All hope abandon ye who enter here

One of the biggest problems faced by humankind, if not the biggest of all, is to get to grips with the concept of death. Just ask Ernest Becker.1 Nevertheless, the issue becomes much more manageable when we realise that, ultimately, we are already dead. To be more precise, we have never been born. Being implies separation, condition. We are the incomprehensible totality—beyond time and space.

Seekers throughout the world are out there trying to understand the puzzle of not being. Zen Buddhists sit for hours a day searching for that golden moment2, that prized instant when we fall away into the primordial void. That’s what the Zen teacher Kōshō Uchiyama meant when he famously said:

Zazen is seeing this world from the casket.

Death signifies the end of hope—the ultimate oblivion. To understand non-duality, we must relinquish all hope, akin to Dante entering Hell. Hope implies a future, a journey, a character, and a destination. This is still separation, still projection. There is no character, no direction, no time. Everything and nothing occur now, not yesterday or tomorrow. Completeness simply is—all-encompassing and limitless.

The British architect Douglas Harding expressed the same idea in his The Little Book of Life and Death, first published in 1988:

Obviously, what never lived can never die.3

We never lived in the first place. Our personal story is an illusion—a mirage in the desert of the absolute unknown. Indeed, we are free of suffering because we have abandoned all hope. Nothing can affect what’s not there.

We are already in paradise. Drop your Virgil, your Beatrice and your Bernard4. When you stop searching and dismiss your guides, you realise you already are where you ought to be.

You have arrived at your destination before even leaving home.