What do we mean when we say the word ‘death’? Our experience is that others die. That is, the word, if it has any basis in experience, is about our experience of others’ physical deaths. And, so usually when we apply the word to ourselves, it is often applied to the disintegration of our physical body, as an object – a thing that can be seen from ‘over there,’ in the way that we might see the body of another.
The inner experience is a mystery, and we rarely know how to go about exploring this while we are alive. Some of us – perhaps many of us – believe that it is impossible to explore death while alive. But there is a way: to the extent that we can bring the word ‘death’ into contact with the experiential dimension of our life, to that extent we can use it to point to how we feel.
There are other uses of the words ‘die’ and ‘death ‘which apply to emotional conditions. We can explore death, for example, when we have certain intense life-experiences, those which challenge our established patterns.
We can explore why, for instance, we say, ‘I could have died,’ when we have experienced embarrassing moments. Spiritual practices, including meditation and mindfulness, can bring us intimately in contact with experiences of ego-loss, and there we find the word death begins to take on a more personal meaning.
I felt this most deeply in the mid-nineties. My experience of my identity underwent such a radical change, due to Zen retreat practice, that for a few weeks, I felt as if I was ‘dying.’ What exactly did I feel that made that word the right one for my experience? It did fit; but, why was that the word I used, for this change in the way that I experienced myself?
It was the sense of losing my old personality, my identity; of losing ‘identification with’ the story I could tell, and had told, of who I was. There was stable contact with an inconceivable dimension of myself. This brought a new understanding of death. I was, at last, actually accepting a dimension that had been insistently nudging at my consciousness for twenty years – that of being unnameable.
In this time, I turned around to face the one that had been haunting me: the feeling that I was nothing that could be experienced as an object – not a body, not a mental ‘me,’ nothing with colour or form.
It wasn’t just that the ‘I’ couldn’t be found, that there was nothing anywhere. I had lived in that kind of existential crisis, as I said, for twenty years. No, this was the recognition that my deepest ‘I’ did exist after all, and that what it was could be called the Unfindable. I was (and am, of course) that big not-graspable silence, the (…..).
And, the best way for me, the human, to describe how the shift from the old felt was to say, “I am dying.” “I feel like I am dying,” I said to my Zen teacher Subhana, when I rang her for to get a reality check.
I didn’t know what the end of the body is like, but this felt like what death must be like. People who take up A Year to Live practice are often surprised at how easily the practice drops off their radar. One reason that this is so is because we want to avoid feeling the loss of our familiar sense of self.
And another is that we fear, down in our depths, that we are nothing. I find, in my work with others, that we have a belief that, to be ourselves, we have to always be able to tell a story.
Stories are an important part of our lives, but they are not all there is. And neither are stories the core of our life. No person is their content. I’m not my gross physical life – that’s content. I’m not my emotional content, and not even my subtle mind content. Now is not content. Try grasping hold of this now. Where is it? Death, as an inner experience, is: dying to our content.
When you take up the way of present-moment remembrance, you get the chance to surrender attachment to the sphere of death – all your content – many times a day, of course, in the flow of your usual relationships. No special retreats are necessary. And, alone in your life – while walking, standing, sitting, lying down – you can also let go your mental chatter, and relax into not naming.
I let go my constructed identity, right there in my stories, my commentaries, my self-scenarios, my self-justifications, and so on. I have, then, the entry into the wonder of being empty of content, empty of all that comes and goes; yet I feel full, in the fullness of this (…..).
I can notice that the mind makes a lot of unnecessary invitations – habitual invitations – to take up the content, the commentaries, and so on; but, I can practice the art of dying, by just saying: “No, thank you. I’ll accept not knowing anything about who I am, just now.” The Buddha said that to stop identifying with our content is to become “profound, immeasurable, hard to fathom like the ocean.” (Majjhima Nikāya, 72)
There is time for stories, so I am not suggesting suppressing thinking. It’s rather noticing the implicit background to thinking and letting that play a part in your life. Then, the stories serve life, rather than obscure it. This means relinquishing reckoning oneself in terms of anything ultimately findable. To do this, we will need to feel the fear of dying.
This ocean of the Inconceivable is not the only aspect of awakened life, of course. There is a place for your uniqueness, after all. However, it is an important discovery, this mystery of Being, which will then put your individuality in perspective. With this discovery comes true riches.
And, aren’t we in a runaway habit of trying to fathom ourselves with concepts? Are we willing to become the Unfindable, the profound ocean? Or, will we keep frustratingly looking for ourselves in the sphere of what comes and goes, the sphere of what is being born and what is dying?
To find the true refuge, we need to turn around, and say hello to our fear of being nothing.