...the Big Problem isn’t death — instead, it’s disconnection, our sense of separateness. From the Buddhist point of view, what hurts the most about dying is the idea that we’re cutting our ties with the ones we love: we imagine death as a permanent exile from the land of the living.

But Buddhists believe that if we can overcome our sense of isolation, death is no longer the Big Problem. Dying remains quite a challenge, of course, but now it’s like a water drop returning to the sea. Once we see that water is what we’ve always been, we understand that all life is eternal.   

For Buddhists, the major obstacle to this discovery is our tendency to cling to the self as who and what we really are. Eternal life comes from letting go of the self, not from holding on. And in one way or another, all Buddhist practices have been designed to help us let go completely — through meditation, chanting, prayer, ritual, calligraphy and sutras study.

Through these practices, we learn to look more closely at our minds, and Buddhists believe that when we do, we’ll see that we have never really been Bob, Jane, Jim or whatever self we’ve accepted as real. The identities we cling to so tightly are actually like a hotel room where we’ll stay for a few nights before moving on to another room in another hotel somewhere else.

What counts, then, isn’t some future room but being fully in the here and now, with gratitude and openness. Beyond all our personal identities, there is a form of consciousness that feels connected everywhere.  

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mes potes du matin

 

Be kind to yourself as you proceed along this journey. This kindness, in itself, is a means of awakening the spark of love within you and helping others to discover that spark within themselves.

Paul Rinpoche

repos en famille au champ centre avant le départ vers le sud

Turning away from a flight from death, you see a horizon of opportunity that puts you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakable JOY

The world as it is, creation out of the void, things as they are, things as they are not, are too much for us to be able to stand. Or, better: they would be too much for us to bear without crumbling in a faint, trembling like a leaf, standing in a trance in response to the movement, colors, and odors of the world. I say “would be” because most of us—by the time we leave childhood—have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience. Sometimes we may recapture this world by remembering some striking childhood perceptions, how suffused they were in emotion and wonder—how a favorite grandfather looked, or one’s first love in his early teens. We change these heavily emotional perceptions precisely because we need to move about in the world with some kind of equanimity, some kind of strength and directness; we can’t keep gaping with our heart in our mouth, greedily sucking up with our eyes everything great and powerful that strikes us. The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.

Ernest Becker, Denial of Death

Writing - The Sacred Art

Rami Shapiro

Gaslight Cafe

Greenwich Village, 1959

Lester Bangs

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung