Practice for Dying & Death
It occurred to me one day that daily meditation – practice – is among other things a training for our death. This assumes that one's death is not sudden but rather something anticipated in terms of minutes, hour or months. If you die suddenly in this life, your practice will still have counted...
I've gleaned enough from daily practice that I've no doubts that something carries on after death, what is sometimes referred to as a mind stream in certain schools. The concept of a stream that is ever moving, constantly changing direction and shape is an analogy and like all analogies, prone to breakdown. For me, it works.
Ajahn Martin talks about the old car wearing out and us moving onto a new one, maybe a Pinto or a Porsche depending on our merits. The Dalai Lama says something along the same lines, that we should be happy because our lives will continue on in a new form once this one is done.
This is an important point: Not every creature wants Enlightenment. Very few do. Of the very few who do, most still don't really want it, they want some conception they have of it, like maybe a Super-Sized Heaven. They are not yet ready to undertake the final push of their journey. I do this frequently, asking the Self, "Hey, do you really want to break the cycle? Then why do you continue to do X and Y?"
Why do I eat too much? Why do I sleep too much? Why don't I practice more?
And that's OK. The Buddha and his disciples were men and women who felt an urgency about reaching escape from cyclic existence. The concept of a new life in a new body didn't appeal to them in the least. Not everyone shares their holy desire to reach the Island. For those in this camp, the ethical life based in compassion and concern for others produces a better future state of existence which is pleasant, peaceful and certainly bearable. This is a point brought out by Longchenpa in his Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind.
If you are in this camp and you probably are, meditation is a way of preparing for a good death, whether you are ordained or not.
How so?
In meditation, samadhi is understood as a state of collectedness where the normal turbulence of the mind is brought to stillness and the normal afflictions of greed, anger and the like are temporarily brought to heel. The voices of the committee (as Thanissaro calls them) become quiet and there is just stillness. It's a goal of my daily practice.
To get the mind quiet takes some time but practicing daily makes it easier. This is where people with a mystical bent may be surprised to learn that meditation is mostly about practice once a commitment to ethical living has been made. If you are using alcohol, lying, stealing, holding ill will against others or engaging in sex outside of a committed relationship, meditation will be harder for you. Actions in these categories have effects and these include keeping yourself in the dark about reality. The kilesas are a heavy black curtain over perception.
If you are having a hard time of sitting for five minutes quietly and breathing in a relaxed way, this is a sign perhaps that your life is out of balance. Overstimulation from electronic devices or caffeine, not living as ethically as you could and other things can cause you to actively resist sitting. Most people will never take to meditation, will find nothing attractive about it. A few will begin the practice and thrive on it quickly while for others it will take longer to get into the groove.
Through practice, it becomes easier to reach the quiet mind daily. Once achieved, it becomes the launch point of investigation into existence. What was I like as a child? What did I do as a child? What is it about this or that draws me to it despite the danger it represents? The subject matter will vary according to the yogi, but the point is to probe from a higher elevation point where the air is clear and the sky is cloudless.
With daily practice, we become familiar with the mind's nature and the ways in which our defilements pull us back to the mundane whenever it begins slowing down. The kilesas do not like you playing Sherlock Holmes after a good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast.
Through careful focus on the breath, we are able to draw the mind back to center whenever it lunges out of the body in search of an object. The normal ordinary mind of conventional day-to-day life is all about repeating the same habits and following the same obsessions even though they are completely exhausted of any value. Meditation helps you to become aware of just how dull your compulsions really are and this will translate positively into your daily activities. The practice you do in meditation is training for "real" life because mind is the fundament of both realms. Meditation is outside of the normal frenetic pace of thinking and provides a perspective on it.
Eventually, we become still through concentration on the breath. The things that pull us away from collectedness are a foretaste of what we will experience during the death process. In death as in meditation, our mind will grasp at things as the life force begins to leave the body. How we handle these things during practice will shape our states in life and death.
Having regularly meditated for two years, the map to concentration is easier to follow with each sit or walk. I can only imagine what more experienced meditators enjoy from their effort, but I don't focus on that. I am grateful those people are out there and it gives me a happy goal to move towards. Dhamma practice is goal-driven and the desire to progress in becoming a happier, kinder and more empathic person is a holy desire. These positive qualities are in the pristine mind and they can be nurtured and brought forward.
How do I know what the mind state is of a dying person? I don't remember my previous deaths, so it's conjecture on my part with some heavy buttressing by intuition. Humans are the only animals who can imagine their expiration in all sorts of ways.
If a doctor handed me a terminal cancer diagnosis tomorrow and said, "You have four-to-six months to live," I would expect to do an inventory of my attachments, to see where my mind lingers as my days run out. Because of meditation, I will have the tools to see where it travels, the states it goes through in rapid succession as I see death approaching – fear, anxiety, calm, resignation. Had I been wiser and practiced sooner in life, the death process would be easier, maybe even pleasant. Buddhism is the only religion I'm aware of that says suffering in this life is optional and that one can have a happy death. People who never meditate will have a tendency to identify themselves with their form; death will be harder since they have no other point of reference for seeing themselves and when they see the breakup of their body coming, a host of negative states can arise.
I take care of my health now because this life, this body are very valuable. Living to old age means more time to draw closer to the heart of dhamma, to prepare well for the next transition. But I could die in the next few moments.
Today, because of meditation, I'm a little better with saying, "There's anger – There's lust – There's greed" when they arise. This anger here now is like this. This is what it feels like, this is the sensation it causes in the body, this is what it is like when it dissipates, this is what anger feels like 15 minutes after it is gone and I'm thinking about something else.
Just doing this a few times will have a transformative effect on your life. Seeing how things swell up in your mind and break through the surface is like Neo seeing bullets moving very slowly towards him. So my analogies are pretty mixed up here, but you catch my drift. This is not an extraordinary claim that requires evidence although it may seem this way. This is mindfulness.
It's an epiphany, the instant when you see that there is the conventional you with its conditioned, brain-dead reflexes to life and then there's another part who witnesses it all, who abstains from knee jerk reactions. Sounds spooky, but it's not. It's wonderful and a sign that there is something like a profound freedom underlying your life. Meditation allows this witness a greater presence in day-to-day affairs. Stepping back and letting it do its witnessing leads to a calmer life, one spent in the neutral ground outside of craving and clinging. The witness observes, it does not identify itself with the never ending flow of mental events. The witness sees things rise and fall like waves, disappearing forever back into the ocean of being. Our consciousness is just such a wave, an aggregate that is compounded out of other parts and is destined for dissolution.
It's not unusual for people, especially older folks, to have a premonition that their current career is about to end. The stories are universal, cross-cultural. They begin giving things away, saying goodbyes to friends and neighbors in subtle ways, putting finishing touches on wills and testaments. Maybe they share a few stories with the grandkids that inspire goodness and fond recollections. They may even give wise predictions about the future course of a family member.
The point is that we do have positive reasons for knowing what dying is like apart from recollection of past lives. Through the practice of meditation, we can experience daily the quieting of mental activity and grasping. The mind brought to rest and awareness is in a state that is much closer to what we might experience if we live out our natural lives and make it to some illness that ends on a death bed.
