Death

A free and honest life includes the very real awareness of death. If we can find the courage to deliberately contemplate death, to keep it in mind, this can open our life in a profound way to a nobility, urgency, purposefulness and beauty. The heart grows in compassion and moves toward the Deathless.

If we, as human beings, are really interested in a very real way in our life moving towards freedom and the discovery of freedom, towards understanding the truth, the depth of truth, and our life opening in love, if we're really interested in that, there are a number of themes that we cannot afford to turn away from, that we need to contemplate. And one of these, quite primary among these, is death, death and dying, and particularly our death. Tonight I just want to explore a little bit exactly that, the contemplation of our death, the contemplation of death.

One of the first things to say about that is that, perhaps obviously, this concerns us all. [laughter] You can hear something like that and think, "That's just for old people." [laughs] Or "That's just for those who are terminally ill" or whatever. Obviously it concerns us all. But it's not a very popular subject. As teachers, we get invited to teach day-longs in different places around the country. Oftentimes nowadays they want to know the title of the day-long months in advance to sort of bring in the punters, basically. And I just wonder, what if you called it "Death"? [laughter] I wonder. But who knows? We can look at our culture and what we can see is that there is a current within the culture, I think it's fair to say, of almost trying to pretend that it doesn't exist -- certainly that it won't exist for me. But pretending that it doesn't exist, a little bit just kind of turning away, or a lot. A little bit trying to ignore it. And I don't want to blame our culture and this culture too much; I'm not going to get into that at all.

But this turning away, almost trying to pretend it doesn't exist, comes at a price. It comes with a price. I think it's a large price. There's a lot to that. The more we turn away, the more we build the fear, the more fear of death. The more, in a way, disconnected we come from reality. Death is a fundamental truth of our reality, of our existence. Turning away, trying to ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist, can only bring disconnection. And I don't know, even in Dharma circles, how many of us regularly, in a very deliberate way, really go into this and bring up, remind ourselves of death, contemplate our dying, in order that transformation of the heart, transformation of the being is allowed. I have actually no idea how many do that, no idea. But my sense, just as a teacher talking to people, is it's not that common. Sometimes when I just throw out the possibility in Dharma talks, and I just see the faces go white ...Sort of "don't want to know." Not everybody, of course.

But this contemplation doesn't have to be depressing. That's, I think, quite key. It really doesn't have to be depressing. A friend was telling me about being on retreat in India, and walking, and coming across by the side of the road the skull of a snake. Somehow intuitively, there was this recognition of death and the fact of death, and what came up was actually joy. The recognition of her own death -- and what came up was joy. She couldn't even put her finger on why. Sometimes as we go into this contemplation of death, it actually liberates joy, funnily enough. If we're going to take this on, and I think we do need to take it on as I've said, we need to find a way of playing with it, to make it work for ourselves.

I remember when my father died, I was 26. He died very suddenly. He was 68. It made a big impression on me. Without even willing it, somehow for quite a few years afterwards, almost every night, lying in bed awake before going to sleep, just lying there quite peacefully, my mind would begin to imagine that I was lying on my deathbed, that when I fell asleep I wouldn't wake up, that these were my last moments and last hours. In a way ... I mean, fun is too strong a word, but, um ... [laughter] There was something actually playful about it, but also it seemed to be carving a way in, in quite a deep way. Over the gradual repetition, it was actually channelling something out in consciousness, which I think really had an effect.

Another friend was saying, "I think about death, but I can't really believe it. It just remains theoretical. I know I'm going to die, but somehow I can't take it in." We need to play with it and shake it up a little bit, imagine what the world is without us. Imagine a world without us. Where were we in 1820? Most of us ... [laughter] If you've been to Asia and practised in some of the monasteries, particularly in South East Asia, in the Buddhist countries, Thailand, etc., it's quite common to have skeletons hanging in the meditation hall. Yanai and I, another co-teacher, are working on this for Gaia House. [laughter] So if any of you want to donate ... it's quite hard to come by a skeleton these days apparently. [laughter] I actually think it would be a really good thing to have a skeleton in here. It's a reminder.

The Buddha says every in-breath and every out-breath, you should be contemplating death.^[1] It's quite strong. The point is, it's a practice. Like all this stuff, like we were talking in the question and answer period today, a lot of these insights and realizations, they're really practices. We need to repeat them and do it over and over again, find ways to make it work. It's possible that we can read something about death or hear something in a talk about death, and something really impresses on us. Or someone close to us dies, and there's that strong impression. But the intensity of that moment will not be enough to change consciousness long-term. This is a general kind of guideline for practice. We need to practise with things over and over, practise ways of looking, ways of looking at life and ways of looking at death, that bring freedom. That's what practice is: practising ways of looking that bring freedom.

For those who are, in a way, brave enough to try this, to enter into this path, contemplating death, one of the initial things that people find is it brings a sense of preciousness and wonder. Somehow the preciousness of our existence, the fact of being here, of awareness, the miracle of it, is kind of right there, startlingly alive, startlingly brilliant, in a way. It brings a preciousness to each moment and a wonder. So really a blessing of the practice in that.

There's a poem by a poet called W. S. Merwin. It's called "For the Anniversary of My Death."^[2]

[9:21 -- 10:05, poem]

It's a very beautiful poem. Very -- I don't know the word -- sobering. Something grabs you right there in that. What a thing to contemplate: one of these days is the anniversary of my death. And pointing, I think, to this preciousness, the preciousness of our existence. But I feel also, in this poem, pointing beyond that preciousness. Because it's more than preciousness. A sense of the preciousness of life is not the sole point of the contemplation of death.

The Buddha says, "There is no greater contemplation than being aware of the impermanence of our life. Just as the elephant's footprint is the greatest of all animals' footprints, so is this meditation of impermanence the most powerful of all meditations." Gampopa, one of the great Indian yogis: "By contemplating death, all attachment to every part of saṃsāra is turned back."

Both the Buddha and Gampopa, pointing to immense potential in this contemplation of death. That has a number of levels to it. On one level, it can be almost practical, in a way. I remember talking with a person, a man, who was serving at a Dharma centre like this one. He was in his sixties. And he had the opportunity to extend his period of service and keep serving the Dharma as a manager. Then he realized that there was a kind of window of about six months where he would be able to spend a lot of time with his young grandchildren, and that probably wouldn't happen again, or he wasn't sure that it would happen again. He didn't know what to do, and sort of tossing between these two options. So we were talking about it, and I suggested that he actually imagine himself on his deathbed. Imagine himself on the deathbed, looking back at his life, and imagining making either decision. Which would you regret? So using the contemplation of death, in a way, to inform and to weigh our choices when we can't seem to decide between two paths that are very important to the heart. So very creative and very powerful. He did it, and actually he decided that he would take this time to spend with his grandchildren and get to know them a little bit better. He wasn't sure how long he had left. Using it creatively to weigh our choices.

In the traditions that go into the contemplation of death, one of the central pieces is that it brings urgency. An indispensable spiritual factor is the factor of urgency. We feel an urgency to live well, to really, really, really live well. What does it mean, what does it really mean, to live well, to live this life well? We could say, "A yacht in Monaco" and this and that. Hopefully immediately we see that's not really that well. But even still, we can find our life and the current of our life moving towards wanting a nice place to live, and a nice job, and setting up things, and that's living well somehow. But we haven't really gone into it, perhaps. What does it really mean to live well?

One of the polarities in this question is what is a life of giving, or to nourish giving in our life, and giving to life, versus a life of self-concern? In a way, sometimes we have a choice between these two. What am I nourishing? Self-concern or giving? We can hear this and we can think, "Yeah, I know that. I know that." The point of contemplating death is it makes it really present, really urgent, really alive, really vivid for us. We do know these things -- or hopefully we know. And the more we practise, the more we know a life of giving is a life lived well. Giving to life, giving of one's gift to life, not even just to one or two people, maybe one's children or one's partner or whatever it is. Giving to life versus self-concern.

With that, and part of what comes with the urgency, what do I really most want in this life? I touched on this in the opening talk. This is actually a really profound question, a beautiful question and a necessary question. What do I really, really want, most deeply, in this life, for this life? The urgency. Picasso said, "Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone." A friend was telling me -- I think it was last year, or sometime in the last months -- in Plymouth, which is one of the big cities nearby, a new shopping mall was built, and there was the opening day of this shopping mall. 120,000 people showed up for the opening of this shopping mall. [laughter] Why? [laughter] Why? This is our life and it's ticking away day by day. What is important to us?

Patrul Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan teachers of the last century: "Death closes in, never pausing for an instant, like the shadow of a mountain at sunset."^[3] Death is closing in, right now as we're speaking. In Pali, the language of the Buddha, there's this word anicca. Usually it gets translated as 'impermanence,' 'change.' That's its primary meaning. Another meaning is 'uncertainty.' Uncertain. Life and things and everything in life is uncertain. It's uncertain. About two weeks ago -- some of you know this -- there was a yogi here, a work yogi, who came quite a lot over the last three or four years, mostly as a work retreatant, and he died very suddenly. Very suddenly. He was travelling in Laos with a friend. He was 47. Myself and someone else here received a postcard from him that, in the confusion after his death, we realized was written probably just a few hours before he died. He was 47. The postcard was full of happiness, full of optimism, full of plans. "Tomorrow morning, off to Cambodia." He never made that. It didn't happen. "Next week, back in Bangkok, and still a week to play. See you soon." 47. No inkling even a few hours before. Anicca. Uncertain.

My father also when he died. After he died -- I was in America and I flew back, and we were sorting out his stuff in his office the week after he died, and found this letter. I found this letter. He died on a Friday night, and he had written this letter and typed it out on the Friday afternoon. It was to a bank or a business or something. For some reason, he wanted to post it on the Monday, so he dated it on the Monday. No idea that he wouldn't be alive then. No inkling. Another friend who died about six months ago, similarly, no idea. Had arrangements to play tennis the next morning.

[20:16] When this work retreatant -- obviously that's not just what he was, but that's how we knew him -- when he died, and feeling the reverberations around here, and talking with people here and elsewhere who knew him, someone said, reflecting on realizing how suddenly it had come, "Enjoy it while you can. Enjoy life while you can. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know when you're going to die. Enjoy it while you can." And then they added, "I hope he died in his sleep, and I hope I die in my sleep." In a way, all very normal sentiments, normal human sentiments. Understandable. But death doesn't give a damn whether you're awake or asleep. When it comes, it comes.

And in a way, kind of probing a little bit further, if I say, "Enjoy it while you can. Let me enjoy it while I can, and I hope I'm asleep when it happens," statements like that, sentiments like that, wishes like that -- what attitudes are they implying about our underlying feelings and assumptions about life and existence? They actually hold a lot. A lot is unsaid in there. A lot is unspoken. A lot of assumptions and views about life and death are right there in those statements. When we contemplate death, we can do that in different ways, with a lot of different results. A lot of different things can come out of it. One possibility is that we start contemplating death and what happens is fear comes up, panic comes up, depression even comes up. So that's not what we want. We don't want to do that. If one takes this on and that happens, then to come back another time. One isn't ready in that moment, or even in that period in one's life. To come back, to come back.

Sometimes one will find that fear comes up but it's actually not that strong. It's not that strong. And like we were talking, again, in the question and answer period today, if it's not that strong, one can be aware of the fear, it's there, I'm not pushing it away, I'm aware of it, but just incline the awareness towards what else might be becoming clear in the depths -- some intentionality or clarity that's clarifying there. And to draw close to that, to let that speak to one, to let that influence one.

We could also contemplate death -- and this is, again, quite human: it happens quite a lot -- we contemplate death, or we're aware of our impending death, and the reaction is that we grasp at pleasure. So there are quite a number of instances of people being told they have a terminal illness and going out there with the credit card and going a little bananas with the credit card, assuming that "Hey, I'm not going to have to pay the bill." Just living it up. And then unfortunately some medication is kicking in ... [laughter] This has been going on. And "now I've got this bill to pay." So one of the reactions can be we grasp at pleasure: "Enjoy it while you can." Another possibility is that we grasp at experience, all experience. We know nothing else but life, and we start grasping at experience, anything -- seeing, tasting, touching, all of it. That's actually very difficult to sustain. Sometimes we can feel it's something spiritual -- we want to touch life, we want to open to life, but actually it's very difficult to sustain that. It wouldn't really sustain.

And again, we can contemplate death in a way that leads to, flows into, brings an urgency, an energy, brings inspiration, brings a clarity, brings the intention to cultivate, to nourish, to take care of, to nurture what is really beautiful in our life, what is deeply and truly beautiful inside and outside. There's an urgency about that. What really matters? What really, really matters? Totally key and central question in our life. What really matters? In a way, one can look at the whole question from another angle -- it's sort of the same thing, but from a different angle -- and ask, "What will make my death more problematic, more difficult? What is it that will make my death more problematic and more difficult?" One of the things I think, and anyone honestly investigating this would come to, is that if the life has been given to accumulation, accumulating possessions, power, prestige, stuff, property, etc., versus if the life is given to renunciation, letting go, living lightly, and to generosity, dāna. This is going to make a big difference when it comes to the big letting go. It's a huge difference. One sees this with people who are close to death, how much easier it is, how much less problematic the death is, a life of giving to life, giving to life. One shares one's gifts with life.

Again, this is stuff that we can know. We need to really sense it. Can you get a sense of this? In a way, the truth of this? Really sense it and deeply get a sense of this so that it affects the choices we make and the way we live. Another one -- and again, this is one, like the first one, that the Buddha put great emphasis on: regrets at the time of death in terms of how we acted and spoke with others, our sīla, our ethics, how caring we were in relationship to each other. When you're on your deathbed, you can't go back and do it again. Oftentimes you can't even go back and say "sorry." Regrets, moral regrets, regrets of behaviour, in that realm, versus a life really lived with care at how we are with each other, what I put out into the world for others.

[28:21] Having a sense, on one's deathbed, what if one had a sense that one was, in a way, disconnected -- this is a very hard one, perhaps, to hear -- one looks back on one's life and feels that maybe for much of it I was disconnected from a sense of wonder, a sense of this miracle in life, from a sense of the potential depths of consciousness. What would that be, to go through a life, and look back, and feel a lot of it was spent in disconnection? Versus nourishing that sense of wonder in one's life, nourishing the depths of consciousness. In the tradition, we talk about samādhi, deepening in meditation, deepening in consciousness, and exploring that, knowing that in this life, that we've drunk deeply from the well.

And again, I find this a very sobering thought and very powerful reflection: what would it be to be on one's deathbed, if one is so lucky to be lying on one's deathbed and have the chance to reflect, what would it be to look back on one's life and, in moments of clarity, think, "How many of my intentions, of the countless flow of intentions in my life, how many of them were towards comfort, or towards convenience? I just wanted things to be convenient or comfortable for me. Or towards sense pleasure. Or towards keeping myself secure in my cocoon of security"? The stream of intentionality in one's life, how much of it, how much of the intentions were towards that? And what would it be to be looking back, or, if there is such a thing, after death and looking back at one's life and getting a sense of it and thinking, "How much of the intentions, small moments, seemingly insignificant moments, were given to those intentions?" Is that what I want to feed in this life -- comfort, convenience, sense pleasure, security?

What else would make my death problematic, difficult? Well, delusion. Not understanding deeply in life. So not living close to impermanence. Not, as we were talking about earlier in the question and answer period, this seeing into the self and the emptiness of the self and this whole self/other duality. If I die and that hasn't been questioned, delusion, ignorance, is going to make the death very difficult, very difficult. This self going, versus paññā in the tradition, insight, understanding, wisdom. We've seen the emptiness of the self, we've seen the emptiness of things, and even more, of time, of death itself. Colossal shift, colossal shift.

So we can contemplate death, as I said, in different ways with different outcomes. One of the outcomes can be we contemplate death and we're eager, we want to seek this understanding, we want to seek paññā, seek wisdom, a heartfelt understanding. It's interesting. The Buddha, right at the beginning of his path, before he left the palace -- and I'm sure many of you know this story, how he was brought up -- before he left the palace and even decided, as he was deciding to leave, in the process of deciding, right from the beginning it had to do with death. There was the four heavenly messengers he saw when he went out from the palace -- an ageing person, a sick person, a dead person, and a renunciate. He saw a dead person, and he asked this question of himself, so powerful it rings 2,500 years later. It's still ringing, resounding. He said to himself -- and this is what made him leave and made him want a life of practice; before this, he had no practice -- he reflected on what he had seen and said, "Why should I who am subject to death seek refuge in that which is also subject to death?"

There are lots of things in the palace or even in a spiritual practice I could get that are subject to death. But right from the beginning he said I want something, I want to discover something that's deathless, and I'm willing to risk my life for it. That was, right from the beginning, it was the encounter with death. And death was kind of at the core of what he was about in his spiritual practice: I want to discover something deathless. It makes no sense for me to try and take refuge in anything but that. I'm going to die. Why should I seek refuge in something else that's going to die?

So our contemplation of death can similarly lead to: I want to see something. I want to see deeply. I want to understand something about life before I die. I really, really, really want to understand something. And the teachings say, and we hear in Dharma and different spiritual traditions that actually, things are not what they seem to be. Things are not what they seem. Which means life is not what it seems. And I want to understand that. I want to understand that.

When we're reflecting on death, thinking about death, contemplating death, it's important also to be kind of aware of what it is I believe will happen after death. What do I believe will happen after death? Sometimes this comes in in almost an unconscious way; it's just like a hidden assumption, almost. We have options here: heaven and hell has been very popular in this culture until quite recently. I don't know what percentage. Most Americans believe in heaven and hell, but I think in England it's lost favour recently. If you're around Eastern spiritual traditions, there's this notion of reincarnation. And the Buddha talks sort of about that, and sometimes people say, "Well, that was just the cultural context he was in. Everyone was assuming and talking and believing in those terms, so he responded in those terms, but he didn't actually believe it." I don't know. Possible. I'm not sure. Actually -- and this is kind of, not really a sidetrack, but -- in Buddhist teaching, in Buddhadharma, it's not so much about reincarnation. The word 'reincarnation' implies something going back into flesh -- carne, 'meat,' 'flesh.' The Buddhadharma talks more about rebirth.

I remember hearing a couple of analogies for what rebirth is: rather than a soul or an entity re-entering flesh, a material form, analogies (and they're quite interesting) might be billiard balls or snooker balls. One ball is travelling with some momentum, hits another ball, and the first ball stops dead, just completely stops, and the second ball moves off at some angle depending on how the other one has hit it, and takes up the momentum. The first one stops dead. And that's -- I can't remember where I heard this; a monk or someone -- that's actually more akin to a Dharmic understanding of rebirth. Or another analogy, you've got a candle flame, and you light another candle from that flame. Is it the same flame or is it different? So sometimes with this reincarnation notion, we want to cling to this sense of self or soul, some thing that's going to be in something else, some core identity or entity, essence, that's going to land up in something else. Actually the Dharma notion is quite different than that.

So heaven and hell, reincarnation, rebirth. Another option -- and I think this is, probably, I don't know, maybe the most popular one now, I'm not sure -- how many people nowadays assume total annihilation at death, total annihilation? This is one, it's so sort of, I think, culturally prevalent, even though it's maybe not put out there in a loud way, in the way heaven and hell were in the last centuries. I wonder how many are kind of operating under that assumption. Statements like "enjoy it while you can," and seeking pleasure, etc., is that coming from an assumption of annihilation, whether we're conscious of it or not? It's important to explore this. What am I assuming?

Or we might have an idea or a sense, even, an image, of somehow merging into oneness, merging into some kind of cosmic oneness. This is also quite a popular one. There's a passage from Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet. It's a little chapter on death, and towards the end it says:

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered? Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.^[4]

Beautiful language, and I'm quite a fan of Kahlil Gibran. But there's actually -- it's a view. It's an assumption. It's an interesting one, because sometimes we, in our life, can have a kind of mystical intuition of that merging, of that oneness, of opening to that or moving towards that, a sense of the oneness in the universe. And one of the potential gifts of meditation is that we can really develop that sense of oneness. It becomes a very real perception. But still, we don't know. It's still in the realm of perception, and we don't know.

[41:03] Can we just face that? That we don't know? Can we just be with that, that we don't know? What do we know? Well, we know the body disintegrates. It literally falls apart. It dis-integrates. You can see even in this life, the ageing process start -- as far as I can tell in my life, it started around the age of 20, and it's all been downhill since then. But generally, for most people, around 30 or so, you really start to notice. It's very clear. It begins to be clear: the ageing process is happening. And then at death, the body, the biological forces that were holding the body together no longer operate, and the body disintegrates, it falls apart. If you've ever been with a dead body, and looked at a dead body, and been in the presence of a dead body, it's quite interesting -- the life force is really not there. It's really absent. The consciousness is really absent. Something is really gone from a dead body.

I remember when I came back from America and, just before my father's funeral, spent some time with his body in the cemetery. How much smaller he looked. The life force, it kind of fills the being, fills the body, and at death that's gone. It just shrunk to the material form. I hadn't seen him for a few months, and just natural heart movement to want to touch him. I was sort of shocked at seeing him like that and wanted to touch him. So taking the hand, just out of love really, and just touching his forehead, and being shocked. It was a cold February day, and it was like touching a cold stone. The heat had gone from the body. It was striking. The body then disintegrates. If someone's been cremated and you look at their ashes, and if you know the person, it's just -- in a way, it's kind of mind-boggling at one level. It comes to bones and then to dust. This we know.

There's something about this process of what happens to the body that we can use and contemplate. Thích Nhất Hạnh, this is a favourite theme of Thích Nhất Hạnh, some of you know, the Vietnamese Zen teacher. In a way, it is an angle on oneness. We know, just scientifically, that molecules and matter recycle, that what goes into the earth comes up, and it feeds the flowers, etc., and it gets recycled. So there's a passage from him:

This body is just a manifestation, like a cloud. When a cloud is no longer a cloud, it is not lost. It has not become nothing; it has transformed; it has become rain. Therefore we should not identify our self with our body. This body is not me. I am not caught in this body. I am life without limit.^[5]

That's actually not the greatest passage of his explaining that. But there's this sense of molecules recycling, atoms recycling. We know this. Walt Whitman said, I think in Song of Myself, when I'm gone, when I'm dead, "look for me under your boot-soles."^[6] Again, this is a practice. We can hear that and we can think, "Well, that's just stupid." Okay. Fine. We can also hear that and it can sound intriguing. Again, in and of itself, not going to make much difference. It's a practice. Like all things that make a difference, they need to be practices. Practice, practice, practice.

If it feels like this would be helpful, we practise seeing this way, so that it's not just an idea, a kind of cute idea. A friend said she spent a while composting and just seeing that process, the literal recycling. You put something in, leaves, twigs, etc., and later it's something else. Then you feed it to another plant, and somehow it's in the plant. You see this process. In Dharma teaching, the Buddha talked about contemplating the four elements -- earth, air, fire, water. Contemplating that the elements in this body are not different from the elements outside. So the water and tears and the urine and whatever it is, it's not that different from what I see in a puddle, in the rain or whatever. Contemplating that commonality. It has to be a practice. We can take it on as a practice. It's a very beautiful practice. Something happens in terms of our perception of oneness and, potentially, in terms of our relationship with death.

So potentially, for some people, very helpful. But you might ask, that's the material form; what about consciousness? What about consciousness? The material form might recycle, but what we fear is the ending of consciousness. Someone a while ago told me that when her grandfather died, who she loved very much, after he died she began noticing death everywhere, all kinds of death everywhere, turning the attention towards that. And again, you can take it on as a practice and really sustain that as a seeing, sustain the seeing. If we do this, what we begin to notice -- and you can see it in nature, in the hedges and all kinds of things -- that actually life needs death to make space for life. Otherwise it would just be overcrowded [laughs]; there wouldn't be enough room. You actually see this in nature. She also talked about seeing the naturalness of death, and how natural it is for everything to die. There was a comfort in that at quite a deep level. In the Dharma tradition, we talk about contemplating impermanence, a big emphasis on that. This can be done in a number of ways.

One is that just every day we become aware of the flows in the day, the flow of the mood, the flow of the mind state, the flow of how the body feels. Is it the same in the morning as the evening? Watching that flow in the day. That's an everyday level. We can also be aware of impermanence at a very microscopic level: just moment to moment, things are changing, changing, changing, arising, passing, dying, dying, dying. There's another way of contemplating it, which is a little harder to get hold of but, I feel, more powerful: being in the present moment aware of the context of death. So aware that this moment, this sound, this sight, this visual impression, being right there, and seeing it in a context of vastness of time where we are not here. There is the unknown before -- aeons, aeons, billions and billions of years -- and billions of years afterwards, and we are not here. The context, the vastness of time, the vastness of space, and being in the moment. It's a little more difficult to get a handle on as a practice, but extremely powerful.

But it's important, I think, if we are contemplating impermanence, to make sure it's useful for us. Oftentimes you can contemplate impermanence and it's not making much difference. We're just doing it because it's supposed to be good for us. So finding a way to make it useful. It's not just that the Dharma is moving towards accepting impermanence, being okay with things coming and going, and dying and being born and dying. That's actually not where we're headed, a kind of fluidity with the flow of life and death. Sometimes a person contemplates impermanence quite deeply in meditation and the sense comes up of huge spaciousness, the spaciousness of awareness. Within that, everything is arising and passing. It's being born out of that and dying back into it. Very beautiful state, very lovely and transforming potentially for meditators. A person can think awareness, this vast awareness, that's the Deathless. It seems to always be there unchanging. But how do we know that that will stay like that when we die? How do we know that survives our death? How do we know that that's not just a perception? So enormously transforming, a lot of freedom in that, but is it really the Deathless?

[51:26] So we can ask a very kind of what might sound like a strange question at one level: why, why would I want to live longer? Now, on one level, it's just the normal, natural impulse of life. But it's interesting. The Buddha has this passage:

Better than a hundred years lived without virtue, without ethical care, uncentered, is one day lived by a virtuous person absorbed in meditation.

Better than a hundred years lived undiscerning, uncentered, is one day lived by a discerning person absorbed in meditation.

Better than a hundred years lived apathetic and unenergetic is one day lived energetic and firm.

Better than a hundred years lived without seeing impermanence is one day lived seeing impermanence.

Better than a hundred years of life lived without seeing the ultimate truth, the ultimate Dhamma, is one day lived seeing the ultimate truth, the ultimate Dhamma.^[7]

So it's actually not just about how long we live. Why do we want to live so long?

I'm going to leave a bit out because I'm conscious of time. At one level -- and I realize what I'm going to say is going to sound quite, perhaps, odd at one level -- what is life? Life is experience. It's experiences, at one level, experiences that come to us through the senses, through the five senses -- smells, sights, tastes, touch, and sound, hearing. Five senses, and the sixth sense in Dharma is the sense of the mind, so thoughts and emotions and mind objects. What we call 'life' is the sum totality of experiences through the six senses, the five physical senses and the sense of the mind or the heart.

When I first heard that, I was absolutely furious. It sounded completely reductionistic to me and anal and cold and nihilistic and just horrible Buddhist rubbish. [laughter] But there's something -- it's pointing to something very beautiful in there, a real key to freedom, something really beautiful. Life is just experience at one level, experience in terms of the six senses. And we don't yet really deeply understand experience. We don't understand what's happening through those six senses. We don't understand experience.

Life, being experience, is all we know. We don't know anything else than what comes to us through the six senses. That's all that we can relate to. It's all we can relate to, is experience, which is life. Dharmically, to understand experience -- 'to understand' means to understand in a way that brings freedom, that brings a real, deep okayness. We're okay with life. When we understand experience, we're okay with life, and being okay with life, we're okay with death. Life and death are two sides of the same coin, inseparable.

So sometimes people ask, lots of people, sometimes they ask me, "What happens when we die? What do you think happens after we die?" And actually, I think the best answer is a question: "What do you think happens when we live?" Because what seems so obvious, we have a given understanding and assumption about the nature of life and what it is: I'm here, I'm giving a talk. You're just about staying awake trying to listen. [laughter] And that's what life is. I'm here, you're there, it's such-and-such a day, this is Gaia House, etc. That's what happens when we're alive, and we move about in that.

So we think about death, and we think, "I want to have more life." "I want to have more experiences" is what it means. I've heard people say, "I don't want to die. I still want to have this experience or that experience. There are things I still want to do. There are experiences I still want to have." And all this is extremely human and understandable. But do we know the emptiness of experience? Do we understand experience? Experience and even time is empty. What does that mean? We don't have time to go into it tonight [laughter], but there are the question and answer periods. I'm serious, but. I'll say a little piece.

[57:18] Without realizing it -- and this is what 'delusion' means in Buddhist terms. I'm actually going to take my time and just finish what I want to say tonight. Without realizing it, we build experience. The mind builds experience, and conversely, the mind is built by experience. We don't realize that we're doing that. We do that at every level, from incredibly gross -- so an example I've been using recently is a tantrum; you're in the middle of a tantrum about something, or you see a child in the middle of a tantrum. Some thing is the object, or some person. Some thing has been built up by the mind in that state, and some experience has come to really be prominent and loud and built up. It's a big deal, and the self also is a big deal. We can see, in our life and then in our meditation even more subtly, that when we let go of what builds things up, we start to let go of our reactivity with things more and more, we get skilled at that, that actually we are building experience up less and less. We build experience up. And it can come to the point one is so skilled at letting go of what builds experience that actually nothing arises, nothing arises. We see that all experience -- which means all of life -- is something that the mind is building. This is an extremely radical, counterintuitive teaching and understanding.

There's a spectrum. We can build experience up a lot, or less, or less, or less, or nothing. But all experience, any experience, even the most given, ordinary experience -- "Well, I'm just sitting here doing nothing" -- that's actually quite a built-up experience. "Just being" is quite a built-up experience. Now, we can hear that and think, "That's completely depressing," or, again, "That sounds nihilistic." It's not at all. I can actually guarantee that when one goes into this, there's something so wonderful about that, something so beautiful in the seeing of that and what that liberates in the heart, the intimations of that. What it really means is life is not what it seems to be, nor is death, and yet it's not something other than that. It's empty. It's empty, and this is not nihilistic. The Buddha, there's a beautiful thing he says. He's talking about this:

Learn to see the world as a mock show, as a play, as a bubble. See it as a mirage. One who regards the world this way, the King of Death does not see.^[8]

One who regards the world this way, the King of Death does not see.

There's another poem from the Theragāthā, Verses of the Elders, monks and nuns who have reached liberation and then write songs or poems. One line from one of them is, "Why grieve or lament? Only what is fabricated (only what is built in this kind of not-really-real way) dies." The Buddha's initial impulse, "I want something that's deathless" -- we can actually discover that. Something deathless is something timeless. It's not eternal in that sense. It's beyond time. It's not something that lasts a really long time, like forever. It's beyond time.

The Buddha also has a passage. As our understanding of this deepens, you could say, we come to a point, there comes a point as the understanding of emptiness deepens, he says, when one no longer asks questions about existence, past, future, or present, such as "Do I exist? Do I not exist? What am I? Who am I? Why am I? Or this that I am, where have I come from, and where will I go?"^[9] One no longer asks such questions, because a whole different view, understanding of life has opened up. Very different.

I feel one of the beautiful and amazing things is that this deepening into this seeing, as it deepens -- it can deepen, and we can see that and, in a way, live that from our heart more and more -- as that deepens, it can almost paradoxically coexist with the urgency that I was talking about earlier, the urgency to want to give, to want to share our gift with the world. And somehow there's a paradox in that, maybe. Somehow. Maybe they're different levels. But they can coexist in a very beautiful way. So it doesn't move into a nihilism. It actually frees our giving even more, frees our will to give even more.

Shall we just sit together for a couple of minutes quietly?