find death before death finds you there was an a Phil um spiritual teacher philosopher in early 20th century from GV from Russian area remember there um uh he later moved to France and Tau there uh he had an interesting he was a he said people are have a personality and Essence and he said many people have a strongly developed personality and virtually no Essence and it's very rare for people to have more Essence than personality that was an interesting way of looking at it and that's of course how it is that uh I'm now elaborating
he only there only a little bit of that and then he dropped the whole matter and then he didn't talk about it again so the essence there is there are two dimensions in your identity there there is the form identity the U as form with your your physical form and your name and all your knowledge and education and abilities and your past whatever happened in your past it's all connected and it all makes up your who you are on the level of form who you perceive yourself to be and who others see you and there
is a a connection between how the world or other people see you and how you see yourself and uh for the um when you are trapped exclusively in a form identity so you only know yourself as a form identity then how other people see you is of extreme importance to you because it contributes to who you how you see yourself so you might become self-conscious and see self-conscious in English means you're very much aware of how you're being perceived and you always a little uneasy because you feel observed and people are judging you and you
say and you want to appear in a certain way and there is a there's a natural tendency in humans to emphasize their form identity to the world it's a natural thing so I'm not you can't tell a little child when the little child begins to say or says You observe it that one child says to the other child look I can do this you can't do what I can do I can do this but you can't or the child says my dad has a bigger car than yours you can't say to the child don't do
that you're emphasizing your form [Laughter] identity but you know that's what's happening it's a natural tendency in humans to emphasize it could be a possession I have more than you it could be my body is looks better than yours or is stronger than yours or bigger than yours or taller than yours or it could be I have an ability that you don't have children start with that and it's that's I can play the piano what can you play I play play the ping pong machine and so the emphasize form identity is a natural thing it
can be there is a point where this should come to a natural conclusion I would say in a more evolved Humanity the emphasis of form identity as a person reaches adulthood a little bit after is replaced at the moment this is not what's happening but can be replaced by something more genuine and deeper and that is finding your essence identity that's underneath your form identity and that is spiritual Dimension finding the spiritual dimension in in yourself so that who you think you are is no longer you still have a form identity yes that level is
still there undoubtedly you have certain abilities you're good at this you're not good at that you're be better than the other person in this thing but not but but not as good as in the other thing or that remains but it no longer gives you your sense of who you are and that can only happen when something else arises that is deeper than the form and that's the presence and when you when the the presence arriving in you it has no form and is is not tangible it's it's there pervading your entire being uh then
suddenly you realize and you feel who you are essentially has nothing to do with what you possess how your body looks your abilities what you can [Music] do or what you know that's another one that's form identity with what I know I know more than you so so then comes the realization who you essentially are is nothing to do with possessions or looks or physical or mental abilities or other abilities and but it comes from a much deeper place and that deeper place no longer operates through comparison you don't you your essence identity does not
deepen because it's stronger than somebody else's Essence identity you don't compare yourself anymore to others in order to find out who you are and that's such a Liberation from only knowing yourself as that particular form because with that comes a lot of suffering it a lot of suffering comes when when your who you are is derived from the form of you because at some point let's you if you have good looks and then your who you are is based mostly on that and you feel Superior to most because you look so much better then uh
you look down on all these other people people who are not goodlook at all and and then you you even emphasize it you so you you buy great even you look even greater with the wonderful things you wear um and then as the decades pass you look in the mirror and there's something wrong slowly and you notice that the mirror is becoming seems to becoming defective it no longer shows you the beauty of who you are externally and then you need to uh pay for repair jobs uh but even there it's just just uh postponing
the suffering that inevitably comes when what your identity was based on begins to collapse and that's awful or it could be an ability you are very good at something but then at some point something happens and you not good at it anymore or somebody else suddenly comes who is so much better than you one could give many examples knowledge perhaps your mind doesn't retain the knowledge anymore more or it becomes redundant having having an encyclopedic mind is no longer a great thing because the internet is always better Wikipedia so if sooner or later if it
strengths then eventually you can't compete anymore you get arthritis can't jump high enough anymore more all these things for sooner or later when your identity is based on form then you begin to suffer so it's vital to have both but it's not easy because your form identity has its own kind of momentum and that's the ego the ego is anything you identify with as yourself becomes part of your ego identity so form identity is ego the ego is a formation a an energy field an energy form in you uh that is quite refuses to go
it it wants to survive as this particular form it wants to defend its form it wants to strengthen its form so although there may be and The evolutionary impulse of the universe maybe at work in you which wants something else to arise there may be the ego trying not it not wanting it not wanting it to arise and so you get scared of Stillness of inner peace can't sit still you don't want to stop thinking because you think I'm going to disappear if I stop thinking you and you want to continue to have opinions about
who you are the old opinions about who you are and there's a there have been spiritual teachers and spiritual Masters and Mystics throughout the ages have realized form identity Essence identity and there is a whole stream of spirituality that is based on deemphasizing your form identity and of course St Francis is part of that stream of deemphasizing form identity not saying look at me I'm so good at this or that but it that says uh basically I'm nobody I'm nobody in particular um that can go too far where it becomes another form so you have
to be very careful when that happens because when you say I'm the most miserable sinner then you that's not quite it that's because that's a big another form [Laughter] identity uh that can be even stronger than to say I'm the most saintly person there's ever been I'm the most miserable Sinners so Dreadful but to the emphasize form identity can be a wonderful thing uh once it it requires enough presence so that you already can sense that which is beyond and it starts with a little thing like in a discussion you're able to drop your particular
Viewpoint because it makes no difference whether you are right or wrong anymore and you just let it go and feel quite liberated it makes no difference whether who is right he or the other person or you who cares that's and and suddenly you feel there's a peace that comes there when we don't need to be right anymore that's because to be right is one way in which people want emphasize the me the me make the other person wrong so that's one way another it can can be very beneficial for some people who have been Afflicted
with some kind of suffering or disability which may be physical disability or whatever it is that makes it difficult for them to develop a uh a well to have a welldeveloped form identity let's say somebody is physically disable AED and uh so they can either seek refuge in some other area and become very focused on identifying with their mind or whatever it can also happen that if there's one major thing that seems to interrupt the full development of your form identity it can more quickly lead you to the realization of your essence identity that is
there have been philosoph of us in the past or spiritual teachers who had disabilities and it's because of their physical disabilities they were able to let go of identification with their unsatisfying form so if the if the form of you is unsatisfying strongly unsatisfying it can be an opening an early opening in into Essence identity the same thing happens when somebody loses all the things that they had identified with in their lives through some disaster that suddenly happens in you things are removed that you had considered to be an essential part of who you are
and life takes them away and suddenly you are faced with that nothingness or emptiness you don't know who you are anymore because life has taken away all those things that you identified with and then it can happen if you don't go into a contraction and and and quickly form another victim identity that it opens up into the formless the essence that is the piece that passes all understanding as it's called in the New Testament because how can a person who's lost everything suddenly feel so peaceful it can happen it doesn't happen always perhaps only in
a small percentage of cases where people lose everything potential the potential is there whenever there's great loss in your life the potential is there for the arising of your the essence identity and that is Grace you can call that Grace the grace that is hiding on the other side of every disaster it's hiding there you just need to recognize it but there is no need to wait for disaster to happen to you but and this is why we are here now we don't want to wait for disaster because that kind might be too late it
might not happen for a while it will happen eventually disaster will come to all of you because yes oh yes because you're going to die the body is going to die Des old age will come and then that'll be it as well as somebody said um each one of us has already been diagnosed with a fatal illness leading to death it's called life on the surface level of course it's so therefore the ancient dictum of spirituality is find death before death finds you because death is going to find you it's just a question of time
now what does it mean find death before death finds you it means find that in you which is beyond death it so the death that you find refers to the the death of the ego the egoic identity in you which when you discover the essence identity then the ego identity begins to die and that's a wonderful thing but not to the ego it doesn't mean that the forms disappear but identification with the forms is no longer there so you still have the same things as before but the identification doesn't happen anymore traditionally this is a
very painful process finding death before death finds you without a strong spiritual energy that you come into contact with in one way or another it's painful the only way you can find death before death finds you is for life to knock you so hard that the ego gets knocked out of you that
