all progress wears the aspect of death

I have become accustomed to, and learnt to welcome, signs that have the aspect of death.

The self is a slippery creature, that will struggle and deceive you to survive by any means necessary. Your sense of self is all-pervasive throughout your life and consciousness. Like a background hum you grew up hearing.

The only way to pierce the illusions of the mind is to find one true thing that you can rely on to guide you. Just one will do.

I could say "all conditioned things are impermanent". Whether you believe me or not is unimportant, you need to find it for yourself. Perhaps yours will be a different truth.

When you find it, take it into your mind and heart and let it sit there for a while. Keep it in your mind at all times. Suspend your belief in all other ideas, however sensible they may seem. And just follow your truth, slowly and completely to its end.

It is not enough to understand it intellectually. You must live it in each moment. It must be part of the air you breathe, the water you drink, it must be in your dreams and all your waking thoughts. It is true! Pure! Cling to it, polish it and make a home for it in your innermost thoughts.

Let every mouthful of cornflakes worship this truth. If you feel like you have swallowed a red hot ball of iron that is burning out your insides, it's ok you are doing it right.

Slowly, surely, one by one, other things you believed to be true will start to fall. You will see them as flawed and incomplete. When this happens there will be a tendency to cling to them. Don't. Let them go, and push if needed. As soon an idea or concept or story does not accord with your truth, it is faulty and must be removed from your life.

As you cut off a wrong idea here, and a wrong thought there, you will find your mind is running out of space. You see, if you believe "all conditioned states are impermanent" what does that really mean? Everything you know is temporary, ephemeral. Everything you will ever do will fall and crumble. Everyone you love will die. Everything you believe in will disappear.

Do you have the strength to maintain these thoughts, though the world around you will fall apart? If you weep and despair, and feel like everything is crumbling into dust, it's ok, you are doing it right.

It is hard, but keep at it. One day you will realise that you are trapping yourself. If nothing is permanent, if everything is inherently dissatisfying, then what is the point of living? You will look for escape routes. The mind is a fantastically tricky thing and will throw up lots of appealing alternatives.

Perhaps you will stop here. I am sure many do. But... what happens if you keep going? Commit yourself to finding out! You must be committed only to the truth, and nothing else. Nothing must get in your way. You must value the truth above your own life. Nothing else will do.

You will paint yourself into a corner. You will hit a solid wall of fear and confusion, and when you look back over your shoulder at where you have been, you will see that you have painted yourself into a corner and cannot go back.

You may suffer from insomnia and wander the streets at night restlessly. You may seek temporary escape from the truth in destructive ways. You may become depressed and afraid and alone. Everything will lose its colour, like a bad dream. Don't worry, you are doing it right.

What happens next is awesome, though it may not feel that way at the time.

Some small thing will happen, a dog will bark, or something, and then you will just give up.

You will give up the thing that you had been holding onto so tightly that you didn't even realise it.

And then you will die.

Really.

The crazy thing is that your body will go on living. And everyone around you won't even notice that you are dead, a part of your mind fused out and gone. You will notice the background hum has stopped.

I am not being melodramatic about the death, it will really feel that way. When you let go, you will lose something. But it was something that wasn't worth having in the first place because it was built on a lie. In the space it leaves, you will gain something else.

In the Buddhist canon you may find this described as 'winning the stream' or being 'sotapanna'.

Make of this what you will. It doesn't matter. My only advice, for what it's worth: follow the truth wherever it leads and look for the signs of death along the way.