You Can Take It With You

People always want more.  Those chasing money can never have enough.  There are never-ending pursuits of power and control, and of conquests.  Competitors are always chasing the next trophy.  Others chasing knowledge always want more of that.  Collectors are insatiable too, and so are artists in their creative expressions.  It is in our nature to always seek expansion, as is the nature of the cosmos.  If you’re familiar with astronomy, you know that our universe is expanding ever faster.  We are just a mirror of that.

The problem of course is that instead of channeling our expansion into elevating our consciousness, we channel it towards our egoic priorities.  About that, we’ve heard that you can’t take it with you.  None of the wealth, power, collections, winnings… none of it transcends the physical.  Despite various cultures who tried to have those things accompany the dying into the next world, all that ended up happening was that archeologists or looters dug up those treasures right where they’d been buried in the tombs.

To state the obvious, in the external realm, there is no chance of taking anything with you because it’s all physical stuff and death transcends the physical.  Yes, that is obvious to everybody, but there are implications that we don’t usually think about.  Is there a part of us that is not physical and can therefore go on?  Instead of chasing external treasures, what if we turned inward?  In the internal landscape, the potential begins to shift.  The further we can develop ever-deeper inwardly, the more we can influence that which transcends death.

Working on the body itself can be viewed as inward work, but the body is still physical.  Working on the mind too, like expanding our knowledge, is still physical because the brain is made of matter.  But let’s go deeper… working on the mind (contemplative or inner-self work), working on the spirit (like meditative work), and especially working on the energy body (like yogic practices) impact subtler levels of our being.  The more subtle the level, the better its capacity to pass through the transition that is the dying process.  To put it in more mainstream terms, if you believe in a soul then you already believe in something transcending death, so why not work on evolving the soul rather than the bank account?

The mayfly lives for one day.  We may look at that and marvel at how brief a life on the planet can be, and yet the universe looks at a human life that way.  From a cosmic perspective, a human life is less than a spec that sparks ever so briefly and then is gone.  When we stop and think about it for a minute, it’s staggering that we spend our short lives accumulating stuff that we just leave behind anyway!  Why is there no work on the stuff that really matters… the stuff within ourselves that we do take with us?  Call it what you will – the soul, the energy field, the inner Self – the name doesn’t matter, its evolution is what matters.  That is the whole purpose of life.