Death is Life

Before I had gotten sick, everything unfamiliar had made me a little uptight. I had felt separated from the people on the train, from the guesthouse keeper, and from the waiters in the restaurant. Every encounter had some feeling like that of walking into a wall, arriving at a place that stopped me, that pushed me back.  Now I could not wait to get past the gate [of the hospital I was staying in] and go out into that noisy, dirty road, to roam through the streets and mountains and valleys of this fleeting world. I could not wait to be of more help to transitory dream people who suffer because they do not know that they are in a dream, and do not know that liberation is waking up to the dream as a dream. I saw beyond any doubt that luminous emptiness is within each one of us. When we talk and walk and think, we are in that state; in our healthy bodies and sick bodies, rich and poor. But we do not recognize the precious treasure that we have. In reality we are dying all the time, but our [thinking] mind is not letting us know this. If we do not let ourselves die, we cannot be reborn. I learned that dying is rebirth. Death is life.

Yongey Mingyur
from In Love with the World; What a Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying