So this week we're exploring death but not in a morbid or a frightening way.
Some people associate spirituality with joy and bliss and peace and all of these really wonderful qualities and that's the emphasis and and that's good and fine and certainly it's a part of spiritual life.
But also part of our spiritual practice is to come in direct contact with death,
With endings.
It can be really helpful.
It helps us not be so committed to our views,
Attached to our opinions and it helps to cultivate a healthy detachment to the world and to consumer society.
A few years back one of our wise practitioners who I believe is on this call,
Charles Lee,
Said that our consumer culture doesn't want dead consumers and I remembered that.
Consumerism positions itself as reinforcing the good things in life,
You know,
Celebrating food and fashion and all the ways of keeping death at bay.
But everything we consume dies or falls apart.
Consumption in a way is our modern death ritual.
Consumerism in some way is the fear of death that's governing our life.
If I just get this thing or if I go to the Costco and buy the massive bulk toilet paper,
I will live to see the end of those rules,
You know,
That type of thing.
And as you know there's a tremendous amount of preoccupation that people have with their physical bodies and in the valley that I live in particularly there's an emphasis on a long life of athleticism.
So to look at death directly isn't the tendency for people but to see endings and this is the focus is to see endings and reflect on them can hopefully in a healthy way help us not be so caught up with the obsession for youth and fitness.
And maybe some of you have had some experiences of being close to death or perhaps you've had an accident or have a sickness or a loved one that is getting close to their end.
And we see in these moments how our priorities change,
Sometimes quite dramatically.
Maybe the things that you saw as important that you were attached to vanish.
So this inquiry into death and keeping death close is really about the transformative possibilities that it offers how to live,
The joy,
The joy of a life fully lived.
One of my teachers on death is a man named Frank Ostaseski who wrote this book called The Five Invitations.
And these invitations they were originally presented as precepts that we took as caregivers for the dying when I served at Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.
And precepts are like codes of conduct,
They're vows,
They're teachings and they help us understand.
You know we can't just say the precepts,
We have to actually live into them.
So Frank viewed these precepts as kind of like a bottomless practice that can be continually sort of explored and deepened and they're not linear.
And precepts have no value as theories or concepts to be understood and realize they have to be lived into and communicated through our actions.
So one of these precepts,
These invitations,
Is to welcome everything and to push away nothing.
To welcome everything and to push away nothing.
So you can see how that has a quality of having to live into that.
It's easy to say,
You know,
Welcome everything.
Sounds good.
But how do we do that?
How do we live into that?
You know,
To welcome things it doesn't mean we have to like them.
It doesn't mean we have to agree.
It doesn't mean that we condone.
It's a willingness actually to meet whatever is happening in our life and welcoming it.
To meet life as it sort of turns up on your doorstep and to ask like what does this happen?
Like what does this happening have to show me?
What can I learn from what's happening?
What can I learn from this?
We have to be willing to meet whatever is happening.
And it's not about managing all the conditions,
You know.
It's about how am I relating to what's happening in front of me?
How am I relating to these conditions in front of me?
I'm of the opinion that we really lose something when it's more important to be the one who knows than to be awake to what's happening.
We get swept away in our knowing.
Suzuki Roshi,
The founder of San Francisco Zen Center,
He had this wonderful expression,
Not always so,
He would say,
Not always so.
I love this expression,
The mind that is so curious and full of wonder,
You know.
Not always so.
And that applies to everything in our life.
Our thoughts,
Our experiences,
Our perceptions.
When we can meet the life with this curiosity,
Then we can learn from death.
And we can learn from the dying.
I don't know what will happen after we die.
You know,
Like Mary Oliver says,
What will that cottage of darkness be like?
I don't know.
But what I do know is the way in which I live my life will enable me to meet it with some degree of wonder,
With some awe and curiosity.
So thank you for listening.
Listening is a beautiful act of love.
Frank Ostaseski,
The co-founder of Zen Hospice Project and the author of the book that I recommended,
The Five Invitations,
Says that listening is the shortest distance between two people.
I feel that.
I hope you do too.
Thank you.
