Reflection 784

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Death

Interviewer: What about death?

Douglas: When I look in the mirror, I see someone who is under sentence of death. I mean, he is. And that is quite proper, and I'm happy about that because he is something that a mortician can handle and is going to handle. But when I look in this direction, at what I am looking out of, it is much too big—no mortician that I know is going to be able to handle what's here. So it's a case of, what dies? When there is content, when there is this or that or the other, there is change and there is death. That's the long and short of it. But this Space I am here, this Capacity, this Awareness, this Nothingness has no content of itself. I have no experience of it beginning, or of it being interrupted. It's not in that game at all. It is Capacity for death. Everything in it dies, including planets and galaxies and people and every darn thing. But the Space here, this aware No-thingness—it's not in the market for death because there is nothing to die, nothing to change there. In a sense it is absolutely timeless. Not in a sense but actually. This is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of just simple inspection.

Interviewer: So you are not afraid of death?

Douglas: Well, I'm not terribly keen on the aches and pains of it etc., and causing distress, and being a nuisance. All my gear has to be gone through, and all that nonsense. No, I don't like death any more than anyone else. But who dies? That's the point. Douglas, fortunately, is a temporary phenomenon, and even more fortunately, where I am coming from, isn't like that at all. So, just as it is face to no face, so it is death to no death. Asymmetry again.

From an interview with Douglas Harding, New Dimensions Radio, February 1985