In Zen we say, “Life and Death is the great matter.” This is a kind of exhortation to take spiritual practice seriously, but as my teacher used to say, “Don’t be too serious.” There is a little ego in being too serious. Anyway, life and death are two sides of the same coin. They arise together. This is the Buddhist view. And so fear of dying is also fear of living. Fear arises toward both. So what is this fear? What are we afraid of?
Fear is a protective reaction of ego. Ego wants to hold, to have, not to let go. In the sutras this is sometimes referred to as the “tight fist”. Ego is afraid that unless it holds onto what it has, it won’t get what it needs. “At least I have this!” it thinks. “Better to hold on to what I have than take my chances by letting go.”
So one of the things ego really likes holding onto is life—being, existing, breathing. It’s like the line from the movie Chinatown (spoken by Jack Nicholson, who has just had his nose injured by a bad guy)—“I like my nose. I like breathing through it.” This is ok as far as it goes-we need to take reasonable precautions–but a life that subsists inside a clenched fist is a rather constricted life. The ego fears death, but this fear also bleeds into life.
A life fully lived–a fearless life–is the life not of the clenched fist, but the open hand. When you see a Buddha statue with an outstretched open hand, This represents fearlessness and generosity. A Zen koan says, “If you have a staff, I’ll give you a staff. If you don’t have a staff, I’ll take it away.” Staff of life and death, stuff of life and death.
A nurse’s assistant, a man who also held a black belt in judo, once said to me as I lay in bed, recovering from a deathly illness, “No fear. No fear.”
If it wasn’t for things that happen which are out of the norm, and witnessed as synchronous thoughts/events, I guess I might have a tighter hold on feelings of my permanence.
It’s not that feelings of fear don’t arise, but they are not the only thing present.
The nature of change allows me to let go of the control to be in the past, and I am one of many passing through this life, as a tremendous gift being given, and to learn giving as a key to enlightenment. Dropping anger is dropping fear. And mantras do help focus on the positive.
As for myself, i keep saying to myself: “There is no room in my body or mind for pain,sicknes, or death.”- sometimes it helps & sometimes not.One has to take the good with the bad to get by in life.There is no right way to do the wrong thing…..
I had an eppif, epiff, you know, one of those aha moments, this morning about three. It was occasioned by Lew’s topic, a cartoon in the newspaper about a dog teaching its master integrity and my own dog’s teaching moments in which when he does his duty, I keep my word and reward him right away.
Fear of Life? Yes, but why IMO? Because we know intuitively that we’re doing it all “wrong,” for the most part. We/I are constantly shooting ourselves in the foot and then putting it in our mouth and reaping the karmic consequences, sometime instantaneously, in the form of self-hatred or that of others.. Samsara, thy name is sado-masochism. We fear, or at least I do, that that’s all there is! So we hide. And suffer.
Fear of Death? Hell, yes! Literally. We’ve done it all “wrong” so far, now what? Aieeeeeeeeeeee. Reborn to do it all again, but even more so? So we hide. And suffer.
The Buddha, I have been taught or at least I think I have, would rather we awakened bit by bit and began to live mindfully in the here and now, letting our unfolding occur naturally, allowing life to teach us. In other words, with integrity, employing whatever tools come to our hands to help us in the process
I find that very annoying! That’s not what I signed up for! Where are my toys? Where’s my stuff? How come everybody’s not my friend. Where’s my damn unconditional positive regard from the universe?
What?
at age 8 I watched a person die…parachute malfunction; just shy of 10 I was subjected, with neither warning nor debriefing, to the Dachau liberation newsreel; at 12 I was able to be ‘youngest adult’ to assess my grandfather’s having died in his sleep; at that time, many homes had a framed blue star hanging in a window to indicate a family member in the service, and each would be replaced by gold stars when the family learned of the member’s death.
I can’t say when I ceased to be afraid of death, but I am reminded of Carlos
Casteneda’s assertion of the importance of touching a dead preson at an early age.
I am now 74, and have now been holding to the Five Precepts for 32 years. recent hospice work has stimulated my interest in the Tibetan outlook, and I seek to be as awake as possible at the moment of death. the point is how one dies, not when!
ciou.
Thank you Jo. I was not aware of the blue star / gold star custom, nor the statement by Casteneda. There was a time when all children had the kind of visceral experience of death that you had. Perhaps that helps, and is a piece of what we are missing now.
In my meditation practice recently I have been notincing how I expand a little extra on the in breath (life) and hold on tight to the out breath (death). Learning to relax both of those has been wonderful ego work.
I was recently reading the Samyutta Nikaya, a marvellous compendium of teachings by the Buddha and others, on the Access to Wisdom website (trans. Thanissaro Bikkhu and others). There are several useful teachings on fear of living and fear of dying. I’ll just mention one, known as the Sanka Sutra, the Conch Trumpet, in connection with John K’s interesting comment, about the rather special fear of dying that people feel if they believe that karma works itself out in subsequent lives, in literal rebirth or reincarnation. In my understanding of it, the teaching applies even if one thinks of karma as working out in this lifetime in myriad indirect and direct ways. Buddha points out that with most people the bulk of their activities are perfectly harmless, and even good; harmful deeds aren’t habitual, and can be given up and compensated for. So although one cannot avoid some bad karma, one can mitigate it. You’re not going to fry in hell. I’m looking again at things that I’ve done in my life about which I feel guilty, which I’m often afraid to look at face-on, and vague feelings of being a “bad person.” It’ll be nice to die without those things still hanging over my head, if only for my children’s sake.
Thanks, Maura et al!
The “hell(s)” I refer to are psycholoigical and are usually self-induced, i.e. karma through habit) Just look around “the room” i.e. the world and you’ll see what I mean.
We do it to ourselves!
:8-)
I did a 10-week online intensive earlier this year on “The Jewel Ornament of Liberation,” Gompopa’s masterwork of Tibetan Buddhism. Scared the bejeesus out of me (and the others, I think). My teacher’s teacher required her to read JOL 26 times in order to reall “get” was being driven at. It’s way too easy to take it literally…
Synchronistically, and to the subject, here is today’s “Glimpse of the Day…” (Tibetan Buddhist author.)
November 24
We may say, and even half-believe, that compassion is marvelous, but in practice our actions are deeply uncompassionate and bring us and others mostly frustration and distress, and not the happiness we are all seeking.
Isn’t it absurd that we all long for happiness, yet nearly all our actions and feelings lead us directly away from that happiness?
What do we imagine will make us happy? A canny, self-seeking, resourceful selfishness, the selfish protection of ego, which can as we all know, make us at moments extremely brutal. But in fact the complete reverse is true: Self-grasping and self-cherishing are seen, when you really look at them, to be the root of all harm to others, and also of all harm to ourselves.
In the dharma,
John
Thinking about Catenada’s comment. Children are often shielded from the death of pets let alone relatives or friends. To fear death is to fear life. If we avoid seeing death then it won’t happen. This is living under the dark cloud.
in Gassho
Hi,
Last night at work, had a patient who cursed and swore around me, not at me though. It made for a good practice of staying in the positive for me, which seemed to spread out… started when I decided in a subtle way to begin the night at work in the ICU, being open to my coworkers, opened by, when normally I can be pretty quiet.
So I started off the shift, with the first person I met on the floor being openly direct and interested in their perspective.
It seems I have to lead in this opening, because I have lead in the closing. And the whole night focused on openness, and healing, right out to the morning drive home. It felt so so good.
Tonight I’ll do the same.
Right now though it’s about being good, to a cup of warm green tea.
Thanks, John. A memorable example, and a good one for me/us to follow too.
In the terms of this discussion of fear of life/death, I see here a kind of fear of death, of annihilation of the self (the person who was projecting that fear through curses on to others; the person who is cursed or deeply disturbed and dragged around by another’s behavior).
Taking the lead to open up requires some courage and resolve, and we can be afraid to do that, afraid to stand out and take the initiative–afraid to do what the moment requires of the bodhisattva.
Last night I was trapped in silence again. I could only speak when offering service to another. Listening to God in silence the first question I have is, is not… “Where are you?” Immediately I place God in another domain, where in fact, but not reason, this present moment is all, giving. It never dies.
“This present moment is all, giving.” It never dies because it never had a beginning.