“Death is not the end of Being; it may the end of some sort of being. Being remains unaffected by death; only that which is fictitious, sham, is continuously dying.” – Herbert Guenther, in his commentary to Longchenpa’s Kindly Bent to Ease Us.
Death-dukkha is a trance of identification, a trance created by the will. Mindfulness makes possible the releasing of will from its entanglement in unhelpful patterns of ‘identity.’ Mindfulness through the body cures our wrong relationship to death, with its confusion, stress, and anguish.
Mindfulness is recollective, present-moment awareness. And what is recollected? That depends on the view underpinning your mindfulness; and, the level of your insight into human process. The view in Buddhism is that liberation from fundamental delusions about self is possible, and in this context ‘mindfulness’ means recollecting your sentient processes. Particularly, we pay attention to those areas of functioning named in the mindfulness sutta: our bodily form; our feeling tones; our states of consciousness (in terms of general descriptors, such as expanded or contracted, wholesome or unwholesome, or this or that attitude); and, the dynamics of these three, in terms of whether they are organised to tend, to ‘slant and slope’ toward liberation; whether they are organised to tend toward maintaining the trance of dukkha (including death-dukkha).
Mindfulness, then, can help one to recognise that one is in a trance of mindlessness. Then, automatically the trance loosens. Leaving the body out of awareness supports the trance, so mindfulness in the body reminds you to be intimate with your bodily experience of the trance. Mindfulness helps you bring in the experiential, body-based skills or methods you may have learnt with others – with friends, sangha, therapists, meditation or mindfulness teachers, focusing trainers, and so on – to take care of yourself. And, from the Buddhist point of view, mindfulness supports deep enquiry. All of this, if tended well, results in dis-identification, which is central to all healing.
Identification happens when the mind state includes a specific kind of error in the feeling of ‘self.’ A self-image gets formed out of the error. The feeling of ‘self’ is a dependently arisen process. That is, it’s a feel which is constantly renewing in all our situations. It isn’t permanent, otherwise it could provide no fresh guidance. So, we can’t actually have an accurate fixed image of our self. But we become caught by the error that the ‘self’ is permanent and that it is the same as our processes. In identification, ‘I’ and something which comes and goes are the same. For instance: I am my body, I am my feeling tones, I am my perceptions, I am my intentions, or I am the one who knows, and so on.
Of course, you – the person of such and such a name and such and such a place, and whose body is quite unique – you can’t be limited to, or defined by, any one process. Neither can you be a findable something which is the totality of all these processes – if only for the reason that the one inside who would be looking for the real you couldn’t include itself! Also, if we were to list all that makes you up, we’d have to include everything in the universe – past, present, and future. How do we get an image of that?! If you are an interdependent, living event, then what image could possible encompass all you are and imply? So you are not measurable, and not findable.
So, if you aren’t anything which can be represented with an image – and, where you begin and end can’t be found – then what dies? With familiarity with what is, when the identification with this or that ceases, one can recognise a special quality of openness.
Aware of this foam-like body,
Awake to its insubstantial nature,
cutting the flowered spikes of Māra,
go where the Kind of Death can’t see.
– Dhammapada, verse 46. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
So, to become free of the fear of death, we live our bodily life consciously. We turn up 100% for birth and death, which puts self-images (self-representations) into perspective – as being only provisional tools, pointing to a reality that can’t be pinned down.