Death is Certain

Death is certain.
The hour of death is uncertain.
How then shall I live?

-- Tibetan mantra helpful to Stephen Batchelor, author of Secular Buddhism

Dear All,

Whether it was brought about by Adam's Fall or not, and whether we will eventually relearn the trick of physical immortality or not, for this long meanwhile of known and foreseeable human existence, all humans die. 

There's a priceless interview in which Sasha Baron Cohen (in his Ali G persona) twits pompous ex-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and suggests that maybe one out of five people will just keep going and not go through "the def thing."  Koop is more pessimistic.  See their exchange here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeUtCxe-xDg

The reason to focus on death's inevitability is multifold.  For example, awareness of limits heightens our sense of the preciousness, realness, immediacy, and miraculousness of being alive.  It puts us under a potentially fruitful time pressure.  It joins us to the wider sweep of humanity, all of whom acted in the human tragicomedy for a time until, as Ram Dass used to say, "the hook comes out and you're yanked offstage."  It right-sizes both our agony and our ecstasy: this too shall pass.  It can increase our compassion for others who, like ourselves, are so often asleep to mortality, having been hypnotized by the three poisons: greed, anger and delusion.

Awareness of death has more mysterious fruits too, of an intensity that surpasses emotion or rather creates new feelings altogether.  It can shock us out of our identification with physical life and deliver us to a life that includes both time on earth and non-time or other-time beyond earth.  If you have the luck to be near someone's dying moments, you may notice that before, during, and after the medically or legally defined passage, and right alongside any grief, anger, confusion and relief, the door swings open on the same vistas of love and meaning that surround a human birth.  Death contemplation opens us to the deathless.

As we continue with the first lojong slogan, "Train in the Preliminaries," let us spend a week asking ourselves as often and sincerely as possible, letting the answers come from ever different angles and ever deeper pondering:
 Death is certain.
The hour of death is uncertain.
How then shall I live?

All blessings to all,

Michael