Death

 

                I could have died from my recent encounter with sepsis—sepsis is fatal for 30% of the people who get it.  As a result of sepsis, I had a mitral heart valve that was severely and permanently damaged.  Mitral valve damage almost always gets worse as time goes on.  Corrective heart surgery is dangerous, more so as one gets older.  All these things, and more, have given me a keener awareness of my own mortality.

                I want to have more of life. Someone said to me, isn’t wanting more of life a form of greed?

                Wanting more life is not necessarily greed.  According to what the Buddha taught, wanting more of something can be either wholesome or unwholesome.  For example, the desire to accumulate more and more huge amounts of wealth when others are starving is an unwholesome desire, and could be called greed.  On the other hand, wanting more wisdom, compassion, and being of service to others is not greed—it is wholesome desire.  The desire for more life is not greed if the “more” is used for worthy purposes.

                Biologically, the body is actually programmed to die.  As we get older we inevitably get physically weaker, skin becomes thinner and drier and more vulnerable, bones become more porous and weaker, muscle loss happens even if you exercise vigorously…  

                And yet part of the body also fights fiercely to stay alive.  When we cannot breathe because we are underwater or sick, the body fights for air, fights for life.  When we are sick or injured the body tries to heal itself.

                The Buddha taught the radical idea that death is an illusion, a false way of seeing things created by the way our minds have been conditioned to operate.  This seemed inescapably true when I finally understood it.  But my understanding is largely intellectual and at the level of concepts, and for large segments of time I cannot say that I am convinced that it is true in my deepest being.  The total extinction of consciousness is a possibility that I am thus far unable to rule out.  It seems like (feels like) there must be something after the death of the body, but I can’t truthfully say that I know that as a certainty.

                I cannot rule out the Hindu teachings on reincarnation, either.  I cannot completely rule out the traditional western idea of heaven where everyone is blissfully happy and sings God’s praises for eternity.  Although it does seem to me like it would get boring and meaningless after a while. And besides, why would God need to be constantly praised and thanked?  But I digress…

                So what does the Buddha mean he says that death is an illusion, a false way of seeing things created by the way our minds have been conditioned to operate?  These teachings can take a long time of study and meditation practice to understand.

                The Buddha himself realized the difficulty of understanding these teachings.  After hearing the Buddha speak about no self and the nature of death, a wandering seeker named Vaccha said to the Buddha: 

“ I am at a loss and bewildered.” [And the Buddha responded by saying]  “You ought to be at a loss and bewildered, Vaccha.  For this doctrine is profound, recondite, hard to comprehend, rare, excellent, beyond dialectic, subtle, only to be understood by the wise.”  

                People frequently strongly link Buddhism with reincarnation, but The Buddha did not teach reincarnation in the way we usually think of it.  To most people reincarnation means that when death occurs, our consciousness (or soul or mind or “me”) is transferred to another physical body after we die.  This new body may be human or nonhuman.  But this is incorrect.

                At the core of the Buddha’s actual teachings on death is the realization that the separate and independently existing self that we fear losing does not exist and never did.  There is just a ONENESS, with no parts, that exists, and I am it and you are it, and Mount Hood is it, and bacteria are it and…

                A metaphor that is often used here is that of a wave in the vastness of the ocean.  On one level the wave seems to exist as a separate thing.  But at the deepest level, it is water, it is ocean, and what we call “the wave” is just the ocean—which is a oneness—that is constantly in a process of movement.  When a wave breaks on the shore does it die?  No, because the wave is the ocean and ocean doesn’t die.  The water still remains.

                In what the Buddha taught, the world only appears to be a collection of separate things—waves, spray, currents…  But that appearance of separation is actually a creation of our minds which mentally segment the oneness into pieces.  Think of a globe displaying our planet Earth.  On the globe are lines of latitude and longitude that appear to separate the Earth into squares.  Do the squares exist in reality?  The 44^th parallel of latitude runs through the center of Oregon—it’s on the map, but if you search for it in traveling in what we label “Oregon” you won’t find it.  These segmenting lines of latitude and longitude exist only in our minds.  They are a useful mental tool for finding our way around, but they exist as mind creations only.

                In the same way, all the apparently separately existing things in the universe—me, you, the Willamette river, a tree in the park next door—are all created by the mind’s activity of drawing mental segmenting boundaries in the oneness.

                These are difficult teachings.  Words can help us to break the illusion of separate things, but ultimately we need to experience the oneness on a deep level.  In meditation, if we look for what we call “me” in our sense perceptions, thoughts, or emotions we will not find it.  We will find only a sort of window, a consciousness, in which perceptions, thoughts, and emotions continually arise and are replaced by other experiences.  The oneness continues, and that oneness is me.

                These particular teachings take time—months, years—to really grasp.  At first we grasp it in terms of concepts, and in this realm there are always doubts.  Eventually, we can experience these truths directly, and when that happens all doubt disappears.   Understanding in words can be a good beginning, but the words don’t contain the truth, they are only pointers to the truth.  Words only point to the reality.  Words help to direct our attention so we can see the truth of the teaching for ourselves.  The Buddha said that his teachings were pointers “like the finger that points at the moon.”  But, he warns us, we must be careful not mistake the finger that points to the moon for the moon itself.

                For myself, at this point I understand the teachings intellectually, and I have had glimpses of the deeper understanding, but I cannot say that I know these truths at the level of absolute certainty.  And so there is still an undercurrent of fear of death, fear of the end of “me.”  But it is less than it used to be.

Note:  For a much fuller presentation of these teachings, please see The Wisdom of the Buddha: Using Mindfulness to Change Your Life, Chapter 16  The Story of Me, A False Idea of Who We Are, and Chapter 17 A Different Understanding of Death.  Chapters available via e-mail on request.  Paperback and Kindle formats of the book are available from Amazon.

 

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