Aware: the science and practice of presence — a complete guide to the groundbreaking meditation practice

by Daniel J. Siegel

“And where am I going when I die?” he inquired. My father was a very strong-willed, self-declared non-spiritual person who was an engineer by training and committed to a materialistic, science-based view of reality—his own words, not mine. He also had a way of having intense negative reactions to anyone in his family who might offer a different viewpoint than his own (my words), the correct view (his words). And so you might imagine how nervous I was as I considered how to respond to his existential question at that moment, a time that might be our last. So I said that I certainly didn’t know what happened to any of us when we die. Then he asked me what I thought might happen. So I told him what I thought. I said that after a quarter of a century of being a psychiatrist, I had never had anyone come to me in therapy saying they were worried about where they were before they were conceived. He looked intrigued, so I continued. If you imagine that there were trillions of sperm and billions of eggs in the world that could have formed you, I told him, but only one egg and one sperm of that vast set of possibilities of gametes actually came together, then you are an actualization emerging from a sea of potential, a plane of all possibilities. Okay, he said, listening intently. And you get about a century to live in this body, this actualization of a form that arose from a formless sea, the source of all that was possible. That’s your life; that’s the opportunity you get to live ...