Be happy, live fully and never fear death!

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I thrill at the way things come together in such charming ways…What am I talking about?

Well, yesterday, I finished my post, The Burial of Happiness, with the following words:

“Awaken to your Self or you will be burying the living”.

Later in the evening, I received a request for a response to a question about death.  Now, it is quite possible that the person who sent it had read my post.  I somehow don’t think he had though :-).  Just a hunch, but there you go.

Anyway, here is the question followed by my response:

“I have a fear of death that causes me tremendous anxiety. I’ve been advised that while in meditation, I should ask, “Who is it that is afraid of death?” I don’t understand that. I meditate on the breath, but to ask that question, I don’t know how to find the answer.

Can you help with this and my fear of death?

Troy

Hi Troy

Fearing death is indeed an awful experience. Notice, I said ‘fearing death’ rather than death itself :-). The former, we have experienced, but the latter, we haven’t, meaning we really don’t know what death is like. This brings me to an important point.

We are all familiar with the expression ‘fear of the unknown’ and most of us actually believe that what we don’t know, we are afraid of and rightly so. Now logically, that does not make sense. If you don’t know something, why ever would you be afraid of it?

What we really are afraid of is what we DO KNOW and that we will find what we *do know* in the ‘unknown’. For instance, we do know what loneliness, abandonment, failure, guilt, being cheated etc are and we are afraid that we may find them in the so-called ‘unknown’. That is the real reason why we fear the ‘unknown’ – we fear we will find the (unpleasant) known in the unknown.

A child, especially a very young child, has no fear. Everything is unknown to it. It is only after it has had some painful experiences that it will learn how to fear and avoid known, familiar situations that it believes are associated with such painful experiences. In time, it will also learn to fear and avoid unknown, unfamiliar situations believing that they too may be associated with pain.

I have gone on at some length about this because I believe it is at the core of your fear. Why are you afraid of death? What does death and dying mean to you?

Are you afraid of the dying process? If so, what is it about the dying process (which is unknown to you) do you fear? Is it the thought of being ‘no more’, of ceasing to exist? And if so, what do you find so terrifying about that?

On the other hand, are you afraid of dying through illness and the pain and suffering that that might entail? If so, what choices can you make now, while you are still in reasonably (I’m assuming) good health? These choices are as much about lifestyle and preparation for the inevitable event of death as they are about how you handle the matter of death mentally and emotionally.

These are important questions to ask. The questions you have been advised to ask: Who am I and who is it that is afraid of death?” are also important and useful questions. They can seem incomprehensible if you have not experienced yourself outside the concept of your personality. At the same time, they are used to trigger this very experience.

Here is a metaphor that is used in Buddhist teachings that might help:

Consider the blue sky. It is often covered by clouds, clouds which are in constant motion, coming and going, changing shape, form, density etc. Sometimes, the clouds cover the sky completely and you even forget that there is the blue sky behind them! Most of the time,however, we get so preoccupied with the clouds that we lose sight of the blue sky and we forget that it is always there, whether we notice it or not.

The same is true of us. The clouds, collectively, could be said to be your personality and your experiences – thoughts, feelings, beliefs, sensations etc. But beyond your personality (which began forming in your earliest childhood), there is a you, a ‘blue sky’ you which has always been. In moments of sudden breathtaking beauty or sudden shock, you do drop your personality and all your preoccupations, if only for a few seconds. In those seconds, you are present as your blue sky nature, that which is always there, which is, as the Buddhists say ‘unenhanceable and indestructible’.

In a sense, when you go to sleep, you ‘die’ i.e. your conscious preoccupations are all dropped as your state of consciousness shifts from beta to alpha, theta and delta. I mention this because it’s useful to consider that the experience of ‘death’ is perhaps a little more familiar than we realize :-).  And, as in sleep and being in the presence of extraordinary beauty, we have a rather pleasant experience of ‘death’ – a loss of conscious preoccupation.

I have found it useful is to remind myself that when I die, all my preoccupations and attachments with the physical world will cease (as happens when we fall asleep or have extraordinarily beautiful experiences), leaving me completely free!

I would encourage you to continue to gently and compassionately and preferably with a sense of humor, investigate your feelings, thoughts and beliefs about death. (By the way, there is a very powerful, enlightening and liberating Buddhist meditation on death). Contrary to what we believe, it can be an enormously liberating experience. Go gently. Think of speaking to yourself as a father to a child. The child is unafraid to ask any question. And the father will do his best to answer drawing on his experience and his reasoning.

You won’t need to search for answers, but when you ask the questions freely and keep a truly open space, the answers will come to you. Be patient.

I have observed that people who are least concerned about death are those who live their lives as fully and freely as they can. So, choose to live every moment of your life as fully and freely as you can. I mean, get so absorbed with life that you really have no time for death!  When it comes, it will find you so full of life, having absolutely no regrets and thus more than happy to shift gear i.e. move into another state of consciousness!

I have said a fair bit, offering you a few different angles from which to approach this matter. If you were my client and we were in a real-time discussion, I would be guided by your responses. In the absence of them, I am giving you a bit of a scatter gun approach…well not really, but a little less targeted perhaps :-)

Feel free to contact me should you need further help.

Blessings, Lucy