In visiting a cemetery today, I reflected on death based on an article by Venerable Robina Courtin entitled “How to Think About Death”. Three themes are covered as follows.

1. Death Is Definite

Everything that we’re involved with in our daily life is impermanent. There’s not a single thing in the existence of the universe that is a product of cause and effect that doesn’t change. The very nature of cause and effect is that things change.

In fact the subtle level of impermanence is the very coming into being of something assumes the passing away of it. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have anything that exists that is within the process of cause and effect that doesn’t change, that doesn’t come and go. Come and go. Come and go.

And that includes our self: death is definite. Intellectually, we know it, but emotionally we cling instinctively to a strong sense of being permanent, unchanging. Intellectually it’s clear to us; emotionally we’re living in denial of it. And remember, across the board, what Buddha is saying is that we have within our mind a whole series of misconceptions about how we think things are, but in fact we’re not in touch with how they are.

So okay, death is definite. How do you contemplate this, how do you think about this? When you hear about somebody dying, your first response is, “Oh!” We’re so shocked. “But I just talked to them yesterday!” So that thought is coming from the misconception that somehow instinctively we thought that they were permanently alive, you know. Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, we think, “I am a living person, I’m a living person. And Mary, I talked to her yesterday! She was a living person, how could she have died?” We’re shocked.

When we think of someone who is sick, however, we think “Oh, she’s a dying person”. Look how we talk about dying people, in hushed tones. We look at them sadly, “Oh, how are you?” We talk about Aunty Mary only in relationship to her dyingness, the sickness; she’s no longer a real person, is she? She’s a dying person. You don’t even want to include her in parties. And this is because we have this misconception that somehow this dyingness is something that defines her, whereas livingness defines me. However, as Lama Zopa says: “Living people die before dying people every day”.

Look at the silly way we talk, an indicator of our misconceptions. “Oh I feel so alive”, we’ll say. Meaning we feel very good. Well excuse me, happy people die. You understand? Healthy people die. Young people die. We might think, “Well, I’m not going to die yet. I’m not old”. And you keep adjusting that, don’t you? I mean, when I was 40, 61 was old. Now, 80 is old. Where is Betty? Betty is old, she is 75. Aren’t you?

Betty I’m 74! Unless you add a year for the Tibetan calendar then I’m 75.
Okay, Betty is old, she’s 74. But she doesn’t think she is old. She probably thinks her grandmother is old or somebody who is 85 is old. So we all just keep adjusting because we don’t like to put ourselves into that category. Dying people are over there, old people are over there, because we have this deep instinct of grasping at permanent me, a living me.

So we’ve got to face reality. “What do you mean: ‘Face reality?’” We think fantasies are nice. Well, Buddha says fantasies have got us into big trouble. It’s a fantasy to think I won’t die. Not because he’s trying to be cruel and sort of rub our noses in death.

But he is saying that given our consciousness is a continuity that didn’t begin at the time of conception, and given that it will continue, and given that everything we say, do and think will leave seeds in the mind that will bring future results that will be my experiences – this is the view of karma – then it just makes a lot of sense that death is an extremely important moment in your life. Because it’s going to be a transition from this body to another body. It’s a bit of a scary transition. We should be used to it, we’ve done it a million times, the Buddha says. But we’re not mentally used to it because we’re clinging so powerfully to this one.

And we cling to everything so mightily – Grandma’s cup: it’s so precious, you’ve got insurance on it and it’s up there and so dear to you and you look at it every day. But its nature is to break, you can’t avoid that. But we live in denial of that because we’ve imposed all of this beauty and marvelousness and value onto it. And so look what happens when it does break. You have a mental breakdown. You live in denial and you start freaking out. You’ve got to blame, you’ve got to sue somebody and it’s so painful. And then we think we’re suffering because the cup broke.

We think we suffer because the person died. It’s not true. We suffer – and this is Buddha’s point – because we have a fantasy that they won’t die, because we have a fantasy that they shouldn’t die. In other words, we’re not seeing reality. Across the board this is how Buddha is talking. We are not facing reality. We don’t see things as they are. We live in denial of things. We are not only not seeing how things are, we’re imposing a fantasy onto it.

So this simple meditation here we are trying to do: using Buddha’s view of what’s real, we’re giving it a go, we’re thinking about how he says things are and attempting to make that the way we think, in order to argue with ego’s entrenched mistaken views. So it’s a practical reason. …

So death is definite and it’s something that is just natural. When we hear that Mary died, it reminds us; surprise is not relevant. That’s the way to think about it. “Wow, Buddha is right. Death is definite; there’s nothing certain. Wow, look at that”.

Everything that comes into being necessarily dies. But because of the ego-grasping, this primordial misconception, because of massive attachment, the main voice of the ego, we frantically don’t want to disappear. We want to be me. So we can’t bear to think that I will change, that I will die. So we have this big fantasy.

Intellectually it would be silly to argue with it: “Oh of course I’m not going to die!” We know we will. But emotionally it’s like that. We might as well say we’re not going to. That’s why we’re shocked. Death is definite.

A simple way to bring this into our lives is every time we see or hear about someone dying – a person, an ant, our pets – remember that it’s natural: death is definite. And the real way to make it tasty is to think, “That’ll be me one day. I will die too”.

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