That Which Never Dies?

I woke up and was wondering what it was I needed to write about today when I was shown a very unique riddle.

"Before life disappears, use the opportunity to find that which never dies."

I truly had to ponder this. All I had to go on was the few brief sentences that lead up to the puzzling question. It said, 

"Remember, each moment, what you are accumulating--is it going to be taken away by death? Then it is not worth bothering about. If it is not going to be taken away by death, then even life can be sacrificed for it--because one day or another life is going to disappear."

I sat puzzled and pondered this for sometime before moving on and reading the story that followed.

A woman's husband died. She was young, had only one child. She wanted to commit sati, she wanted to jump in the funeral pyre with her husband, but this small child prevented her. She had to live for this small child. 
But then the small child died; now it was too much. She went almost insane, asking people, "Is there any physician anywhere who can make my child alive again? I was living only for him, now my whole life is simply dark." It happened that Buddha was coming to the town, so people said, "You take the child to Buddha. Tell him that you were living for this child, and the child has died, and ask him, 'You are such a great enlightened person, call him back to life! Have mercy on me!'" 
So she went to Buddha. She put the dead body of the child at Buddha's feet and she said, "Call him back to life. You know all the secrets of life, you have attained to the ultimate peak of existence. Can't you do a small miracle for a poor woman?"
Buddha said, "I will do it, but there is a condition." 
She said, "I will fulfill any condition." 
Buddha said, "The condition is, you go around the town and from a house where nobody has ever died, bring a few mustard seeds." 
The woman could not understand the strategy. She went to one house, and they said, "A few mustard seeds? We can bring a few bullock carts full of mustard seeds if Buddha can bring your son back to life. But we have seen so many deaths in our family...." It was a small village, and she went to every house. Everybody was ready: "How many seeds do you want?" But the condition was impossible because they had all seen so many deaths in their families.... 
By the evening she understood that whoever is born is going to die, so what is the point of getting the child back again? "He will die again. It is better for you yourself to seek the eternal, which is never born and never dies." She came back, empty-handed. 
Buddha asked, "Where are the mustard seeds?" She laughed. In the morning she had come crying; now she laughed, and she said, "You tricked me! Everybody who is born is going to die. There is no family in the whole world where nobody has died. So I don't want my son to be brought again back to life--what is the point? Forget about the child. Initiate me into the art of meditation so that I can go into the land, the space of immortality, where birth and death have never happened." 
This I call an authentic miracle: cutting the problem from the very roots. 

Still puzzled I read it over and over again. I get the point that death is inevitable. I get the point that we will all die someday and we need not be attached. But what does it mean "to find what never dies"? In my mind all I hear in silence...and then enlightenment came.

No-thingness
Buddha has chosen one of the really very potential words - shunyata. The English word, the English equivalent, "nothingness", is not such a beautiful word. That's why I would like to make it "no-thingness" - because the nothing is not just nothing, it is all. It is vibrant with all possibilities. It is potential, absolute potential. It is unmanifest yet, but it contains all. 
In the beginning is nature, in the end is nature, so why in the middle do you make so much fuss? Why, in the middle, becoming so worried, so anxious, so ambitious - why create such despair? Nothingness to nothingness is the whole journey.
Being "in the gap" can be disorienting and even scary. Nothing to hold on to, no sense of direction, not even a hint of what choices and possibilities might lie ahead. But it was just this state of pure potential that existed before the universe was created. Relax  into this no-thingness...fall into this silence between the words...watch this gap between the outgoing and incoming breath. And treasure each empty moment of the experience and something sacred will be born...something that will never die.   

NO-THINGNESS

(resources for this blog came from Osho.com)