Cyber Spirit Cafe

The last “Reflections” post that I wrote for my congregation in Florida was about the death of our dog, Emma, a week before Christmas. I’ve re-posted it and you can find it on my website. There was one aspect of that experience I didn’t write about but want to explore a bit, and that’s the meaning of her death.

Just after arriving in New Mexico early last November, we were stunned to be told that Emma had a malignant tumor. In the following weeks she handled and responded well to chemotherapy. But then one morning she became sick and deteriorated rapidly. It didn’t seem related to the cancer, and we will never know exactly what happened.

That afternoon, we went back to the clinic where she was being treated, thinking we would then take her to an animal hospital in Albuquerque where she would spend the night. Instead, we discovered that she was in much worse condition than we realized. Her vitals were not good, she couldn’t walk, and most upsetting, she didn’t recognize either of us.

With her life expectancy due to the cancer only a matter of months, we knew that Emma’s life was coming to an end. We had the veterinarian euthanize her there in the office. The first shot put her to sleep, the second stopped her heart, and she was gone.

“Gone.” Gone? Gone where? It’s a strange turn of phrase. As a pastor, I’ve been present at people’s deaths on many occasions. I’ve watched other pets die. Recently, I’ve found some new ways to think about this experience, which comes to all of us and to everything.

“He’s in heaven now.” “She’s gone over the rainbow bridge.” Those images are helpful in our struggles with loss and grief. But we don’t press them too hard or too far. It’s just so difficult for us to accept that someone or something we loved and cherished no longer exists.

What happens when we die? We know the physiological event but what is the experience? The prime human experience that ends with death is consciousness, or awareness. There are, of course, ways of losing consciousness that don’t involve dying, but such experiences are often described as “death-like.” Sleep has been called a “little death” by sources as diverse as Homer, the Buddha, the Quran, Edgar Allan Poe, and George R. R. Martin.

Yet dying always means the loss of awareness of the world around us. And the living experience this, as well. When I realized that Emma did not recognize us, I felt that she was already “gone.” And when her eyes closed and heart stopped, it was her aware interaction with reality that had come to an end. From the world’s perspective, and ours, the story of Emma was over.

“Who am I?” is the most important question to ask according to many philosophical and spiritual traditions. In the religions of south and east Asia, the pursuit of that question, a practice called self-inquiry, is often seen as the path to spiritual enlightenment. Such an inquiry is not an academic pursuit, but a deeply personal discovery and experience of our true self. According to the modern Hindu teacher, Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry is “the most sacred of sacred.”

The deceptively simple answer to that question, according to these traditions, is that our ultimate self is awareness. Awareness knows and precedes all our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences. It is our sense of being, our ultimate knowledge of our self, our fundamental “I am-ness.” And when that ends, so do we.

But it doesn’t end, and that is where we can find intersection with the biblical religions of the west. Asian tradition says that our awareness is really a manifestation, an incarnation, of the one Self, which the Bible calls Spirit. It is the presence of God within us and all creation. It is the Spirit that moved over the waters in Genesis 1 and the Spirit that was breathed into the first human in Genesis 2. It is why, when Jesus dies on the cross in John’s gospel, it says he “gave up his Spirit.”

Spirit, our conscious awareness, is what unites us with all people and even all creatures. It is why we are all, ultimately, One. But as individual manifestations in the world, we are also separate. And, according to English spiritual teacher, Rupert Spira, overcoming that separation is our deepest desire and experiencing that overcoming is the meaning of love. My awareness meeting another’s is what we mean by love. It is most profound in our deepest friendships, yet it happens in other relationships, as well, even with a dog.

I described Emma’s death above as the ending of her story, and to me that seems a better metaphor than thinking of her “going” somewhere. I don’t expect to see Emma again anymore than I expect to find a good book, which made me sad when it ended, continued somewhere else. Yet the Awareness, Spirit, Love, I experienced in Emma is still all around me: in my husband, my family, my friends, strangers I may encounter, and in any number of conscious creatures, including our dog, Lana.

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Death’s “sting” is its incessant reminder of our seeming separateness. But separation in formal existence is transcended in awareness, in perceiving our real self to be the Light shining within us and in all those around us. It is the Light, John says, which “darkness cannot overcome.”

We may experience the Light go out in those we love. It will eventually go out in each one of us. But that Light is nonetheless eternal. It has been shining since the first moment of creation. We know it in every loving moment. It is the joy of existence itself, knowing that it shines within us and through us, in everyone around us, and in every atom of creation.