to encounter on the other side. Perhaps nothing, you simply ceases to be and that's it, end of story, no more traces of tell tales of who or what you once were. the 70 to 60 years of your so called life just up and poof! Gone! Would be a great waste after all that has been shared, educated and impressed upon you as you get to where you are on the last breath, is all for nothing.  On the other hand you could be listening to the monk or Lama's voice as he leads you from your moment of death state to the end where you reincarnate after 49 days of your Bardo state that precedes death; this is according the Tibetan book of the Dead. Or you could be facing the two angels of Munkar and Nakir, who are designated to ask you several questions of your faith in order to ascertain where you will end up or how you will be treated henceforth the moment the last of the last of your mourners have left your graveside; this is the Islamic view of what happens when you die. 

We will all one day end up in the Happy Hunting Ground sooner or later and how or when it is a matter up for grabs as none can tell except when it is happening gradually as in a sickness or through a mortal wound of being shot at or an accident. But the human mind has been preparing for this moment from the day he understood that he will one day die whether he knows it or not. Morbid as it may seem, I have never passed a day without imagining my own death and how I would ride it as it happens to me; yes to die fully conscious of the event happening and beyond. 

Can I too, like the Buddha declare to myself, "I, Am No More."