The Day You Die

When will you get to practice, you o fool, the day you die?

What will you do then?

How will you let go of all these things that are unfinished?

Will you say: “I shall return tomorrow and finish it”?

Will you say: “I’ll call my lawyer, and have him sign agreements and fill out paperwork”?

Shall you say: “just not yet” and expect death to take the long road?

When is your chance to learn to recognize that you have moved on, that the boat has left the shore, that the plane took off, that it is over?

How do you distinguish between the real you and the mask you have grown into?

When do you give yourself a chance to recuperate, to rest, and to enter the ‘real’ from the ‘surreal’ you call ‘your life’?

What can you take with you that you have accomplished, built, acquired, saved, dreamt, realized, planed, schemed, organized and disorganized?

Where will be that which you love so much or hate so much that it takes every second of your life out of the precious time you have been given?

Where will be that which keeps your mind so busy and so focused that you have lost touch with the purpose of life?

Where will be all those for whom you have toiled and lowered your standards, those who have kept your hopes in vain and caught your imagination in webs of circular promises of greener over-the-fence pastures?

How then will you know, o fool, how to let go of the by-gone and what to look for?

You are awakened, and you see your body’s laying in the dust below you.

It all gets dark, and a light is shining in the distance. Will you then think about the food in the oven? The contract you never signed? The movie you never went to see with your kid/friend/lover/parent? The guy that owes you a million dollars? The woman /man who rejected your advances? The neighbor who insulted your pride? The war in your country?

It is over! Done with! Finished!

You will NEVER see it again, know about it, hear about it, hear from it, experience it, resolve it.

It’s time to move on.

Will you o fool? Will you jump into the unknown with fear of the darkness and the lurking shadows, or the blinding light?

Or will you be taken to a resting place of love and harmony or to the place of never ending lack of love? Will you be knowing and seeking that eternal ecstasy, expecting it to embrace you forever? Will you be finding your way Home? or

Will you torment yourself with the bitterness of your lack of diligence and your attachment to the irresolvable: your past?

Will you seek the peace of never having to ever think about anyone or anything and bask in the warm light of lacking nothing, the ever-joy, the burning love that consumes you and re-generates you, that sustains you and expands you into oneness with the entire universe, in which you will be nothing and yet everything.

How will you know?

When will you start your training?

When will you understand that when the bell rings, the tests must end, the # 2 pencils must come down and the page must be turned over.

When will you practice taking that test, the final test, the graduating test?

This is the test that comes, unannounced. It is here at the term of your hour.

That is Shabbat, that is your return to the Lord, the Source of life, the all encompassing energy.

That is your practice.

Practice to let go, let go everything, at once, in the appointed time. Every week, months after months, so you are always ready, always prepared, always awake.

Practice to be in that Oneness; oneness with each others, Oneness with the Source, One with harmony, peace, love, kindness.

Because that moment shall come, and if you miss the practice, where will you go?

Will you graduate?

When the question arises: “Will you let go of everything and be One with us?”

Will you even understand it?

Will you understand that ‘you’, the great “I” you claim to live by, the ‘me’ you try to save and pamper with gifts and reward, your identity, your name, all you stand for, it will mean nothing at all? It must be abandoned for the new you to become One with all.

It will be so that there will be no more ‘I’ for you. Only a ‘we’ shall come out of your inner essence, your consciousness shall merge into the collective, the great One, the great ‘I Am”.

That is Shabbat, that is the practice of a ‘holy convocation’, that time to put our ‘voices together’; that is the practice for that ultimate test question:

“Can you let go and be One with us?”

And the Angel of the Lord kept silence.