If we’re sensitive to it, aging prepares us for death. Growing old and falling apart is nature’s way of teaching us how to release our obsession with form. It’s humiliating. Old age, sickness, and death are the ultimate insults to your ego, but the best compliments to your spirit.
Even before we enter the actual stages of dying, our body, and even our mind, starts to let go as we age.
We lose our hair, our teeth, our vision, hearing, mobility, flexibility, endurance, memory, and countless other physical and mental aspects of our form.
We lose control, productivity, independence, security, dreams for the future, and even meaning.
Aging is a preliminary practice (Tibetan: ngöndro) for the letting go that is forced upon us at death.
The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle writes:
The return movement in a person’s life, the weakening or dissolution of form, whether through old age, illness, disability, loss, or some kind of personal tragedy, carries great potential for spiritual awakening—the dis-identification of consciousness from form …
Since death is only an abstract concept to them, most people are totally unprepared for the dissolution of form that awaits them. When it approaches, there is shock, incomprehension, despair, and great fear …
[But] what is lost on the level of form is gained on the level of essence … [If related to properly,] old age or approaching death becomes what it is meant to be: an opening into the realm of spirit. (Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, [New York: Penguin Group, 2005], 284-287.)
Source: Holecek, Andrew. Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition. Boston & London: Snow Lion, 2013. P. 72.
What Should We Do When Dying?
First, we must try to realize that we are in the process of dying. We should try to take the experiences of dissolution as peacefully as possible, without panicking. We should try to remember that all the transitional appearances and experiences are reflections of our own mind and emotions, like dreams. We should not be attached to them, get irritated by them, or be afraid of them. Rather, we should see and feel everything as the path of our spiritual journey. Anchoring ourselves in calmness, we should peacefully let any situation come and go.
We should remember to employ any spiritual approach or experience with which we have been acquainted in our lifetime. The spiritual approaches with which we are familiar will be more effective and easier for us to rely on.
(Tulku Thondup. Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth.)