In Stephen Levine’s beautiful book, he asks us to consider how it might feel if we knew that we only had one year left to live. It’s a book about dying. But it’s also a book about living, finding out what this life really is, and awakening to living in this one present moment.
There are some stunning lines. In writing about our tendency to deny death, to ignore the fact of our death, he says that at one level this is understandable. “The reason that some part of us denies that it will die is because it never does.”1
In my office today it is quiet. I sit still and listen. As I feel myself gradually relax, I deliberately let go of any gaining thoughts, let go of the nagging discomfort caused by whispered voices telling me there is something else. Something else I need to do. Something else that I need to find. Something more that I need to achieve. Slowly, gradually, I have been recognizing these voices. And I have been recognizing the constant tension in my body they create.
I let go and sit in stillness. Gradually even the most subtle sense of craving fades away and there is only stillness. The afternoon sunlight. A few cars driving by. Some children’s voices as they walk home from school. I let go of anything I think I need to gain in this moment. My mind goes completely blank, and all that is left is simply being here. Somehow, without any craving or yearning, this simply being here is more than amply fulfilling. It is everything. There is nothing else to want or need. It is all right here, and it has always been right here.
In the Uraga Sutta, there is a verse about letting go of craving like a snake shedding his skin:
“One who has entirely cut off craving, having dried up its fast-flowing stream; that bhikku gives up the here and the beyond as a serpent sheds its old worn-out skin.”2
How is it possible to entirely cut off craving? When a snake sheds its skin, it begins by tearing a hole in the old skin. Then it wriggles out of it. Biologists call the process “ekdysis.” Ekdysis derives from ancient Greek, ek =out and dyein=to enter, to get into. So ekdysis means “to get out of,” as in getting out of old clothes. A snake gets out of its old skin like wriggling out of old clothes. The old skin falls away useless.
When we really see how cause and effect operate, then we will understand how to cut off craving entirely. Everything in this life is impermanent. Nothing lasts. Everything that is born eventually dies. But there is one thing that never dies. It never dies because it was never born. It simply is. When we see this clearly, then we will see that craving only leads to suffering, in fact, craving is, itself, suffering, because we crave that which is impermanent. We crave that which does not last.
But to rest in the one thing that is never born and never dies, this is to find the end of craving. It is to find our true nature. The snake sheds its skin and wriggles free.
Levine asks us to reconsider our assumptions about life and death. We have been taught to believe certain things. But in A Year to Live, he encourages us to examine everything. “One of the first beliefs we come across is that the only reason we imagine we will die is because we are convinced we were born,” he writes. “But we cannot trust hearsay! We must find out for ourselves. Were we born? Or was that just the vessel in which our timelessness momentarily resides? What indeed was born? And who dies?”3
Throughout the book, his meditation on life and death, Levine points to the timeless eternal that is our true self. In all the flux of experience, the myriad comings and goings, there is, “an unchanging spaciousness in which all our changes float. How could we have overlooked the obvious so completely?”4
Ed Gabrielsen 
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