Living in illusion

So many veils and illusions separate us from the stark knowledge that we are dying. When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.

Sir Thomas More, I heard, wrote this words just before his beheading "We are all in the same cart, goint to the execution, how can i hate anyone or wish anyone harm ?" To feel the full force of your mortality, and to open your heart entirely to it, is to allow to grow in you that all-encompassing, fearless compassion that fuels the lives of all those who wish truly to be of help to others.

Source - Glimpse after Glimpse - Sogyal Rinpoche.

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Near Death experience from the above mentioned book

Those who have been through the near-death experience have reported a startling range of aftereffects and changes. One woman said: The things that I felt slowly were a very heightened sense of love, the ability to communicate love, the ability to find joy and pleasures in the smallest and most insignificant things about me....... I developed a great compassion for people that were ill and facing death, I wanted so much to let them know, to somehow make them aware that the dying process was nothing more than an extension of one's life.

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What is our life but a dance of transient forms? Isn't everything always changing? Doesn't everything we have done in the past seem like a dream now? The friends we grew up with, the childhood haunts, those views and opinions we once held with such single minded passion: We have left them all behind. Now, at this moment, reading this book seems vividly real to you. Even this page will soon be only a memory.