…”So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing. You can’t hang on to yourself. You don’t have to try to not hang on to yourself. It can’t be done, and that is salvation. That’s why you may think it a grisly habit, but certain monks keep skulls on their desks, ‘momentomori,’ ‘be mindful of death.’ Gurgdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize is that you and every person you see will soon be dead. It sounds so gloomy to us, because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting death. There is a wonderful saying that Anandakuri Swami used to quote: ‘I pray that death will not come and find me still unannihilated.’ In other words, that man dies happy if there is no one to die. In other words, if the ego’s disappeared before death caught up to him.But you see, the knowledge of death helps the ego to disappear, because it tells you you can’t hang on. So what we need, if we’re going to have a good religion around, that’s one of the places where it can start: having, I suppose they’d call it The Institution For Creative Dying, something like that. You can have one department where you can have champagne and cocktail parties to die with, another department where you can have glorious religious rituals with priests and things like that, another department where you can have psychedelic drugs, another department where you can have special kinds of music, anything, you know. All these arrangements will be provided for in a Hospital for Delightful Dying. But that’s the thing, to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.”
— with Jason EM and Jason M Mattick.
