There is a step in the 67 step program that wants you to look at what would be your obituary if you died today.
But there is a much better test, the test:
imagining yourself being on your deathbed: a thought exercise.
Until today I’d thought that what it drives up is all the things you haven’t done, all the things that are important and maybe you can do now… tell people you love them, and other trite things like that.
But today of all days I had an insight.
The insight came because I was trying to figure out what is in common in people who do the 67-step program well, and people who rush through it, skim the surface.
I was trying to categorize them, but I could not see any consistency.
While I was looking, I asked consciousness to look for me too.
One type of person is trying to rush through things, always thinking of the next thing… never happy, never stopping, a life of hell.
I looked: is there a factor of fastness that is common in people who
- can’t hold onto a new capacity I turn on.
- can’t move from A to B
- in spite of all that they participate in, their vibration is low
And then it hit me: if you live life like there is a place to get to… all these three are true for you.
It can be a phase or it can be your whole life.
They say trite things like “stop and smell to coffee” but that is the surface.
The problem is: there is no place to get… because the “someplace is better than here” talks about a mirage.
A mirage that makes you run towards it… Riches, happiness, miracles… a place to get to.
What happens to life, your life, when you are hooked on a mirage? You don’t even look… you wade through it, to get to the promised land.
Let’s pit it against Don Quixote De la Mancha, the Man of La Mancha, certifiably crazy, certifiably happy.
What’s the difference? After all Don Quixote is keeping his eyes on the impossible dream, doesn’t he?
Or Martin Luther King… or JFK… or Gandhi…
The difference is their relationship to the now moment, the herenow.
They had a strong relationship with the now moment. They saw what was missing, they saw what might have been wrong, what needed to be changed. They did.
While they had the possibility, not a place to get to, but as the context of their now moment, of what they were doing.
But what does the mirage person see?
The mirage person sees “there is something wrong here”… making the whole now wrong.
The mirage person says: “someplace is better than here” and starts rushing, away from the now moment.
How does it manifest in their work in the 67 steps?
Their answers belies the fact that they weren’t looking long, and that they weren’t looking deep or wide.
Their consciousness isn’t given a chance to look, their consciousness isn’t given a chance to guide them.
Quickly… is their inner speaking… next.
So when they are on their death bed and realize that there was no place to get, that life is not about what you are not doing, but what you are doing, doing it fully, slowly, deeply, because there is nothing more to life than life itself.
Life is about living life well. Not some happiness to hope for. Not some riches to work towards. No, living life well, in the moment.
Now, that doesn’t exclude building something. Building something is the pleasure, not some phase to go through to get to what you are building.
If you are doing anything, I mean anything, you are not living well. You have been mislead by the mind that there is a place to get to, that the present moment is for one thing: to get you there.
Guaranteed unhappiness. Guaranteed misery. Guaranteed shambles. Because life is lived, moment by moment, and tomorrow may never come.
Stupid. Like everything suggested by the mind.
Here, in the work I teach, mind is a four-letter word. The curse everyone has to deal with.
But if that is all you have, then life cannot be lived… it becomes a rush to the grave.
What a waste.
PS: One other dead giveaway of this attitude: things show up as things that have to get done… Have to… done…
When you do anything with an eye on having it done, you are not with it… and that is why you don’t want to do the things that “have to” get done… Because you see that it is putting death into life.
Things, the grind, are life. Right now. and Right now. Not what comes after that.
Rush through it, so you can get to the good life…
Like a child that is told: eat your vegetables, then you get your cookie…
Never living, never being “with it”.
More here: Top Five Regrets of the Dying and how to beat them
Read the original article: The deathbed exercise