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We Are Already Dead

Paul Bahder, MD 

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In Tibet during funeral ceremonies the monks recite verses from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and keep reassuring the person that passed on saying, “You are now dead. Keep moving on and don’t look back. Realization of this truth is your awakening into reality.” While traditionally this book is read to a dying person, in the spiritual circles it is used as a guide for the living. Spiritual adepts look at the book’s instruction as manual for transition of consciousness from the life in time and space, our physical sense of life, to the spiritual realm of the eternal.

What we call “our life” is really the experience that takes place in time and space. The ever-changing character of our physical experience has led the Buddha to formulate the Law of Impermanence and Jesus to say, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The underlying commonality between these pointers to truth is the realization that the physical experience of being alive is temporary, changing and in a deeper way not the ground reality of what is. It is the realization that behind this world of appearances there exists a realm, a context that is changeless, not limited by time or space.

When we are fixated and bound by the impermanent flow of experience we are in fact unaware of the changeless context of consciousness. The relentless passing of what we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, of what we imagine or think means that we are already possessed by time and dead to the timeless. It means that time, the condition of passing on and ending everything without an exception is really the realm of death – the end of what we know.

We are in fact already dead and it is only our unresolved issues that keep us attached to the world of images and sounds that we know. Our family, the places we know, the settings that have served as the background to the story of our life – these are the emotional attachment points keeping us in the past and preventing us from recognizing that this past is in fact already GONE. We are already dead to the past. The past is no longer here. It is gone as we know it. It exists only as reflections in our mind bringing up emotional content and drawing us into the dream we call “our life.”

The future likewise is not here. We do not have life in the future simply because the future is not here. We cannot live in the future. We cannot eat, or kiss or cry in the future. Our experience is always now even if it involves images symbolic of another time. The past is gone, the future is not yet here. Time removes us from living to dreaming. “Don’t look back. Move on. You are already dead.” This is the priceless advice we receive about our experience in the physical realm.

Tibetan Book of the Dead is in fact the book of the living. It calls adepts to awake into a higher sense of reality, out of the temporal to life eternal. It reminds us over and over again saying, “You are dead. Keep moving toward the light. Do not look back. Recognize you are already dead.” It assures us that the sensory-mental experience we may be having is a delusion, a mirage engaging out attention in empty, lifeless images. True life lies ahead, in the unknown. True life is being revealed to us in the present moment. It is timeless and it cannot exist in time. That is why it has no duration. Its appearance is signaling at the same time its dissolution and end. Time does not exist in the eternal. The eternal is timeless. The eternal is not a whole lot of time. Time has no entrance into eternal even though eternal permeates time.

From the dead we can be resurrected into the living. But that does not happen by returning to the past. Sentimental, sensory-mental images build the story of who we believe we are. We formulate a concrete sense of self out of the past. Experiences, some good and pleasant, many excruciatingly painful are like scenes in a play that builds the plot of our life. These images not only create a sense of the past but they also determine the future. We fall into character acting. We live out the plot. Our life is one of following the script. We shy away from situations that can throw us into the unknown. We take the most painful known in preference to the possibly glorious unknown. We become tragic heroes who follow their allotted course. With each experience moving closer to the culmination of the tragedy that deep down we believe our “life” to be.

How difficult it is to deviate from the “program” of our life? When we look around it is easy to see how most people follow a most predictable path. Growing up, education, job, relationships, marriage, children, stresses, ailments of advancing age, disappointments in several major areas of life, old age, loss of relationships, finances, bodily functions, health, and finally death. What if at some point during this life story of ours we stop listening to the script? What if we open up to the new – that new that the Bible speaks of when it says, “Christ makes all things new”? What if the plot of our life becomes discontinuous and there will be no way to determine with certainty what will come next? What if the story of our life turns out to be entirely different that we ever imagined?

To be resurrected from the dead means to be awakened from the story of our life into a new sense, into the Ever Living Presence that is beyond any story. As long as we are carrying with us the burden of the past, we are determined by the past. There is no room for the new, no space to behold the revelation just waiting to usher us into the Unconditioned Life.

“Keep moving. Realize that you are already dead. There is nothing for you here.” “The experience you are having is universal. Everybody passes through the portal of time. Do not be afraid.” Eternal is beyond time. Eternal is NOW. Not in this moment in time. Not a point in this linear flow of experience that we call out human life, but in the Timeless which is actually not enclosed by time.

How much easier will it be to go through life, face difficult situations, make impossible decisions knowing that you are already dead? How much easier to take rejection or insults? So much of the pain and suffering of our everyday life has to do with our image of the future. No more time means no more agonizing over our experience. “You are already dead.”

Being dead means not having a future. That is difficult enough to accept. But imagine giving up the past. That is almost impossible to accomplish.

Not having a future means giving up all fantasies about what may happen. It means giving up that thought that “everything will work out” and it will all be well. It means there is nothing more to look forward to. That this is as good as it gets. Much of our motivation comes from the fantasy about future. We so often do things because we want to control the outcome, attain a particular experience. This is true from the simplest of things to the biggest decisions in our life. It may determine why we dress a certain way or why we adopt certain mannerism and it can determine our choice of profession, selection of partners, decisions about where we live, who we socialize with, what degrees we are going to collect. So when time ends, when we run out of time as in a terminal disease or as in the split second before a fatal car accident, then we get to experience the not-future NOW. We are then removed from time. Without future we are landed into Now.

However, releasing the future even though difficult and often painful is not half as difficult and overwhelming as releasing the past. Old people often have a growing realization that their future is limited. But do they routinely enter the Now? No, they usually focus on the past. They recall images from childhood or from later life and keep them alive by reliving them. It is not unusual for elderly people to talk about relatives long gone, about childhood events, about a time from the story of their life that was in the past imprinted on their mind. The new plot does not unfold for them any more. The old replays itself. There is nothing new happening in their life. It’s all re-runs.

Giving up the past is much harder even than giving up the future. While the future holds a promise, the past holds an assurance. The future exists as a mental image. It is how we envision our life to be. But it has not been experienced emotionally or physically. We have not touched the future. We only imagine what it would be like.

The past is different. We touched it, we felt it, we cried, we laughed. We were happy. We made love. We heard it, we saw and we smelled it. We were disappointed and elated. The past comes in Technicolor with all the associated special effects. It has surround sound, smell, tactile impressions. The past is what defines us even more than the future. While the future always remains to a certain extent uncertain, the past, we believe, is what cannot be changed; it is the stuff of certainty of our egoic life. While it is not true that the past cannot be changed – our mind is always re-writing the script to fit its current needs and current plot development – the past appears solid, untouchable, something you cannot argue with.

And it is when we come to the possibility of giving up the past, realizing that it is GONE, that we are faced with sadness. This is not just a little sadness. This is not just a measure of grief. This loss is quite literally a total annihilation. This sadness reaches beyond the human depth. It is like an ocean that has no end. It seems like it is something we are totally incapable to travel beyond. I really wonder if this sadness has an end.

Giving up the past means giving up all that we know. It means giving up the concept of self and the path, the script, that idea that we imagined our life to be. Without the past there is no more sense of being somebody. We are no longer a character on a trajectory to our destiny. The erasing of the past is also the dissolution of the future. It is the end of everything as we know. It requires total openness, total vulnerability. No past, no future, no present. The Now is liberated from the grips of time. It is no longer a parenthesis in time or even some point in time. It is free from time. It is time eternal. It is life unfettered by conditions, without limitations. Life in itself and not as reflected off mental concepts.

Yes, true Life cannot be found in its modifications and modulations. The purest music is not in the notes. It is in the silence. Life is not in its conditions. It is in its beingness. That is why one of the oldest names of Truth-Life given in our Western tradition is “I am that I am.” It points to beyond the categories of time. It reveals a glimpse from behind the curtain of time. It says that “I am” or “beingness” is a name of reality for the initiated. It is not about what we have. Not about our accomplishment. When you take those away, you take away all images of the past and all promises for a future. You are left with the timeless “I am.”

“I am life eternal.” That statement does not speak of experience in time. It points to the timeless. It talks about being dead – according to the understanding of this world of time and space. It encourages us to move on. “Do not look back. You are already dead. Follow the unfolding experience arising in front of you.”

“Realization of this truth is your release into freedom.” It is the realization that this experience we are now having is not life. Even scientists will tell us that what we see is not the present. It is an appearance of something from the past. The time light travels to meet the eye, the time it takes the mind to process the input; not to mention the fact that mind also needs to retrieve memories in order to categorize the experience and assign it a meaning and that requires time – all of that give us the dream experience based on images and not what is. What is, is timeless. What we experience is in time. 

In fact it is quite impossible to live in the present. What appears as the present can at best be a recent past. And of course we often get to experience the fantasies of the future. Either way when we live in time, we are not living in the Now. The Presence does not appear in time. Or if it does, it appears disguised as the changeable, the passing, the impermanent. Only waking out of this experience can we come to see the Timeless Now and behod the true reality of what is.

“Realize you are now dead. Keep moving on. Don’t look back. Do not fear.”