Not-Self & Death Anxiety

[Kyōsen]

Haha, that sounds brilliant Jishin! I'm adding it to my reading list right now!

Gassho,
Sen
SatToday|LAH

[Jishin]

Haha, that sounds brilliant Jishin! I'm adding it to my reading list right now!

Gassho,
Sen
SatToday|LAH

Sekishi recommended the book in jest I think but it’s actually a good book for brain dead people like me.

Gassho, Jishin, __/stlah\__

[Geika]

Sen, that is lovely.

Gassho
Sat today, lah

[Rich]

Yeah, gratitude is great for this wondrous moment

Yeah, don’t know

To live zombies have to eat brains. The way of the zombies

[emoji120]
Sat/lah


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[Onka]

The weirdest experience I've ever had was after being knocked off my pushbike at age 12. I remember looking down on myself bleeding in someone's bathtub. We lived in a poor area so calling an ambulance back then wasn't an option. My Mum was contacted and she apparently picked me and took me to hospital. The next thing I remember was looking down on myself and seeing my Dad crying. It was the only time I saw him cry. Apparently my parents were sent home but told not to go to sleep because things were a bit dicey. I remember trying to scream and move but couldn't. I was pretty terrified.
The only other time I was confronted with my own mortality was earlier this year when there was a decent chance I had a blood cancer. Many many tests later my blood is still weird but I definitely don't have cancer. YAHTZEE! This time I was remarkably calm. Believe it or not the only thing I wanted to do was listen to my favourite songs and make a modern version of Ye Olde Mixed Tape for my partner. I sat a lot of Zazen over this period too.
Life eh... It throws all kinds of bollocks at you doesn't it. I thought about writing down some of the bollocks that comes and goes while sitting Zazen but if it was found I'm sure the nice men in the white coats would want me to go with them haha.
Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Don't be a dick. Sit. Sit. Sit. Repeat.

Gassho
Anna

Sitted and done stuff for others

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[Kyōsen]

Hello friends,

I've continued to work with this topic and in case anyone is interested I think I have some interesting things to share.

I came across a notion that a different way to view emptiness is as "infinite relativity" - the view that everything relates to everything else; all things have a relational reality rather than an independent reality. I think this helped me to better understand what Jundo wrote about emptiness turning back and affirming the existence of each of us.

This fear of death that I struggled with had a particularly crucial element: The idea that death means the end of experience. That there'd be no more experience of reality, it would be lights out forever. I was operating according to a very materialistic view of reality, one that says when you die then you become nothing, you're just gone. This is, upon reflection, a very silly idea. One cannot become nothing. Nothing doesn't exist! So a person cannot become a thing that doesn't exist - that wouldn't make any sense.

The Dharma teaches us that when death comes, the aggregates that make up this current experience (mentioned in the Heart Sutra we chant each week) dissolve and/or go their separate ways. So that leaves the question "Well ... what happens to me then? I can't exist without my body!" But ... we are not our body, and we are not our perceptions or sensations either. All these things, we are told in no uncertain terms, are not-self. Anatta. Even so there seems to be this continuity of experience we have, so what happens to that? Before I get to that, actually, I had an interesting thought:

I don't have any memories of being in the womb, and my memories of being a very young child are very sparse and the few that I do have are very dim. I don't really remember much about my childhood either (possibly for a sad reason but that's not really the point). But ... do I have any kind of fear or panic about those gaps in my memory? No, not at all. I don't seem to be the slightest bit inconvenienced by those gaps in my memory, I don't seem at all bothered that there are people I have forgotten entirely who maybe were once important to me. So if part of my fear involves this discomfort about not being able to have a sense of experiential continuity, then maybe I should consider that my current sense of continuity is already pretty shaky and I don't feel all that bad about it.

But back to the thing before ... what happens to that part of us that has this sense of an experiential continuity? Well, like the other aggregates, it doesn't just cease to exist. When a tree falls in the woods, it doesn't wink out of existence after all. So what is it like to have an experience without having a body to feel or the ability to create memories? I honestly don't know, but I think about people who have brain injuries who aren't able to form new memories and, from what I've read, they don't seem to be in a permanent state of distress about it. They obviously face some unique challenges for which they need a lot of help, but they quite literally don't know what they've lost.

But that does give me the impression that when we're without this human life we are especially vulnerable. Without our mental aggregates, how can we really evaluate situations or make meaningful choices? I think this is why it's so important that we practice while we're still alive. To train in the Buddha way so that when death comes, we have already established within ourselves strong habits and patterns that will guide us when we lose our ability to do human things.

I can't say for sure what happens after death, though. These are just the thoughts I've been thinking.

Gassho
Sen
Sat|LAH

[Onka]

I always figured that once I fall off the perch I'll become compost and therefore just another significant but insignificant part of the cycle of life.
As for the 'me' or 'I' in all this, I'm just a skin bag of bones, blood and organs that is trying not to muck up things for other skin bags of blood, bones and organs either now or when this skin bag reaches its used by date as a skin bag. Then again, maybe we're all just compost already at various stages of deterioration. If I fail or succeed I'll still be compost.
Gassho
Anna
stlah


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[Jundo]

Hello friends,

I've continued to work with this topic and in case anyone is interested I think I have some interesting things to share.

Maybe still too intellectual, analytical. Both these ideas, and your fear of vanishing, are simply in your head. Like a musician merging into her music, or a thread merging into its tapestry, or a stroke of a paint into the Mona Lisa ... this must be felt.

We cannot really even explain such things, only experience them through Zazen and the like. However, I feel that some poetic descriptions or traditional images help. So, for example, we quite literally feel that the whole ocean pours into, and is fully contained without the least tension, in every single drop of the ocean ... as if the who ocean is held within or, better said, is co-identical with that tiny drop. So it is for you, me, every dust mote or mountain ... all drops which hold all. It is not merely that drops of water combine to fill the ocean, but that the ocean fills totally every single drop and is held within its skin, is its skin too. Miraculously, each drop holds the entirety of the ocean inside with not one drop left out! Then, should a particular drop vanish ... the ocean remains.

There are a few nice images of this in Dogen, other mystical writers, and some modern Zen folks too. For example, Dogen wrote this substituting the moonlight for the ocean ...

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water. Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long of short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.

Also, a Sufi poet ...

“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.” – Kabir

A nice image from Shunryu Suzuki (in ZMBM) ...

I went to Yosemite National Park, and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1,340 feet high, and from it the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly, as you might expect; it seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance it looks like a curtain. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one whole river. Only when separated into many drops can it begin to have or to express some feeling. When we see one whole river we do not feel the living activity of the water, but when we dip a part of the water into a dipper, we experience some feeling of the water, and we also feel the value of the person who uses the water. Feeling ourselves and the water in this way, we cannot use it in just a material way. It is a living thing.

Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called "mind-only," or "essence of mind," or "big mind," After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear.

Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life. When the water returns to its original oneness with the
river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die? I think we are like the water in the dipper. We will have composure then, perfect composure. It may be too perfect for us, just now, because we are so much attached to our own feeling, to our individual existence. For us, just now, we have some fear of death, but after we resume our true original nature, there is Nirvana, That is why we say, "To attain Nirvana is to pass away," "To pass away" is not a very adequate expression. Perhaps "to pass on," or "to go on," or "to join" would be better. Will you try to find some better expression for death? When you find it, you will have quite a new interpretation of your life. It will be like my experience when I saw the water in the big waterfall. Imagine! It was 1,340 feet high!

We say, "Everything comes out of emptiness." One whole river or one whole mind is emptiness. When we reach this understanding we find the true meaning of our life. When we reach this understanding we can see the beauty of human life. Before we realize this fact, everything that we see is just delusion. Sometimes we overestimate the beauty; sometimes we underestimate or ignore the beauty because our small mind is not in accord with reality.

To talk about it this way is quite easy, but to have actual feeling is not so easy. But by your practice of zazen you can cultivate this feeling. When you can sit with your whole body and mind, and with the oneness of your mind and body under the control of the universal mind, you can easily attain this kind of right understanding. Your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an old erroneous interpretation of life. When you realize this fact, you will discover how meaningless your old interpretation was, and how much useless effort you had been making. You will find the true meaning of life, and even though you have difficulty falling upright from the top of the waterfall to the bottom of the mountain, you will enjoy your life.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Kyōsen]

Thank you very much, Jundo!

I watched Muho's video twice. The first time I was lost, then I sat with what he said and I had a moment of "oh! This this!" I watched it a second time and his words were much clearer to me. I also really find value in that image of how even though the drop is separate from the stream, it's still water. The ocean is the drop.

I think "infinite relativity" helped me to relax my rigid conceptualization a little. The ocean relates infinitely to the drop, the drop relates infinitely to the ocean. There is still a relative ocean and there is still a relative drop, but they relate infinitely to one another and, really, everything. Master Dogen's words seem to perfectly illustrate how the whole ocean is "in" that drop, even though the drop doesn't become large and the ocean doesn't become small. Nothing changes size or location.

I feel like some part of me is beginning to let go of all this analysis and compulsion to intellectualize this, and maybe I'll just be able to relax into it and sit with it and see this a little more clearly without having to tell myself stories about it.

Gassho
Sen
Sat|LAH

[Shonin]

Thank you, Sen and all contributors, for this thread. The timing of this was perfect with some thoughts I've been having.

_/\_ ST/LAH