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Help me accept death
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Who are all these people?
Trungpa Rinpoche actually said as the setting sun mentality is taken away that we do feel more lonely. I can't remember the context, but it is in the sacred path of the warrior.
It's good to contemplate death in my humble opinion. You just need a lighter touch.
They're really suffering - you're TRYING to suffer.
I feel you haven't got a bloody clue.
So why don't you try that in regards to death? Or dying.
You know, I was wrong. I'm better off than you. I'm making the most of my life, you should do the same. Log off and go outside. Play chicken in the New York traffic, that will make you appreciate life.
I'm done with you. You don't want to know or accept death, you want an audience.
If you don't like guidance, why are you here? You are looking for guidance from people who are not teachers in an official way. Many of us learn from teachers, and we are probably doing quite a bad job, overall, at transmitting what we have learned and experienced. You want answers, but it sounds like you are reluctant to go to better sources than the internet.
Everyone has already given you ideas of what to try, but you don't want to do that, either. You want to let go, but you don't want to let go. None of us can do it for you. We can't drop you.
I like alot of the tips I receive from some of you, but some I dont. If I only had one source of information than I might be bias towards everything else.
If you like some answers, and not others, then you are already biased. You can take the information that works for you, and figure out which traditions they come from to perhaps give you some direction in your quest. We all practice from some bias, in a sense. Because what works for me, may well not work for you. And that's ok, there is no one thing that works for everyone. The only thing that really matters is that you actually practice in some way rather than only asking questions. If you are interested in Buddhism, that is. If all one does it ask questions, but never gets down to the work at hand, then they never really get answers to their questions. Because most of them lie in the experience, not the words.
You know what the problem is @heyimacrab? There is a path to tread but you fear to tread it. "Attaining" is not the right word to use about life, rather "accomplishing."
There's a lot you can accomplish in life, but it is YOU who must do the accomplishing. You are squandering your time with your delusional, self-centred, pseudo-intellectual fallacies in order to shirk responsability about the life that you could have and are not having because you are totally incapable to create it.
Your life has no meaning until YOU give it a meaning.
And how dare you say that Buddhism is a "side thing" for all of us when your comments constantly show that you have absolutely no idea what Buddhism is all about, least of all about human nature as a whole?
Why don't you use that enlightened insight that you seem to have to judge the rest of us in order to do some useful soul-searching and finally do something meaningful with your own life?
When you're dead, you'll be dead, dude! There's nothing to attain over there, that we know, since nobody has come back to tell us.
It is here and now that you can accomplish anything, but no-one can tread that path for you.
What are you doing with your life, anyway? At your age I was working during the day, studying in college in the evening and making my dreams come true by my own effort. Nobody helped my dreams happen. "I" made them happen. "I" created my life. "I" gave a meaning to my life.
Get yourself a job, study, help people, but above all, get as far off your navel as you can because all that navel-gazing is killing off your neurons, boy.
Stop using Buddhism to put you above the rest of the world because there is something you're totally missing from range here: your own person.
Youth is wasted on the young.
George Bernard Shaw
So wise. So knowing. So mature. What needs to die? The arrogance of answers you can not hear perhaps?
Perhaps you can provide us with videos or something? Why waste time on the ignorant? We all need to know. Think you can tell us?
Excuse my ignorance but are you trying to not be reborn/reincarnated? Reach Nirvana, die physically or what?
None of the above. First-rate sophist prattle, that's all.
Sorry, I really need to grab that cushion now...
I think you are just afraid to take the risk to commit yourself. You are afraid to go out there and fail, so you manipulate Buddhist doctrine and call effort and attainment 'worthless' to absolve yourself.
Being born human, apparently, is so rare and so precious. Your lack of respect for your own incarnation might be an abomination.
You can't understand death until you stop being so terrified to live.
@heyimacrab: i guess that you might not like to hear any tip from me - the reason can be that i am a hindu and not a buddhist - so if you do not like reading my post, then you can neglect reading my below post.
but i thought of suggesting to you something, so writing this post:
don't worry about accepting death. when your death will be there, you will not be there and when you are there, your death will not be there. so relax.
i think you are somewhat around 20 years of age. why are you thinking about how to accept death? because somewhere you would have the wish to live. if you have no wish to live, then you would not fear death and so consequently will not ask help regarding how to accept death.
thinking about anatta theoretically is not going to help you - it will be just a thought, which you will have in your mind. the reason of suffering is craving and clinging. remember craving is of 3 types - craving for sensuality, craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming. so if you think there is nothing worth to live and better to die, it will be a craving for non-becoming, which will still lead to suffering.
till the time defilements of lust, anger, greed, attachment, aversion and ego are inside us, which are due to ignorance at the first place, till then we will suffer - when the defilements will be removed, then the mind will be calm and then wisdom can arise within us, which will end our ignorance to allow us to see things as just they are - but till, it is arrived at, gradual acts of kindness, compassion and generosity can help in reducing our defilements.
if you think you do not have much responsibilities in your life from your family side, then think about you becoming a monk and trying to attain jhanas and then becoming awakened - so that we can have instead of a dead Siddhartha Gautama, a living heyimacrab buddha - to whom we can go and directly ask meditation questions either through face-to-face discussion or through telephone call or chat messages.
but if there are responsibilities in your life and you have to live your life as a worldly person, then along with doing meditation, try to get a good college degree, get a good job, find a girl (if you are a boy) to love to marry and take care of your family and also try to help others, whom you can, who need your help.
metta to you and all sentient beings.
I just want to accept death because there is nothing to attain in life.
Death as an end is all around you at all times, embodied in constant change, framed by your very intervention.
Enquire into anything and see it start and end from your observational point. The start an end and the end a start again. Observation has this consequential lineation.
Accepting one particular facet of one particular observational point (say the end of your personal biological processes) is a fraction of the ocean of change and even then what does accepting mean in practice?
These processes exist with you as you live - your statement of a desire to accept death equates to a statement of your intended attainment in life - though in this sense, whilst striving to attain, the goal you set is limited as the definition of death applied is limited and ironically, thus your life view is limited.
@lobster - it wasn't intentional humour - am I missing something?
No I am. A mistake. Humble apologies. Have changed it. Did not intentionally press anything. Very occasionally this happens as I am trying to scroll or go back or similar and have a poor connection.
The Budha gave up being a prince to find ultimate wisdom. Why should I strive to attain a job,money and a family when the example that I follow gave up the ultimate riches to be enlightened? Dont you see the point? His actions express the worthlessness of attachment to this world.
When the budha asked other how many times they thought about death everyday, one replied "7 times". The budha responded "You are too careless, you should think about death after each breath".
Agreed. Didn't I say that in my post?
However, the temporary nature of attainments does not always mean such things are unrewarding. Think of children building sand sculptures at the beach. They are gone the next day, if not in a few hours. But the children enjoy it.
The OP made the statement "there is nothing to attain in life" and I was just saying this is not really true. Maybe he meant "there is no permanent happiness in life." But why do we always need happiness to be permanent?
Why do you keep asking questions like this? Are you asking for guidance or demanding that everyone else accept your guidance? You write as if you've already figured out everything the Buddha was talking about but then demand that people impart their wisdom onto you, only to complain about the advice that they give you...
...seek the middle way.
One can have a job, a home, and so on, and not be attached to them. If you truly desire to emulate Buddha, then perhaps it is time to meditate instead of going in circles.
@heyimacrab: in my above post, both options are written - you seem to be going with the first option to become a monk, so you can become a monk, attain jhanas and become awakened. then we can have you as a living buddha with us, whom we can try to have a face-to-face discussion or ring or ping and chat to get answers to our meditation questions. this seems to be a good approach for you and seems like you are going for it also. all the best to you.
Why should I strive to attain a job,money and a family when the example that I follow gave up the ultimate riches to be enlightened? Dont you see the point? His actions express the worthlessness of attachment to this world.
It's not as straightforward an account as simply 'turn away from everything' as the Buddha turned by example away from 'everything you dream of attaining'. If you wish to rely on historical accounts to rule your present choices then it wouldn't harm to really look into it in depth, for one as it is your guiding light.
The point I am striving to is that (from the accounts I have read) the Buddha didn't seem to simply give up being a prince as a guide to what should be given up.
For example, the birth of the Buddha was the culmination of the countless lineage of past lives. An ascetic called Sumedha met the Buddhadipamkara who inspired him to embark on achieving the 10 perfections. This practice was completed / attained over countless lifetimes leading to a rebirth as a god in the heaven of the contented. It was here that the god could survey the world and see the correct time / place to be born to be a Buddha. His birth was chosen as his path to Buddhahood. The traditions make no mention of the King having anything to do with his conception. It happened on a full moon in July with a dream of a white elephant. Buddha's mother is depicted in iconography as being alone when this conception happened.
Upon his birth, it was proclaimed due to the 32 marks of perfection on his person that he had one of two destinies - to be a world uniting king or a Buddha. His name Siddhartha means 'purpose accomplished' - this is the purpose of his countless eons of lifetime attainment.
His local king father (akin to a feudal Lord) was not best pleased with this outcome and elected to try to ensure that the boy would seek his inheritance being the inheritance of his father's perceived lineage however as considered above, Buddha's lineage was not this - there is doubt even that the King had anything to do with his actual conception.
All this and we still haven't considered whether what the Buddha said was new in nature, whether the historical account of his life is to be trusted as an accurate source, the countless living god figures before and after him and the seemingly endless contradictions and mixed motives that drive society.
Very inadequate summary set out to illustrate briefly that it is not as straightforward as Buddha gave up X so I shall give up X and we're the same. I think in this sense, a more suitable guide is the output that is attributed to the Buddha rather than isolated examples of what may or may not have been his life etc. Condensing down to a conclusion that he was expressing a 'worthlessness' is a stretch... it is never 'worthless' - to have no worth is to have no connection - what is unconnected? Where is this unconnectedness other than at the close limit of your own perception of what may or may not be chaos?
'You should think about death after every breath' is an interesting concept - that passage is somewhat cryptic in my mind and what it is not saying in my opinion is literally think about the end of your physical processes and functions after every breath.
It is in my mind, striking at the wrong view of death as fixated obsession with only one minute form of end at the considerable expense of the weight of constant ends as proposed by constant change as a result of an observational view point.
Keep in mind that upon enlightenment, Buddha is said to have proclaimed, "This Dharma that I have found is profound, hard to see, hard to understand; it is peaceful, sublime, beyond the sphere of mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise. But this generation takes delight in attachment, is delighted by attachment, rejoices in attachment and as such it is hard for them to see this truth."
He was approached by a god and told that "There are life forms here that have but a grain of dust in their eye and out of compassion for them, teach the Dharma."
This is in my mind less a universal teaching and more a form assurance or assistance for the select, much as the ascetic sumedha is presented at the point of his inspiration which culminates after countless lived lives as enlightenment.
@heyimacrab Let's cut to the chase. You don't think life's worth living, fine. You want to embrace death, that's fine also. Knock yourself out. But I just spent a month sitting in a hospital room and watching my wife slowly die while I meditated upon the reality of life and death, and maybe I have a few insights you have yet to find.
Death is nothing special. Death is simply not being alive. You don't embrace it and you don't reject it. Death is the price you pay for being born.
Life, life is everything. Before you're so quick to embrace death, learn how to appreciate life. Learn how to live. You have a few short years to learn how to live. You have eternity to learn how to be dead.
The rest of your argument is nothing but whining about how difficult it is to be alive. So roll up your sleeves and put in the hard work of building a life, and then you'll know what the point of being alive is. The point of being alive is to live.
And I don't believe the Buddha would have one criticism about what I just said.
@heyimacrab There are very few ways to dedicate yourself to enlightenment in the way the Buddha did (i.e. "fully") except to leave it all behind and become a wandering mendicant, relying on others for your sustenance. Good luck with that, unless you find somewhere to become a Buddhist monk (which could work for you, if you're up to the task). Otherwise you need at least to be able to support yourself while you seek enlightenment, so things like a job and a house/apartment are necessary. Lay Buddhists can still reach enlightenment, it just depends on how skillful you are at turning away from worldly desires and focusing on the goal.
The good news is you don't need to strive for more than you need, such as a career, spouse, children, big house, big tv, multiple cars, savings accounts for sending your kids to college, and a host of other "worldly" stuff. You already see the futility of acquisitions, and so you can do the bare minimum (though I would not recommend disengaging from society altogether, there's no reason to make yourself lonely or spend 100% of your time focused on enlightenment). As some famous Christian or what-not said "Be in the world, but not of it."
Oh for f****sake. As everyone is saying, you deal with accepting the fact of your death - whenever it's going to be - by doing the best job in your day to day life. By balancing a mix of being a good citizen, being kind to those around you, not squandering your talents, recycling, remembering your mother's birthday, enjoying your hobbies, eating healthy, and asking yourself - if a truck took me out tomorrow, would I have done a good job with my life? Are there some dangling ends? If you find that some things are left undone, take care of them and carry on.
o> @Barra said:
Well said.