17th February 2016
The End
The Sun is rising over Veranasi. I have
been observing the sky since before dawn. The air is fresh and clear but it
will be another hot and humid day. The Sun is rising for the final time. Before
it is time for the next sunrise, Veranasi, the Sun and the rest of the universe
will have ceased to be.
I am dying. There are other, more
complicated ways of describing what is happening but “I am dying” is sufficient.
Detail, precision and even accuracy no longer seem as important as they once
did.
As Mother Ganga flows downstream and
eventually loses herself in the sea, so I am nearly at the end of my journey.
Shortly, the cycle of deaths and rebirths will end and my consciousness will be
lost when it merges with the greater whole.
How long have I known that I was dying? We
begin dying when we are born, perhaps even when we are conceived. Think of
that: we begin dying before we exist! And yet we continue to live our lives
from moment to moment, ignoring the inevitable.
A little while ago (though it seems like an
age) I relinquished my final responsibilities, then came a period of immense
relief. I had no more duties to perform. Nothing would suffer particularly if I
did not do whatever it was that I felt I was supposed to be doing. Eventually,
that feeling of relief was replaced by one final duty. I felt obliged to tell
my story, so that others might gain whatever benefit they could from it. Maybe
memories are meant to be conserved, like matter and energy.
The remembering and the telling have been
refreshing, even therapeutic. From this point, perhaps for the first time, I
can track the trajectory of myself through all those lives. Each birth, life
and death has been reviewed. All those names have been identified. They are the
means by which we connect, but they are so transient. Our names are not as
immutable as we imagine. There are the formal names, the shortened forms, the
pet names, even the names we ourselves did not know, and all ultimately
identifying the same entity.
For every name, the memories have been
accessed and reviewed. They have been sieved and sorted, checked and
consolidated, indexed, collated and categorised. All those memories have been
cross-referenced to allow easier access and easier referencing. All those facts
have been stored away. They have been sanitised and cleaned, stripped of their
emotional content. Even the feelings have not been lost. They have been rendered
down and distilled. They too are stored as more information on the time-line of
my lives.
Nothing has been lost, but everything has
been transformed!
Names: the way we identify things and
differentiate one thing from another. But if there are two names, are there two
things? Not necessarily. Two things can share the same name and one thing can
have several names. And if you do not know the right name, how can you find the
right records? Do you want to know my name? Do you want to know my real name? My
name is… I am…
