Earth, give me back your pure gifts, the towers of silence which rose from the solemnity of their roots. I want to go back to being what I have not been, and learn to go back from such deeps that amongst all naturala things I could live or not live; it does not matter to be one stone more, the dark stone, the pure stone which the river bears away.
The only way to avoid death is not to be born in the first place. In death there is union with the Beloved. The real skill is to reach the secret of death before dying.
We prepare for death, or rather eternity, by consciously adjusting the focus of our life so that it is not upon our personality and the flowing world that spawns upon it, but instead upon our individuality and the Great Fullness with which we are one. This process of focusing our attention is called meditation. In meditation we die to the personality and are reborn as something much greater. That rebirth is not a sudden or one-time event, but is a gradual process in which we become ever more focused on who and what we really are behind the mask of personality ... the process of dying to death by being reborn to reality.
