I recently heard a well-known magician say that “magic does not fool you because you’re stupid. Magic fools you because it’s stupid… because the human brain wants to have beautiful, wonderful, aha experiences.”

In other words, in order to be fooled, we have to want to play the part of the fool first.

In a similar sense, this world, this existence is like a magic trick, a magic trick that’s intended to create the appearance and experience of impermanence; to make death SEEM just as real as life.

And just like any magic trick based on a sort of stupidly simplistic sleight of hand, this great illusion requires only one thing of you when you first come into the world:  to take everything you see and experience at face value. To look at the body that you seem to have control over and assume that it’s ‘me’ or ‘mine’. To then look at the world out there and see ten thousand separate things that can’t possibly have anything to do with you.

A master magician relies on presentation and performance to convince their audience. This world is no different; the elaborate presentation of existence makes it so that seeing easily becomes believing.

After all, at face value, it seems pretty evident that you are just a person, that you are a body amongst billions of other bodies; each with a brief window of time to make the most of life before your expiration date catches up with you. It seems pretty obvious that you’re you and that’s a tree and that’s a dog. That you’re you and that’s the sun, and that’s the moon.

And so it goes, right from the start, very quickly, we go from being uncreated undivided awareness of consciousness, to a seemingly impermanent identity separate from everything else.

THE ORIGIN OF DEATH

So what causes death to end?

Well, what causes death to begin? What makes it so easy to fall for this existential magic trick of impermanence and division? Why does consciousness so quickly abandon the innate knowing that it’s no-thing (and therefore everything) in exchange for believing that it’s something?

Because it’s easier to identify with being something than it is to identify with being nothing. In fact, identifying with nothing isn’t even possible… and yet, that’s precisely what we are: pure emptiness; pure consciousness; an uncreated intelligent void that’s aware of its non-self. But when we come into the world, all we’re presented with are somethings, not nothing… hence how easy it is to play the fool and be fooled.

Fortunately, this existential magic trick has an achilles heel; your willingness to inquire into the nature of what you really are; your willingness to recognize that you don’t really know what consciousness itself is; your willingness to see that it has no inherent identity attached to it.

WHEN THE VEIL LIFTS

When you truly recognize that you can’t directly locate what it is that you are exactly, everything that was previously supported by the assumption of knowing yourself, is suddenly, immediately, rendered questionable.

The believability of existence collapses under the weight of your direct self-inquiry.

Along with the collapse of this artificial sense of self-identity is the collapse of ignorance as well.

After all, ignorance is only possible when you think you know who you are.

When you think you know who you are, you ignore the present moment (reality) by projecting a self-story onto it. Remove the self-story and the projection stops, ignorance disappears.

THE END OF ABSENCE

So what does death have to do with ignorance anyway?

Well, death ultimately means the end. When you ignore life, ignore reality, it is the end of life, full stop.

Although temporary, it’s nevertheless the complete end of being awake to reality, awake to life. So when it comes to self-awareness, ignorance is precisely death.

When you’re fully awake to reality and no longer sleeping in death, you realize that the you that is aware
has nothing to do with what is subject to death — because the you that is aware is not a ‘you’ at all, but a field of consciousness that was never born to begin with. You see that birth and death have nothing to do with life.

You see that birth and death are just the great show that life puts on… for itself.

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