Writing on the Subject of:

We pretend we are immortal. Only others die:

At home in our favorite easy chair, we read in the newspaper of live dying in a hotel fire in Cleveland, of ten killed in a bus accident on the freeway. Of three thousand crushed in an earthquake in Italy. Of the death of Nobel laureates in their laboratories. And of murders in the electric chair. We partake of the "survivors news," reinforcing the idea that "everyone dies but me. Sitting there, reading over the death of others, reassures us of our survivorship, of our immortality.

On the loss of control that we feel when we fear death:

If we examine our fear of death we see in it a fear of the moment to follow, over which we have no control. In it is a fear of impermanence in itself, of the next unknown changing moment of life.

On the "persona" we create that obstructs how we experience reality:

Our models, our ideas of who we are and how the world is supposed to be, create a cage.  Each concept becomes a bar that blocks the reception of the truth.  Each idea of how things are limits our ability to experience them as they really may be.  We can't go beyond our idea of the world to actually touch the world.  When we move beyond our models and ideas, we feel threatened and offensive.  Confronting some reality which opposes our self-image, our sureness confuses and upsets us confuses and upsets us.  We don't know who we are because we think of ourselves as ideas and old models.  The world is constantly confronting us with the truth. We are kind suddenly withdrawing.  Our experience is painful.

On why death is not the enemy:

What preparations have you made to open an inner life so full that what ever happens can be used as a means of enriching your focus?  It's an ongoing process of opening a life.  The more you open to life, the less death becomes the enemy.  When use using death as a means of focusing on life, then everything becomes just as it is, just this moment, an extraordinary opportunity to be really alive.

On being open in the present and how it realtes to being open to one's death:

As Achaan Chaa said, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, "all you have to understand is just as much, just at this moment." If you can participate in this moment openly, then you'll more likely be present for the next. If that next moment turns out to be on your deathbed, then you'll be open to that too. There is no other preparation for death except opening to the present. If you are here now, you'll be there then.

On our erroneous essential self:

Unable to differentiate between the object of awareness and awareness itself, we think of all the content of mind as our own, as "me."

On trusting our essential nature:

Who is close enough to the truth to live without honor, without dignity? Who trusts his moment so much that they have no need to create some arbitrary morality? Because they know that who they are is the essence of morality itself. They recognize that they are the shining awareness by which life is perceived. Who trusts the light of their original nature sufficiently to allow oneself to respond appropriately in the moment to whatever is called for?

On the persona we create and the damage that does to us:

We have become so identified with our doing, with our model of who we are, that we become incredibly insecure at the time of death. We no longer know who we are, because we have always traded off our true being for some stance in the world, for some position of authority. We are traded grace for the mask of someone doing something in a world of arbitrary values.

This self-cruelty of our holding two models can be seen in the eyes of those on their deathbed unable to continue manifesting the roles they have spent their whole life polishing and developing, guilty and confused as a condition they find themselves in, wondering what is real and who they really are.

On coming to terms with mortality and living with that reality:

Once someone asked a well-known Thai education Master, "in this world where everything changes, where nothing remains the same, worst loss and grief are inherent in our very coming into existence, how can there be any happiness? How can we find security when we see that we can't count on anything being the way we want it to be?" The teacher, looking compassionately at this fellow, held up a drinking glass which had been given to him earlier in the morning and said, "You see this goblet? For me, the glass is already broken. I enjoy it, I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun and beautiful patterns. If I should It, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocked it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, 'Of course.' But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with his precious. Every moment is just as it is and nothing need be otherwise."

When we recognize that, just as that glass, our body is already broken, that indeed we are already dead, that life becomes precious and we open to it just as it is, in the moment it is occurring. When we understand that all our loved ones are already dead -- our children, our mates, our friends -- how precious they become. How little fear can interpose, how little doubt can estrange us. When you live your life as though you're already dead, life takes on new meaning each moment becomes a whole lifetime, the universe unto itself.

On how our socialization creates our fear of death:

It is said that up to the first year or two, a child really has no concept of death. Death doesn't exist. It's just another word floating in the air. Between two and four, there seems to develop the idea that death is in permanent. "Grandma's dead; when will grandma be visiting again?" "My dog is dead" -- but they still put food out for a spot. Death is in permanent. Each comes and returns. As children mature, however, entering school age, they are pretty much in this world, walking and talking, exchanging ideas, learning and becoming socialized beings. They are already becoming acculturated. They reflect the cultural fear that they have began to absorb from the family. In those early school years, you often see a child relating to death as though it were approaching from outside. The Grim Reaper. Death is going to come and take you away. As children mature yet more, and the elementary land school years, they have a tendency to become a very solid part of the world. And then death is often seen as open duration, as though your lights got put out, a permanent absolute that sweeps you away. This feeling develops yet more deeply and can be seen in a greater fear of death and many teen-agers. What's interesting is, the older a child gets, the less comfortable he or she is with death. In a very real way, the older the child becomes, the further he or she grows from the truth. The child's original bully the death does not exist, then it's just another moment in life, is closer to the truth. It's almost as though the longer the child spends in the body, the more he or she thinks of the body is the only reality and that the loss of the body is the loss of experience itself. It seems that the younger the child, the greater the contact with the deathless and therefore the less the fear of change.

On being in control:

We began to see how that which has encouraged us to "be in control of our life" causes suffering.  That the goal of controlling pain, with the idea that paying is the enemy, actually intensifies our suffering, causes the system close more tightly.  While cultivating the capacity to allow pain to float free in the body and mind offers the possibility of insight and even peace in the midst of that which has always seemed a raging inferno.  Control is suffering.  Control is the bars that lock us in our cage of identification with our suffering as being all we are.

On living in the present and taking life fully in:

Life becomes immense when we start recognizing that there is no assurance that we will live out this day. Our fantasies and presumptions that we will live forever confuse us as we entered. In reality, all the time we have is right now. The past and the future our dreams only this moment is real if we come newborn to each moment, we will experience life directly, not in a dream. Born each moment, we let ourselves die to the mind's habitual commentary, it's judging and merciless self-protection.

There aren't many moments in our life and we are fully awake. That may be why we find death so difficult: because we keep dreaming our lives, we dream our death.

On ageism and the meaning of service:

Many societies honor their elderly for the wisdom accumulated during a long life. our society does not approach old age with that reference but rather with revulsion, so it becomes necessary for each to give themselves the respect they deserve. It is in the last years that many touch a sense of being but few trust themselves sufficiently to let go fully into it, to let themselves be who they suspect they really might be. Though many come to learn the real meaning of service: volunteering in hospitals, visiting people in nursing homes, sharing as big brothers and sisters, baby-sitting, in remedial reading groups, in grief counseling, they shine with wisdom and compassion.

On preparing for death early on:

You can't make another die your death for you. you'll live that one out as you can, as you do in the moment. As you deal with your dying now, that's what you'll bring with you as you approach that moment.

On hospitals as a dying enviornment and on our fear of speaking openly abour dying:

"I have been working in a hospital as a nurses aide for awhile now and see what a difficult place a hospital is for one to let go into death. For most people the presence of death is never even acknowledged in those dying are constantly encourage to hold on to life, to get well, to ignore the fact that they are dying and never, under any circumstances, talk about it. In short to run and hide from death in every way possible. It's a funny movie. The loved ones "comfort" the dying by pretending the dying is not happening in the dying comfort the loved ones in the same way. No one dares bring it up. Everyone hides his head in fear and trembling."

"This great freedom terrifies most people and what they share with each other is simply fear. They believe that death is something different from and opposed to life and do not perceive or embrace their own death daily so that they might know the freedom of it."

On the many forms of our denial:

Denial is important to recognize because everyone is in. It is the hiding, the resistance to life, the grasping at the old. When one contemplates denial in oneself or in another, one sees the unfinished business of a lifetime.

Denial is the resistance to acknowledging our grief, our feelings of loss that we carry with us and add to daily. Is it any surprise that the mind denies a prognosis of death when it has hardly acknowledged that it is alive? How could it be otherwise? Can a mind that is seldom opened to the truth of the moment, unwilling not to know, allow its self recognition of the unfolding as it is? Indeed denial tries to stay at a loss of who we think we are, of how we thought it should be, and what, be.

Many cultures have made a big business of denial. The multibillion-dollar cosmetic industry, hair dyes, toupees, corsets, "corrective" plastic surgery, are all denials of decay, bargaining is with change, depression that the body moves constantly from birth to death.

On the funeral industry and our denial:

Ironically the whole funeral industry is based on the denial of death. Stuffing cotton in the pale cheeks of the dead man to make him look robust, stitching a contented smile on his face, all it can to make death appear as if it were going to a party. Even in death, death is denied.

On death's power to center us:

When we take death within, life becomes clear and workable. One of the remarkable things about confronting death is the depth at which it gets our attention. If you could fully experience even a moment of being in its totality, you would discover what you have always been looking for. We don't pay attention to most things, but death catches our eye.

On depression and its role in our mortality acceptance.

Most are afraid of depression and yet there is in depression a potential for great healing, an opportunity for new beginnings. It is a confrontation with the truth that we cannot buy or yell or deny our way out. There may be a deep seeing of "how powerless I am." Though many view depression with alarm, a creative process may be going on we have no where to turn, nothing is working in the way we wish. We have come to a place where we are beginning to see how things really might be. Seeing that we cannot control the universe, depression has the power to lead us to a new openness. It is a painful process of shedding the parts of us that are dying away at each moment. We become depressed at our vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of change. Indeed, it may be in depression that one begins for the first time to take responsibility for the way we respond to change. Depression can have almost an alchemical quality about it when we begin to investigate the draws, the fear, the withdrawal, the anger in our lives and transmute them into a new richness, a deeper understanding. From this understanding a new fearlessness arises, a new loveliness. For some, depression can be an indie TA should into a new life that is no longer a struggle with difficulty but is instead workable and at last exciting.is

On on hunger to feel alive and search for externals that will "wake" us.

Focusing on death is a way of becoming fully alive. Because wherever the attention is, we're ever a awareness is, that is where our experience of life arises. Indeed, the recent interest in "dangerous sports" such as mountain climbing, hang gliding, and skydiving me all the ways we have of tricking ourselves and to be present. Many say they "feel so alive" when doing the sports because they make them pay attention. The more attention, the more alive we feel. Perhaps that is why so many who are dying also say that they have never felt so alive.

On letting go of separateness and our self image:

When all we have imagined ourselves to be is allowed to die, all is seen in its essentially empty and permanent nature. And we experience the superficiality of the separate self we have clung to so long. As we see the nature of this dreamlike separateness, we recognize that there is in reality no one to die and that it is only the illusion of this separate someoneness that takes birth again and again. Then when loneliness or insecurity or fear arises, we recognize them as the longings that have driven us from incarnation to incarnation. All is seen as just a coming and going. It is as though we hear the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha or Jesus, our original nature, for the very first time.