I have often heard stories of people facing very sudden death. It may be that they had an accident, the plane crashed, they saw someone driving towards them and they could no longer avoid it, they fell from somewhere or something similar.
These are moments when we feel how little our existence is actually about time.
In such a situation, when someone is driving straight at you and there is no way out, you know you have no choice but to surrender. These moments feel like half an eternity and we realise that we are asked to go with what is, come what may.
In that moment, time somehow stands still.
When time comes to a standstill like this, a space opens up where we feel that we are making a conscious choice, in every moment and not just when we are about to pass away. We are aware of what we are facing in this extreme situation. There is no doubt, there is an omniscience of what is going to happen, even if we can't really follow it cognitively because everything is happening so fast. Our perception (thinking) is freed from time at that moment.
The interesting phenomenon in such situations is, and people who have survived such accidents or events report this, that there was a sudden deep stillness in the body that just asked them to let go. Suddenly, nothing of what had seemed so important before was important anymore.
A complete detachment from the things that one would otherwise consider vital were now only void and small, if existent at all. And this happened in this incredibly timeless moment just before a so-called tragedy took its course.
My wife was in one such serious car accident and she described the moment she lost control of the car and hit the guardrail as a moment of decision. She knew immediately that death was near and that she would only survive if she let go physically and therefore emotionally. All of a sudden, an intelligence spoke to her from her body and instructed her with the command: Let go!
In fact, she says to this day that this was the reason she survived despite burst lungs and other injuries after the car rolled over several hundred metres and finally came to rest on its roof.
That she survived and did not break all her bones was an absolute miracle.
The examples described are extreme situations that not everyone will have experienced in this form, but they describe a phenomenon that is relevant to all of us. How is it that in such moments we listen to our body and what it communicates with us and otherwise mostly ignore what it is constantly telling us? The intelligence of the body is available to us every second. So why should it only be possible to be in communication with it when we are on the verge of what seems to be the end?
What I also find fascinating is that at such moments, all control slips away from our own "human" system. When we inevitably know that we are dying or could die, we suddenly return to a truth. To the truth in the silence of being and omniscience.
We are no longer preoccupied with things that made our lives difficult, suddenly others and what they might think don't matter, suddenly there is this knowing that we are not alone, pride, drive, hate or frustration all fall away. Suddenly there is a purity and love that we do not allow ourselves in life.
You can of course say, yes well, that's easy, you also potentially die. No wonder, you have nothing left to lose.
But what is there to lose anyway? When the moment just before you know you're going feels so vast, warm and infinitely still, fearless, possible, familiar and holding?
Isn't that what we've been searching for all our lives?
How then can we be under the assumption that we are losing something when the moment before potentially passing, feels so rich and true, so absolute. Simply because we stop.
What then do we really miss, day by day, that this moment of reconnecting to that one force - for one it may be God, for another the universe, whatever you want to call it - reflects and mirrors to us?
How many of us think that we have it in our hands how things will go, that we can control what happens when and how?
Isn't it our very consciously made own decisions to deal with things that don't belong to us?
- to deal with things that do not serve ourselves or anyone else
- to agitate, manipulate or even attack
- to isolate ourselves from humanity and to despise and devalue others
- to lose ourselves in doing, to be seen and
- see themselves as victims and thus claim the right of ultimate irresponsibility
- to doubt because one has cut oneself off from omniscience.
We create this tension away from the aforementioned timeless, infinite vastness that is always available simply because one is and knows and feels how everything is connected. A vastness where we are enough and don't need anything from the outside, feel truly safe.
What we keep ourselves busy with, the dramas, reactions and fears, can only be there because we cut ourselves off from the big picture, from the moment of timelessness. In fact, we use them to distract us from feeling that one power, from embodying it ourselves and being with it, from living and sharing the responsibility that comes with it. The logical consequence would be that we thereby also remind others that there is this power from which we all originate, which always holds us. It never judges us or pushes us, but lets us decide when we return to it and thus to ourselves. To our origin ...Whenever we are ready for it.
We can wait until we literally hit the wall, or stop right now in this moment and - let go.