Yes, indeed, no choice! I must have around 1500 “Facebook friends” at the moment, and most of them are supposedly oriented toward spirituality. Yet I question this spirituality. The spirituality of the physical body? The spirituality of illusion? The spirituality of “Care Bears, everything is beautiful, everything is kind”?
Yesterday I shared a video of Tibetan funerals. Strangely, the comments were hidden by Facebook, and it said that only I could see them. Or maybe you can? Anyway, whether it could be seen or not wasn’t what mattered, but rather the comments that came in—and they were disapproving.
One comment quickly posted said clearly that it was not acceptable to share such a video, that it was shocking, that warnings should have been added (which I did), or even that it should not have been published at all… In short, the fact is that it was reported by one of my 1500 “Facebook friends,” and I had to sign Facebook’s charters…
Now I want to raise a question: what is your body? Muscles, flesh, fat, blood, bones, marrow, essences… If you believe in spirituality, it means you think there is something else in your body besides a pile of organic matter. It means you are aware of a consciousness, and that this consciousness is independent of your body.
So, do you think that when you die you will carry this pile of physical matter with you into the afterlife?
Whatever conceptions exist, depending on the different spiritualities, about what consciousness is, what the afterlife is, the common point among all paths is that the only thing that remains here in this world is the set of organic matter that constitutes our body.
In our society, this set is usually placed in a box and devoured by maggots, beetles… not to mention our billions of bacteria that will then get to work and spread throughout all parts of the body, digesting us from within—we call that natural decay. The other funeral option, increasingly common in our society, is to be consumed by fire.
In both cases, we see that this set of organs in which we have lived, to which we have developed so much attachment, will be nothing more than a pile of ashes or food for thousands of insects.
So there is nothing different from the Tibetan funeral rites where the body is eaten by vultures.
So what is shocking? Why be shocked by these images?
Simply because we live in a world of illusions.
A world where everything is hidden. Whether buried or cremated, in both cases we see nothing. At death, the funeral home takes care of dressing the body, making it up to cover the obvious lack of vitality, perfuming it to hide the bad smells. So when we see it one last time before the box closes, the body seems perfect.
Thus, we have very few opportunities to truly look at reality and question our attachments to the physical body, especially since our society creates every possible strategy, notably through advertising on social networks and television, as well as countless innovations pushing us to idolize this physical body even more.
So, I want to say to all the “illusioned spiritualists” that spirituality is not a dream. It is not a golden Care Bear kingdom. Spirituality must not be separated from the reality of life. The reality of life is that from the moment we are born, we are already on the path to death, since to be born means already to age. From the age of 25, our bodies show the first signs of aging and therefore of decomposition. The moment this physical body stops functioning, it enters its process of rotting.
Why is it essential to bring up this point, so strongly rejected in our Western societies? Most neo-spiritualities totally conceal this aspect, yet it is inherent to life! It is impossible to deny it—it is so. We are born, we age, we die, we rot. We? No! Our body rots! This mass of muscles, flesh, fat, blood, bones, marrow…
The Tibetans are a people who have fully integrated spiritual understanding into their culture. The body is only a shell that we inhabit for a given time. It is a bit like staying in a hotel. We rent the hotel room for one night. The next morning, we must give back the room and leave. Are we attached to the hotel bed? To its bathroom? Do we want to take the room with us because we are too attached to it? Of course not. That is how, in daily life, we must learn to perceive the body as a simple hotel room that we occupy for a time. We take care of it, yes, but we must remain aware that this rental is only temporary—and that it is only a rental. We live in it, but it is not us. It is not our consciousness, which is much more subtle than the coarse aspect of this physical body.
It is essential to meditate on these aspects in order to die in peace, because one of the three main causes of our suffering is attachment. Attachment to this “me,” to this “self,” which is rooted in attachment to this body.
It is therefore essential to detach from this attachment, without losing sight of the fact that the body remains our temple on the path to awakening, its doors being the senses, but this relationship of body to senses must be lived in detachment.
In Tibetan culture, there are many meditations designed to help us free ourselves from attachment to the body, and funeral rites are in some ways part of this understanding—or rather, they denote the realization of this understanding.
In the end, the dead body is nothing more than a pile of meat feeding vultures rather than flies… it is the same thing.
I conclude this post by saying to my “Facebook friends” that if their spirituality does not allow them to understand the essence of life, that is fine—but please, if it bothers you, just move on rather than “reporting to Facebook” a video that is nothing more than the reflection of a spiritually evolved culture with over 18,000 years of experience…
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