“(A Year to Live) is not simply about dying, but about the restoration of the heart, which occurs when we confront our life and death with mercy and awareness. It is an opportunity to resolve our denial of death as well as our denial of life in a year-long experiment in healing, joy, and revitalization.” – Stephen Levine, A Year to Live
This practice is to turn toward what we fear; to explore, feel, think, sense into, and know one’s actual relationship to death. We help others when we help ourselves in this way, too. There will always be people in our circle who will appreciate such reflections.
To reflect on death leads naturally to studying – directly, in our own experience – how we know ourselves. We can resolve the question of who or what dies by knowing ourselves. I have found that, for me, the enquiry naturally deepens into an understanding of human nature as being more about ‘process’ than ‘content’ – how we are in the world (how we interact), and not so much what we are. (Selfish or altruistic, for instance).
One thing that has slowly become clear to me, over close to fifty years of contemplative practice, is that an experience-near way to think of ‘selfhood’ naturally leads to a different understanding of death. When we able to see the death of our identifications with self-images as the basic death, then what we emphasise about being human changes. We then know what matters about living.
During the year of writing the blog, my strong focus on the Pāli mythos came as a surprise for me. (This is, broadly speaking, the earliest form of Buddhist culture). I thought I’d be talking about the things that have caught the attention of Western Buddhists, such as: the means of early preparation for physical death, involving forgiveness practice, gratitude practice, and life-review; and teachings about death from Tibetan Buddhist culture, such as after-death experiences; and so on.
Some of these topics you can find in Stephen Levine’s book. Going through such contemplations, and those in the book, certainly supports being able to approach death with a sense of completion or fulfilment.
Regarding the Tibetan or tantric approach, I do the Tibetan Dissolution of the Elements practice from time to time, and there are other aspects of tantric practice that I use – mandala practice, for instance – but, I nevertheless have found the early Buddhist meditations every bit as powerful as the Dissolution of the Elements meditation. There’s nothing more powerful, for me, than classical Ānāpānasati meditation (which I’ll explain in the course of the project).
So, what emerged in this year-long project was a clear picture of how the Buddha of the Nikāyas saw death and preparation to death. Because the Pali texts are my primary Buddhist texts, that is what I will concentrate on, in this writing. It turns out that the Buddha of these texts (which I hereafter refer to as the Nikāya Buddha) sees the practice of life as the preparation for death.
One thing that has deepened, due to the practice of A Year to Live, is my understanding of what the Buddha means when he talked about the ‘deathless.’ It came to me forcefully several years back, with a radical clarity, that “There is no death.” I then undertook a period of review, to be sure that I was seeing right, which has included checking with other Buddhist teachers. I hope to present this radical claim to you, during this project.
“Before we can leave the body effortlessly we have to inhabit it fully. A remarkable means of heightening life as well as preparing for death is to enter the body wholeheartedly, sensation by sensation.” – Stephen Levine, A Year to Live
My understanding of the body is the other most radical shift in my thinking during my long Buddhist life, so that naturally arises in this project. To dwell in the body intimately and fully only happens after a thorough training; because, this ‘dwelling’ not just about being in contact with bodily sensations and actions. As I see it, the body is a local representative of true nature – it is the intelligence of the universe manifesting in specific ways.
While I glimpsed, forty years ago, that I could say rightly, “I am not my body,” on the other hand, I have also come to understand “I am only my body.” This is not the body of modern medicine – a constructed thing, or a machine. In this project, body and mind are perspectives on experiencing, and ultimately on Being (which resolves these contradictions).
There is the always present the profound presence of luminous Being, felt as the core of our very own bodily life. So, I’m confident that knowing the body thoroughly will allow its dissolution without any resistance, on the occasion of my death.
“Old age, sickness and death do not have to be equated with suffering: we can live and practice in such a way that dying is a natural rite of passage, a completion of our life, and even the ultimate liberation.” – Joan Halifax, Being with Dying