The Parable of the Blue Sky and the Clouds
It’s amazing to think that our real fear of death is really a fear of life. It is a fear of who we really are. Our fear of death is at bottom a fear of ourselves.
What is on the other side of death? That is what we most fear. We are afraid it is annihilation. We think once we die, the lights go out and there is nothing left, just eternal darkness.
Blue Sky and Clouds Parable
In the book, Mind Beyond Death, the author Dzogchen Ponlop gives us this metaphor for our fear of death. He compares it to a sky full of clouds, and let’s just say there is someone who has never seen what is behind those clouds. All he knows is the clouds.
As he is standing looking up at the clouds, another person comes up to him. The original person says dejectedly, there are only clouds up there. The other person, says no, that’s not right; there is blue sky up there. That is what’s behind the clouds.
The original man looks at him as if he is crazy, and says, there is no blue sky up there. Do you see any blue sky up there?
The second person says that as a matter of fact he has seen the blue sky up there. The original person looks at him like he’s crazy and asks, “what kind of drugs were you taking then”?
The second person says I wasn’t taking any drugs, I’ve just seen it before. The original man just walks away shaking his head complaining about those dreamers who just can’t handle reality.
The original person who has never seen the blue sky is like most of us today, even religious people. They have never seen the blue sky either, and since no one can provide them with direct tangible evidence that it exists, they reject it as a bunch of “Hu-Ha”.
Faith Means You Don’t Know
Even religious people who have faith that God exists, don’t know if God really exists. That’s why they have faith. They have never seen the blue sky. They say they don’t need evidence that it is there; they have faith instead. But that’s pretty weak ground stand on. Faith can be shaky and thus, easily shaken.
Especially when you think of all the things that can occur in life that could challenge one’s faith. The sudden death of a loved one, or even an innocent child, the loss of a job needed to keep a family or a person afloat in uncertain times. Perhaps it’s a serious illness an individual or a loved one has just discovered, giving whoever a very limited time left to live.
Anything like that can upset one’s faith and bring doubt into the picture. Once doubt creeps in, faith often moves out.
Experience Not Faith
Wisdom teachers have told us repeatedly over the ages, that there is blue sky behind those clouds. They then counsel us not to have faith in this, but to discover it for ourselves.
We might study their teachings on how to pierce through the dark clouds to get a little glimpse of the blue sky. That’s really all we need, just a glimpse. For once we get that glimpse, once we have that experience, then everything changes. We now know there is something behind those clouds.
Sure, it could be that one experience of the blue sky is not enough. We might still fall back into our old habit of only seeing clouds up there, questioning whether our experience of the blue sky was real or not. I’m not saying everyone will have those doubts after their original “blue sky” experience, but some might. It could depend on the intensity of that blue-sky experience.
That’s why we have to stay at it, and cultivate more blue sky experiences. The more we have, the surer we are that there is something beyond those clouds. I’m led to believe that some of these masters of wisdom have had enough blue sky experiences to have cleared all the clouds away. Maybe on occasion, they see a lonely little cloud floating by, but they pay it no heed and it quickly disappears.
A Metaphor for Death
That is a great metaphor for our fear of death. We don’t think there is anything on the other side of death, so we run from it. But these wisdom masters tell us that’s a mistake and counsel us to go inside and see for ourselves. As I said earlier, the fear of death is the fear of ourselves. If we are afraid to look inside how can we ever find that eternal aspect of ourselves?
Those clouds I’m talking about are really internal clouds. They are the clouds we see when we look inside and get scared at what might be looking back. We wonder, what monsters are hiding in those clouds, so we shut the door on them, busying ourselves with outer tasks.
Sure, inside those doubts are monsters, but they are monsters we have created and buried down in our subconscious, and they are struggling to get out. We hear them knocking on the door of our consciousness but we are afraid to let them in. But these masters of wisdom tell us we have to let them in, maybe not all at once, but monster by monster.
We have to do this because when we die, we will have no body or door to bar their entry, and then, like a prison break, they will come on us with a vengeance.
So the masters counsel us to deal with them now, piece by piece, while we still have a body to control them. They also say if we do this diligently, we may actually begin to get a glimpse of our eternal self. We may just get a peak into the nature of reality and our mind. We will then get an inkling that death is not the end, but just the beginning of our next journey.
But the masters can’t prove this to us, they only can point the way for us to prove it to ourselves. It has nothing to do with faith, but it has everything to do with experience.
Faith’s True Role
Actually, I misspoke a little here. It does have something to do with faith. It does take faith that we will discover something when we begin our journey. But if we read some of the literature, and hear some of the talks of people who have seen the beyond, then maybe we might at least get an inkling that there is something there. After all, what have we got to lose?
We hear people like Plato say that the purpose of philosophy is to die before you die. We hear Don Juan of the Carlos Castaneda books tell us death is our advisor and is always located over our left shoulder.
We have Jesus telling us, something to the effect of, whoever wants to gain his life, must first lose his life.
That just means we die to our lower physical egoic self to be reborn into our higher spiritual-self, the part of us that is the “blue-sky.” Perhaps that is what the crucifixion of Jesus means; dying to our lower physical self to be born into our higher spiritual self.
Then there is the saying, I believe by a Tibetan teacher that says, “When you die before you die, then when you do die, you don’t die.”
So, if you are afraid of death, then heed the advice of these great teachers and start on your own journey to find your eternal self, and in the process, you may find your fear of death starts to diminish, as does your fear of life.
To learn more about the magic of the universe: Click this link: The Magical Universe.
Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash
