Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Death
chrispche
Southend on Sea, Essex, UK Explorer
I have this terrible fear of death. I suffer from bi-polar disorder and have high anxiety. From a Buddhist point of view I should and do meditate on the subject of death. Actually let's call it ego death. So through the Dharma and meditation. I have been trying to slowly chip away at my ego and fear. I am making some progress, but it's terribly slow. I post this here in the hope of some advice or tips. .
Thanks in advance.
1
Comments
I don't think you should be meditating on death, it could be counter-productive. Impermanence might be better.
I agree with @SpinyNorman aka SpinyPendraco aka Ice Cream Dharmaist ...
Do you have a little anxiety demon to practice on for example fear of cructaceans?
Good advice from @SpinyNorman , the mind has this idea of death and that's what we are afraid of.
A tip I learnt is that fear is your friend, it's biologically there to help you. Keep you alive.
So don't try and resist the fear, accept it but often investigating what it is actually fearful of is helpful.
Remember anytime of your life when you were really scared of something you imagined might happen, then it turned out to be ok?
It's often our imagination that instilled fear.
Another angle that might help is that when we are in deep sleep, where are you?
Your entire world is gone, you have zero experience of deep sleep and you lose everything. We love deep sleep.
Some Buddhists and Hindus suggest that after "death" the only experience you will ever have is the same sort of experience as when you opened your eyes for the first time as a baby.
You won't experience death, you can't
I hope you are well mate!
@chrispche -- No one can talk anyone else out of the fear of death, so your "chipping away" sounds sensible to me.
One of the pointed lessons of Buddhist practice is that it teaches that to the extent anyone fears death and seeks to avoid or sugar coat it, to that extent exactly there is a fear of life and a willingness to try to avoid it. This is not a criticism. It is just a fact. And avoiding the living of a life seems a bit wasteful.
A fear of death is a fear that there is something to lose and I am going to lose it. If that's the way things are, then that's the way things are ... no point in yammering about the emptiness of ego. No one wants to lose what the claim as their own. But think a minute: Is the fear of death afraid of death or not? What, in very concrete terms, IS death? If you don't know, then how can you fear it? Likewise, if you do know, in what way is it fearsome? Isn't it a bit like people who chatter along about "enlightenment," but when you ask them what "enlightenment" is, they really don't know except to say that someone else said it was a good thing and good things are nice so gimme-some-of-that.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever come back from the dead to complain about their current circumstances. If this is true, then, by a popular vote, death can't be all that bad. The vast majority seem to get along fine. Why wouldn't you as well?
Chip-chip-chip.
Take your time. In the middle of a sneeze, are you alive or dead? Are you sure? Really? How frightening can a sneeze be?
A Japanese Zen teacher once encouraged his American students to find a better word than "death." "Death" was far too period-on-the-sentence whose words were unclear. He advocated the use of the word "senge," a Japanese term (if I remember correctly) used to describe the death of a monk. "Senge," he said, meant "to change the place from which the Dharma is spoken." This suggestion points out the on-going tendrils of all things. Nothing sexy ... just a fact.
And the English Zen exponent, Christmas Humphreys, once observed approximately, "The opposite of life is not death. The opposite of death is birth. The opposite of life is form."
Chip-chip-chip.
Best wishes.
I don't get "The opposite of life is form." Do you know what it means? And is this referring to the form aggregate?
Fear of spiders. Yes.
I'm plodding along fairly well. Thanks.
@chrispche I would like to add to what @genkaku said. Think about when you were a child and fear the doctor. Once you realized he was there to help and not to be feared, the old you died and was reborn into a new awareness. In our view, upon physical death (I know you talked about ego death) we stream to a new fertilized egg. In both cases, it might be helpful to think of it in a non-destructive way. For example, think of an old, worn down street. One day, the city workers come and lay down new asphalt. Think of it not as destruction of the old, but the introduction of the new. By eliminating the very concept of death, there is nothing left to fear from it.
There is no death, but rather, that which is new superseding the old.
Alan Watts talked about Death Anxiety
https://youtu.be/SG1tU-piMn4
youtu.be/qK1BJkBJdtY
@SpinyNorman -- I wouldn't claim to have an unimpeachable understanding, but from where I sit, it's just plain as salt: "There is the daisy. It is concrete. I can touch it. And also, it is alive. I can't see aliveness or touch it or prove it in some empirical way. It is alive, but the "alive" does not depend on the limitations of what has form or even my appreciation."
Something like that?
Wait! I think I need more coffee....
I'm not watching that, it would make me anxious.
Through losing a few loved ones my fear of death has been turned into respect.
It's all part of the natural way things go and many others have gone before me.
Sometimes I feel anxious about it but there's actually an excitement of sorts where there once was mostly fear.
There was a long time where I wasn't even born yet and I seem fine to me. It may not make a lot of sense but although the individual identity probably dies, I don't think it's the end of what that individual identity really is.
It seems to me (though I'm not going as far as to claim truth) that before we are born is the same as after we die with only experience (or maybe more to the point effects of experience) being the difference.
Like the hydrological system where the water that evaporates to form clouds will never form the same drop twice but it's all the same water.
To me, that's the most likely scenario but I'll be damned if I bother believing it to be true.
I honestly do think seeing fear for what it is will turn it into respect. I know that a speeding car can kill me and so I have a good respect for that truth so I can be mindful. It doesn't mean I am going to fear a speeding car.
That may make sense or it may not. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night.
We are dying and born every second, this second right here "knips" you will not see again, its gone, we are dying all the time
You need to know when its right for you to contemplate death, if you feel very afraid to deal with death right now, then you should start with something softer and easier for you, let say, seeing your breath coming and going, and when you feel more strong and have more confidence then your are maybe ready...
some movies have 18 years age limit, others not, its the same with meditation objects, dont run into the hardest and most difficullt first.
Don't come live in Australia then!
@chrispche
I have few tips to say other than Death is the deep end of the pool for most Buddhist swimmers. If you think that your bi-polar and high anxiety condition limits your ability to safely swim, then perhaps the shallow end of the pool might be a better place to train for now.
But...
To actually know what dies, one has to know what lives.
Is it some of what we see or hear or smell or taste or feel or think or all of it?
Is it some part of form or sensations or thoughts or activity or consciousness or all of it?
Is it some of our karmic inheritance spring boarding off of our Skandhas or all of it?
From some meditative perspectives (selflessness) it seems that life and death is no more different or the same as, an inhalation is to an exhalation.
The separation that we place between self and others is the same fear that you identify as a fear of death.
To address such fear, I'd simply suggest some meditative investigation into **what **separates you from anything else.
In gassho H
Ah OK, perhaps you do not fear they will lead to death but you could have a friendly arachnid representation on your shrine/meditation space, direct metta towards spider kind? That sort of thing ... ?
Yes, chrispche, we do need to contemplate death. @Spiney Norman has a good point in rethinking of it as a contemplation of impermanence.
Of course it is not good to obsess over it. As long as one recognizes that death is one aspect of life, he or she (you) can continue to 'chip away' at the fear of it and the fear of life. (Spiders and all)
Slow progress is progress none-the-less. Congratulations!
By the way, I trust your By-Polar disorder is being tended to.
Best of luck to you.
...Did somebody say 'coffee'?
Peace to all
It makes perfect sense. Very interesting perspective. Thanks.
Yes it is being tended to. I'm taking medication which helps greatly. Thanks.
The death of the crazy bits is not so fearful ...
Actually let's call it ego death.
Let's.
Dharma practice leads to:
Life is death [lobster goes to hide under the sofa with the things that go bump in the Dark Mind]
You shouldn't bother. Meditate on Life, it won't be the death of anything except ... well ... Dharma is experiental ... let us know ...
You will probably find your view on death changes a lot as you go through life. If I missed it, my apologies, but how old are you? Have you had to deal with someone dying, where you were with them and went through that process? That changes your view quite a bit. As you experience different things in life, your ideas and fears about it change.
Sometimes we fear suffering that we believe comes before death more than death itself. But in what I've seen, whether it was a teenager dying of cancer or my ex who died of a drug overdose or my grandma who died of a stroke...our fear is generally much worse than what actually happens because the body and mind processes as death approaches causes a cascade of things in the body to reduce the suffering. Between that and what doctors can do to help a lot of suffering is alleviated. There is much more suffering in those who are being left behind and their suffering is actually harder to bear for the one who is about to pass.
We fear because we don't know, whether that means we don't know what happens after death or we fear suffering before. But like almost everything else in life, our fear and anticipation is much worse.
Even if you aren't a Tibetan practitioner, The Tibetan Book of Living an Dying is excellent on this topic. Some of it goes a bit more in depth into Tibetan death beliefs, but most of it is just practical, and is easy to read. It was one of the first Buddhist books I read, and it is probably the second most referred to book I own. I open it often.
Thank you. I'm 37 and do own that book. Well I have it on my KoBo. I shall look into it.
I have enclosed a very scary [not] video of itsy bitsy
Hope you are still A L I V E after watching that scary vid. I am intrigued ... what is scary about arachnids?
Is it the scuttle capacity? The world wide web? Do you as a biped suffer from leg envy? Is it the fact that they are so hairy/bearded? Is it that they hang out in the dark places? Is it that they have no soul [allegedly]. You don't have to answer of course ...