Daily Meditation: Monday, February 21, 2005

Renunciation - to die in order to live

02/21/2005

For human beings, the words ‘life’ and ‘death’ immediately evoke the notion of physical life and death, whereas physical life and death are in fact only very limited aspects of these two processes. Although people may know what life and death are on the physical plane, they are not at all clear as to their meaning on the psychological and spiritual planes: they do not know when they are dead and when they are alive. On the psychological and spiritual planes, it is by renouncing the lower manifestations of life that we become more and more alive. If we do not do this, what we call life is, in reality, death. Whether we do good or evil, we can always say we are alive. But we can also say that we never stop dying: if we do not die to stupidity, we will die to wisdom, and if we do not die to hate, we will die to love. Call it what you like, life and death walk together. Throughout our lives, our only choices are between life and death, between one form of life and one form of death. And what some call death, others call life.