## Metadata - Author: [[Joan Tollifson]] - Full Title: Death - Category: #books ## Highlights - Someone sent me a wonderful cartoon for my sixty-fifth birthday. It pictured a long line of cute penguin-like creatures waddling in single-file across a vast plain that extended as far back as the eye could see, and at the front of the line, the creatures have arrived at the edge of a cliff, a very steep precipice—and the captions reads, “Man, I guess it really was about the journey and not the destination.” When the future disappears, we are brought home to the immediacy that we may have avoided all our lives—the vibrant aliveness Here-Now, the only place where we ever actually are. Whether it is the personal death that awaits each of us, or the inevitable planetary death in which the earth itself will be no more, or even the end of the entire known universe, death is the single reality that most clearly informs us that the future is a fantasy and that the person and the world and everything that we have been so concerned about are all fleeting bubbles in a stream. ([Location 123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07ZYRQ62Y&location=123)) - I’m all for staying fit, challenging ourselves, enjoying life to the fullest, and having a positive attitude toward old age; but in the final analysis, growing old is one long surrender, letting go into a process of subtraction and unraveling, a demolition project in which things fall apart and every form we know and love is lost. It usually involves some degree of physical pain, and it isn’t always pretty or easy. Old age is an adventure in uselessness, loss of control, being nobody and giving up everything. That sounds quite dreadful when we have been conditioned to believe that we must be somebody, that we must strive to get better and better, that our lives must have purpose and meaning, that above all, we must be useful and productive and always doing something and getting somewhere. This book is here to suggest that the loss of all that is actually not bad news. It may even be immensely liberating! ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07ZYRQ62Y&location=157)) - when I use the word spiritual, I don’t ever mean spirit as opposed to matter, or spiritual as opposed to secular. Spirituality as I mean it is a perspective that sees all of life as sacred, and by sacred, I mean worthy of devotion, full of wonder, inconceivable and ungraspable. ([Location 166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07ZYRQ62Y&location=166)) - Identified as the separate “me,” we inevitably feel insecure and incomplete. We don’t like uncertainty and feeling out of control, so we keep trying to grasp what we believe will save us. We try desperately to make sense of everything, to nail things down, to get a grip, to get control. And yet, the faster we run on the mental treadmill of thought, chasing the proverbial carrot of Ultimate Understanding, Total Happiness and Complete Mastery, the more confused, desperate and miserable we seem to become. ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07ZYRQ62Y&location=270)) - The so-called awakening journey, the spiritual path, the pathless path from Here to Here, is about waking up now to what is obvious, immediate, simple and never hidden in any way. It is about discovering what brings forth happiness and what brings forth suffering. It is not about belief or philosophy. It is actually about letting go of all the answers and beliefs, and waking up to the inconceivable immediacy and simplicity of this very moment—being just this moment, the only actuality there is, and perhaps discovering the jewel at the very core of our being, the aware presence in which the whole universe is contained. ([Location 275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07ZYRQ62Y&location=275))