IT'S Easter Sunday, the most important date in the Christian religion. Whilst the percentage of people in Scotland who say they follow a particular religion has dropped, including the number of Christians, and the numbers attending regular church services has declined even more rapidly, still most Scots have some cultural heritage in this religion. Moreover many people, while not identifying themselves with a particular religion or church, do have a sense of spirituality, or a wider belief that something bigger than us is present.

This is not something I personally experience, nor do I follow any faith. But whether we consider ourselves religious, spiritual, or neither, the annual festive date of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, as written in the New Testament, can give us pause to reflect on our own lives.

Leaving aside the core issue that divides people – Jesus as God or Jesus as just another human, albeit hugely influential – it is useful to remember the back story leading up to the Resurrection. Here is a man, a radical teacher, sometimes abrupt, impatient, but with views that remain astonishing, at least in my opinion. In the space of a few short years, he gathered an immense following, with crowds flocking to his talks. His popularity and his pointed disagreement with the mainstream views of the time, made him a feared enemy of many influential people. They plotte his downfall and the Roman overseers washed their hands of the matter. He was then tortured, humiliated publicly, abused then left to die in a deliberately agonisingly slow and cruel way, nailed or tied to a cross of wood. It was an appalling scene: a young man in his early 30s, brave and earnest in his teachings, made to die an excruciatingly painful death.

Then of course cane possibly the most controversial moment in human history. The stories in the four gospels say he rose from the dead after three days.

How does this relate to our own lives? Interestingly, 500 years before Jesus’s time, one of the other great founders of what we consider nowadays a religion, the Buddha, was also talking about death and resurrection. He came from the traditions of his own time, part of which was the doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation. This proposed that although we die, something continues in another form of life, a life that could be of an animal, bird, insect, or indeed a god or a creature of hellish proportions. Your future form of rebirth depended on your actions in your previous lives and current life.

The Buddha changed two things about this belief. Firstly, and radically, he proposed that it was our mental intentions that caused future effects, rather than the actions themselves. As an example, suppose you accidentally kill someone in a road accident through no fault of your own. In the Buddha’s time it was believed that this would result in future negative consequences for you, but for the Buddha, as there was no intent to harm, there would be no future negative effects.

Likewise, if you had the intention to kill someone but never carried it out, the traditional view would have been that as there was no action, there would be no consequences, whereas for the Buddha the intention itself would lead to future negative effects.

But more importantly the Buddha was ambivalent about rebirth. Although there are numerous stories about his altruism in past lives, in many of his talks he specifically refused to discuss what happens after we die, suggesting it was an area of speculation that was not useful to explore as it was not knowable. This was more typical of his reasoning method than the tales of past lives.

More interesting for our own lives is that he postulated the remarkable statement that we die and are reborn in every moment. This reminds me of Bob Dylan’s beautiful lyrics, “he not busy being born is busy dying”. The idea is that we have opportunity in each moment. Once that moment goes, the opportunity is lost. It is dead and gone. But lo and behold another moment appears. Another opportunity. An opportunity in mindfulness terms to notice what’s actually going on in that moment, whether through our senses – what do we see, hear, touch, smell, taste – or what is on our minds in terms of thoughts and automatic reactions to what’s going on.

If we unconsciously just flow with the automatic unconscious reactions of the mind, we are essentially dead to the moment. We have not brought our deliberate, clearer and more considerate qualities to bear on the situation. A Harvard study showed that we are like this a whopping 47 per cent of our waking moments. Just short of half of our life is lost – effectively dead or at least zombie-like – through unawareness.

Now think of someone you love who has died. Or if no-one close to you has passed away, think of a hero from the past who is long gone. I think of Marie Curie, or Maria Sklodowska-Curie to give her her proper name. What would your loved one or hero give to experience just a few moments like the ones we have, the ones we so neglectfully let slip through absence of mere attention?

So on this Easter Day, rise from the dead of wasteful autopilot living, and experience the miracle of being alive, and of the life around you, in the people, the pets, the animals and bird, plants, clouds, sunshine or rain.