...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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