Ram Dass:

Then he and I talked back and forth — I mean, I talked, and he did his Morse Code — about what the incarnation was like. We were looking into each other’s eyes, and after a while the space got quieter and quieter, until pretty soon we were just sitting there appreciating it all together — the total tapestry of a human life, with all its beauty and all its suffering. The whole room started to take on this purple glow, and he was radiant. He spelled out to me, “Much light, much light.”

For me, it was as if we had met in a space behind the da-nce, the dance of being “someone dying of ALS” and of being “someone there to help somebody dying of ALS.” We met as fellow souls. “You in there? I’m in here. Wow, what a trip you’re on!” Think about meeting another human being that way. It’s so rare for us, we call it “soul mates” when it happens. But ultimately the game is to be there for everybody as a soul, if they’re ready to come out and play. And if they want to stay egos, that’s fine too — I can still be a soul, no matter who they want to be.

It turns out that the whole journey of aging is something designed to lead us from thinking of ourselves as egos to knowing ourselves as souls. We’re given opportunity after opportunity to practice letting go and to shift our perspective from ego to soul-view. However if aging doesn’t do it for us, then the next stage, dying, certainly will. Because at death the ego ceases; the soul, on the other hand, goes on. The soul doesn’t age the way the body ages, so aging and dying are trips of the ego and of the physical manifestation. The soul is merely watching: birth, existence, aging, death. In India they talk about dying as “dropping the body.” — Beliefnet.com