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Tool for death meditation
fivebells
Veteran
... there's a new product called Tikker, a wristwatch that counts down your life, so you can watch on a large, dot-matrix display as the seconds you have left on Earth disappear down a black hole.
Your estimated time of death is, of course, just that — an estimate. Tikker uses an algorithm like the one used by the federal government to figure a person's life expectancy. But the effect is chilling, a sort of incessant grim reaper reminding you that time is running out.
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Comments
These are our tools. Death is around us every second of every day. we just refuse to recognize it until we are forced to and have no other choice.
The teacher favored, if I remember correctly, the Japanese word "senge" (I think I've got that right but welcome correctives). "Senge" is the word used for a monk's death and means roughly, "to change the place from which the Dharma is spoken." Since the place from which the Dharma is spoken is always changing, the word "senge" seems to carry with it a sense of continuum ... nothing fancy or holy or wise or scary or elevated ... continuum is just continuum. Fearing death and making up stories about what is called the "unknown" is just one expression of fearing life. I guess everyone addresses that issue in his or her own way.
As in: "There will come a day when I will be ready to 'transition' both physically and mentally..."
Yeah. No obvious positive expectations, or negative doom involved.
Just........................ "transitioning".
The definition of death has nothing to do with anything that may happen after, only with this current body and mind.
We have such an aversion to death that goes way beyond coloring gray hair and using anti aging cream.. We dont even like the name and seek to change or lessen it.. So we say silly things like "they passed away" instead of they died.