No Death, No Fear-Thich Nhat Hanh

Dying with Confidence: Contemplating impermanence

From Anyen Rinpoche's book, Dying With Confidence, come these practices for creating a Dharma Vision for ourselves.

Contemplate Impermanence from the Outer Point of ViewReflect on how your outer environment has changed during the past year. Recall how the seasons changed: how the plants, flowers, and trees transformed over time; how the daylight increased and decreased. Think about it both in your own personal living environment and throughout the globe as well. Think about the natural catastrophes that occurred around the world. Reflect on all the births and deaths of people, animals, and insects. Allow the enormity of these changes to reach you on the deep level until you feel with certainty that not even one thing remained the same.

Contemplate Impermanence from the Inner Point of ViewImagine yourself as a small baby. See the physical changes you have gone through until now. Sometimes looking at photos of yourself from childhood to the present can be a poignant way to examine your own physical impermanence. Look at the transformation that has occurred in you physically. Then think about your physical being from last year until now, from last month until  now, from yesterday until today. See that your body is changing even from moment to moment.

Contemplate Impermanence from the Secret Point of ViewReflect on the wild  nature of your own mind. Remember yourself as a child and how your intelligence developed over time. Look at how your  mind changes moment by moment as it fills with entertaining distractions or follows after different sensory experiences. Contemplate how you are constantly transforming mentally and how the mind is also impermanent.

Contemplate the Impermanence of Things to Which You Are AttachedIf you are attached to material objects in the world around you, reflect on their changing nature. If you are attached to a person, reflect on him or her growing old and dying. Actually envision his or her physical and mental changes. If you are attached to your own life, as we all are, go through your body from the ends of the hair on your head to the tips of your toes and try to find anything that is lasting or permanent in your body. Do a very thorough examination, looking from outside to inside to see if you can find anything that is unchanging. Do this until you are confident that you, too, are actually going to die, and that you cannot hold onto this life forever.

"Griefwalker"

Griefwalker is a National Film Board of Canada feature documentary film, directed by Tim Wilson and produced in 2008.  It is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with dying people.  Filmed over a twelve year period, Griefwalker shows Jenkinson in teaching sessions with doctors and nurses, in counselling sessions with dying people and their families, and in meditative and often frank exchanges with the film’s director while paddling a birch bark canoe about the origins and consequences of his ideas for how we live and die.  A few of the themes appearing in the film: Where does our culture’s death phobia come from?  Is there such a thing as good dying?  How is it that grief could be a skill instead of an affliction?  Who are the dead to us?  How can seeing your life’s end be the beginning of your deep love of being alive?

The film in its entirety may be watched for free on the National Film Board of Canada web site.

On losing someone you love

On Losing Someone You Love
by John Aske

I once asked Phiroz Mehta what the central problem of our lives was. He pinched his arm and said: ‘We think we are this body, but we’re not.’

When I lost my mother after looking after her for five years, not only had I lost the last member of my family, but I also lost the main motivation for getting up in the mornings.

First comes the self-pity. But since no amount of that helps you or the way you feel — it just makes you feel worse! — you have every reason to put it aside and no reason whatsoever to let it nibble at you; that’s just as pointless as concerning yourself with the weather!

Much more of a problem for me was seeing something interesting or going to the theatre or a concert, and not having anyone to discuss it with. If I went on holiday — I went to Mexico in the spring of 2011 — I could tell someone all about it, someone who was genuinely interested. But suddenly there was no one to tell, and no one to be interested in what I was, or did, or anything. Unsurprisingly, I lost interest in myself.

Men never really stop being little boys. When we are small, we want to tell mummy what we’ve been doing, and bask in the interest. Then, when we are older, we tell girlfriends or wives, or whoever we’re very close to. It’s a very human search for approval and acceptance.

The time that my mother was in hospital in a coma, I found to be very distressing. There was the ghost of a presence. And it was almost a relief when she died. It is at those times, when everything is thrown into question, that we need support and wise advice.

In my bedroom, I have pinned up on the wall the following conversation between Ajahn Chah (the abbot of a famous Thai monastery, Wat Pah Pong) and an old lady who had gone to the monastery but could only stay for a short time as she had to return to take care of her great grandchildren. She asked if he could please give her a brief dhamma talk.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s no one here, just this. No owner, no one to be old, to be young, to be good or bad, weak or strong. Just this, that’s all; various elements of nature playing themselves out, all empty. No one born and no one to die. Those who speak of death are speaking the language of ignorant children. In the language of the heart, of dhamma, there’s no such thing.’

We see life and death as broken pieces, because we do not understand the timeless, unbroken reality from which they seem to emerge. As Phiroz said, ‘We think we are this, but we are not.’

This did a great deal to raise my spirits. But then I remembered what the Buddha himself said, and I pinned that up with the other piece:

‘There is this unborn, unmade, unconditioned, and if there were not, there would be no liberation from the born, the made, the conditioned.’

That liberation is what Ajahn Chah called ‘the language of the heart’, and the place he called ‘our real home’.

When Ramana Maharshi was dying, his grieving followers asked, ‘What will we do when you have gone?’ to which he replied, ‘Where would I go?’

Whatever happens to us, whatever we do, our lives and deaths are a function of the unborn, unmade, from which we have never been separated for a moment, and which is the refuge that can never be taken away from us. We just need to live with it until we see it for what it is, for what we are.

vinnanam anidassanam anantam sabbato pabham
‘Infinite, trackless consciousness shining everywhere.’

(From Buddhism Now)