Death As Timeless Reality
Thousands of people have been privileged to catch glimpses of the reality that encloses space and time like a vast multidimensional bubble. Some people seem to have contacted this timeless realm through near-death experiences, but it is also accessible in everyday life.
Who you are depends on what world you see yourself living in. Because it is ruled by change, the first world contains sickness, aging, and death as inevitable parts of the scenery; in the second world, where there is only pure being, these are totally absent. Therefore, finding this world within ourselves and experiencing it, even for a moment, could have a profound effect on the process of sickness and aging, if not death itself.
This possibility has always been accepted as fact in the East. In India and China, some spiritual masters are believed to have lived hundreds of years as a result of achieving a state of timeless awareness. The new paradigm assures us that there is a level of Nature where time dissolves, or, to turn it around, where time is created.
This level is extremely enigmatic, even by quantum standards, since it existed before the creation of space and time. The rational mind cant conceive of such a state, because to say that something existed before time began is a contradiction in logic.
Yet the ancient sages believed that direct knowledge of timeless reality is possible. Every generation has affirmed that assertion. Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor eternity, only Being.
It has taken three generations for a new paradigm to show us that Being is a very real state, existing beyond change and death, a place where the laws of Nature that govern change are overturned.
Death is ultimately just another transformation, from one configuration of matter and energy into another. But unless you can stand outside the arena of change, death represents an end point, an extinction. To escape death ultimately means escaping the worldview that gives dea! th its t errible sense of closure and finality.
Adapted from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1998).
