Some time ago I was at an Aldi near the Central Station in Leiden. I almost never go to the Aldi, but for whatever reason I was there.
It’s a small store, there are no windows, bright white lights, the produce is surprisingly fresh and sometimes you can find Trader Joe’s products.
I was inside the store, nothing special, then suddenly there was the experience of being everything. If I try to describe it probably the closest I can come is a kind of awareness floating: the Aldi, Iguazu Falls, it’s all good. There was no-body to reference back to or to “ground me”. No magic, nothing shocking, I just dropped into a state where “there” “was” everything.
As usual, it took some time to integrate the experience. And as the months went by (and the years?) one day I found myself talking to a very old sympathique Dutch man in Katwijk, he was selling tiny handmade poetry booklets on a street market. At the time I was also writing poetry, I had accidentally started writing poetry to try to make sense of who or what I was, a habit that grew stronger and more fun after my son’s birth.
We had a long conversation, he had been practicing Zen for many years, it was a quite pleasant and unexpected encounter. At some point he paused and told me: you know, Buddhism is a religion. He told me that to indicate his posture, but also to find out where I stand in the whole philosophy – religion situationship. To my surprise, I very easily agreed with him.
I think I always saw Buddhism mostly as religion in Asia and a philosophy in the West. Probably due to an amalgamation of ideas, thoughts, assumptions and all sorts of mental objects supporting the idea of philosophy being superior, above or further ahead.
But after the Aldi experience + a lot of time, now there is no doubt in me that what happened in the Aldi is what happens when we die.
This is not what I think. Due to the embodied experience, I now believe that.
After years of meditation practice, Buddhism changed my understanding of death and more significantly, what happens after we die, and for me at least, that is what religions do, provide a map, idea or “certainty” about the afterlife.
Maybe in some years that experience will be explained by synapses and chemicals in our brains, or I’ll have a new experience that’ll override my experiences of unbound awareness.
More likely, that narrative or need to interpret experiences will dissolve. But for now, I feel this is what happens when we die, and I sort of live accordingly.
The Dutch & the child in Katwijk
Self-Ethnography 