Death is just another beginning

Death is just another beginning

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

JAKARTA (JP): I have been thinking about what I consider to be
the single most fascinating subject a lot lately -- death. A
colleague, whom I used to work with, recently died of breast
cancer. She was only 34, a mother of two with a bright promising
career. Despite her serious illness, nobody expected her to
depart that early. It made me ruminate even more: how imminent
our death is. How mortal we all are, how vulnerable our position
is.

Death can be around the corner, yet we know little of it: what
it actually is and when it will exactly come to fetch us. And it
is really non-discriminatory. We have seen the bold, the
beautiful and the rich die unexpectedly: Princess Diana, John
Kennedy Jr., Dean Martin. It may sound melodramatic and neurotic,
but actually not. Only when you can accept and prepare for death
you know how to live. And the meaningfulness of life is not a
matter of how long you live but how you live. For many great
spiritual traditions death is even an opportunity for growth or a
gate toward liberation. Life and death are two sides of the same
coin: death is the beginning of another chapter of life. Death is
a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected.

However, a good number of us are not too pleased to talk about
death. "Sure, sooner or later, we all are going to die, but let's
be positive, let's think about it later when it is comes." But
no, I refuse to only think about it when I will be too helpless
to really come to terms with what is happening on my deathbed,
assuming my dying process is a natural, gradual one.

Natalie Goldberg in her book Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in
America tells about her experience of raising funds for the Zen
Center she helped run. One spring, they decided to reach out to
the Twin Cities community in the hope of receiving some big
donations. They worked really hard to prepare for the occasion;
they would have a lovely Sunday afternoon tea and invite guests
who could potentially contribute large sums to their waning
funds. They set up card tables in the zendo (meditation room) --
they did not want their guests to have to sit on the floor cross-
legged as they did. They rented lovely white linen tablecloths,
they baked small square tea cakes and thin butter cookies. They
served tea from beautiful rented silver tea servers. They wanted
people to feel the elegance of Zen. They wanted the guests to
like them.

Prestigious people came: lawyers, university administrators, a
journalist, even the owner of a downtown department store. There
were about 30 people in all. After a time of tea and cookies,
cordial conversation, they asked Roshi (a nickname for a Zen
master) to come down and give them a lovely talk -- maybe he
would talk about generosity, about being in the moment, or
something Americans are wild about from the movies: the samurai.
Roshi was ideal for a fund-raiser. With his erect posture, his
beaming, alive face, he was just what you would envision a Zen
master should look like.

Roshi came down the stairs in his black robes, stood in front
of the group seated at the tables, bowed, smiled, nodded, and
then began,

"You know, all of you are going to die someday."

No, Roshi, no, they thought, and the visitors drinking their
tea out of lovely white cups stopped their cups in midair, before
they got to their mouths, the steam from the hot water covering
their faces.

And at the end, as you might have expected, they did not find
a dime in the donation box! The roshi often said to his students,
"I'm sorry for you. I do not give you a piece of candy. I do not
give you what you'd like, what would please you, but would not be
true. I do not feed your illusions."

State of denial

This illustrates how we, "modern people," are secretly in a
state of denial of our imminent death. Death is nemesis, because
many of us believe that time is linear: we believe in a beginning
and an end. Though many of us are conditioned to believe in some
kind of hereafter, deep down we still think that death is the end
of our being: the "I" simply vanishes and that is the last thing
we want to happen to us since the "I" is the only surest thing we
can hang on to, or so we think. And the fact that we do not even
own our "self" really gives us the creeps, doesn't it?

Sogyal Rinpoche, the bestseller author of The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying, expresses his shock when he first came to the
West by the contrast between the attitudes to death he had been
brought up with, and those he then found. In his eyes, for all
its technological achievements, modern Western society has no
real understanding of death or what happens in death or after
death. He learned that people today are taught to deny death, and
taught that it means nothing but annihilation and loss. That
means that most of the world lives either in denial of death or
in terror of it. Even talking about death is considered morbid,
and many people believe that simply mentioning death is to risk
wishing it upon ourselves.

And others look on death with a naive, thoughtless
cheerfulness, thinking that for some unknown reason death will
work out right for them, and that it is nothing to worry about.
We rarely give it much thought until someone close to us passes
away, when we become more philosophical for a period of time
before the routines and pressing deadlines of our mundane daily
lives bring us back to our normal self again. One Tibetan master
says: "People often make the mistake of being frivolous about
death and think, 'Oh well, death happens to everybody. It's not a
big deal, it's natural. I'll be fine.' That's a nice theory until
one is dying."

The Tibetan art of dying is to die peacefully, without
grasping, yearning, and attachment. And we can all prepare for
it, now, so when our time comes, which really will not be too far
off if we are really honest about it, there will be no fear and
mental anguish. It sounds unreal, but why cannot we look forward
to our death rather than living with a heavy foreboding of it?

The author is Director of the Satori Foundation, a center for
study and development of human excellence through mind
programming and meditation techniques, e-mail: satori@cbn.net.id.