Creating Space for Someone Who is Dying

Somebody Dying…

When I walk into a room and I see somebody dying, I sit down and I start to quiet my mind, and I start to move through many planes of consciousness.

As I let my consciousness flow into these other planes and I look at this being before me in silence. Just sitting quietly. I can see different karmic story lines. When I’m on the physical-psychological plane and I look at the person I feel all the pain of their lost dream, their fears, their social ostracism. In some cases, that person is busy thinking on the plane of being someone with an illness, dying. If I see that person exclusively that way as well, and say to them, “Don’t fear, it’s okay,” they hear in that a reinforcement of fear.

Sharing Awareness

If instead I begin to play with my mind, I start seeing this person in different ways, and I begin to see another face of the beloved. I enter a space where that person and I are just sharing awareness – all of the perceptual apparatus is dissolved, and all I’m experiencing is presence with the beloved. Now what’s interesting is that’s all going on inside my head.

In my head is an environment for that person in which they can do what she or he needs to do. It’s none of my business to die their death. I have no right to take away somebody’s suffering. But I can create a space. Where if they would like to come out they’re welcome to, because only on one plane are they somebody dying. While on another plane. We are just two beings in a vast universe.

So what I’m doing is making an alliance with that person independent of the storyline.

No longer are we somebody

Who has come to help somebody dying, and somebody who is dying. If I were busy seeing that person only as somebody dying. No matter what I would say. It would be reinforcing that reality. And that reality is a place of suffering for that person to the extent that they are identified exclusively with it.

So how do you say to someone, including yourself, “Let me help you out of your storyline”?

 

 

– Ram Dass

 

Photo by John Daciuk