Nona's World

Life's biggest challenge is facing death. Death is an inevitability, a constant, what varies is how we react to it. My mother, for example, favors ignoring death. She says that since it is going to happen, no point in thinking or worrying about it. One should just enjoy life while one can. The Western world in general leans towards this approach, not just towards death but any "obstacle" - whether it be disease, ageing or dying. The other approach is to face it, to accept this inevitability and to prepare every day for it, so that our last days are not filled with terror and anguish. This is more of an Eastern attitude, and is evident in many Eastern religions. In Buddhism, for example, some of the practices that help you prepare for death involve spending nights in the cemetery, meditating on death (Satipatthana Sutra). Hinduism encourages a different kind of life, depending on the phase of your life cycle. They are the life of a student, the householder, and the "hermit".

Larry Rosenberg, one of my favourite writers of Buddhism puts it the best:

"Our culture is particularly culpable in this regard. We put young people on pedestals, sick people in hospitals, elderly people in nursing homes; we sanitize the dead in funeral homes, trying to make them look attractive and alive, and do everything we can to keep death out of our consciousness. We put all of our energy into acquisition—of material possessions, knowledge, titles, land, friends, and lovers. We think we want these things for themselves, but we are using them to create and enhance our sense of self. This life of acquisition seems to shield us from the bedrock realities of aging and death. Our things become who we think we are.

The truth is that we are aging from the moment we are born, that we have no idea when we may grow ill and when we will die. No one is guaranteed even one more breath. Death will take all our acquisitions away, including our sense of who we are, of everything we identify as self. Death is not waiting for us at the end of the road. It is walking with us the whole time. We are fascinated by disaster epics, like the story of the Titanic, but the truth is that we are all on the Titanic, right now. We just imagine it’s a pleasure cruise, just as the people on the Titanic did.

At the same time, we harbor a huge amount of unfelt fear about sickness, aging and death, and that fear robs us of vitality, partly because we expend so much energy avoiding and repressing it. Bringing up this fear and facing it—as I did with Badarayana and other teachers—is a great enhancement to our lives. Really facing death enables us to appreciate and make the best use of our life in a whole new way."

Labels: buddhism, death, hinduism