Enlightenment and Death

How has your spiritual progress / Enlightenment affected your views on the death of your body? Does awakening strengthen the faith in life after death, or will the whole issue somehow become uninteresting? For some reason there seems to be more emphasis on these ideas in some Buddhist schools than others.

I actually don't think about it much. The awakening process seems to have strengthened my zest to live. To live and help others awaken. Death is inevitable but I truly don't think about it at all. It's almost like a very meh! feeling. And life after death for me at the moment is still all speculation. Before path, I felt a lot of faith in the notion of future lives. Now I just don't have any personal experience....yet......to say that a future life is a possibility. But you know what? If there was some button I could press where I could come back and help out, I'd press it.

Fear of death definitely was part of what drove me back to meditation practice after a period of about 10 years in which I sat only occasionally.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 57, and died a couple of years later. He was a pilot, and received thorough physical exams every six weeks. Apparently, the exams weren't thorough enough.

There's such a big difference between knowing, intellectually, that you're going to die, and actually starting to REALIZE this by seeing loved ones pass away and being forced to confront the reality of death. As an obese, habitual binge-drinker, I knew I had to change some things, or I would also probably die early. I have a wife and kids I love dearly. It was back to the cushion for me.

For a period of time, I consciously worked to undermine or question my logical positivist, materialist assumptions about things. I started reading books about near death experiences, the consciousness research of Stan Grof, the University of Virginia rebirth studies, all kinds of what might be called paranormal literature. I had started to believe that the "energy body," as Ken Wilber terms it, is in fact the entity that is reborn.

If you had asked me a year or so ago, I would have very confidently asserted that life after death is an actuality. Certain experiences, such as the time I seemed to wake up in source consciousness during an afternoon nap, were at least part of the reason for this certitude. It was clear, for just a few seconds, that everything is OK and that all of this is a dream that, in a moment of true clarity, seems very thin and unreal indeed, to the point of being humorous.

However, I now see that much of this confidence was false--I wanted to believe in life after death. After all, I'm getting old. When I was younger, I wanted to believe that existence ends with the death of the body. Why not? I was so young--I had plenty of time left.

[cont.]

These days, I've started to think of the whole question as a distraction. In one breath, I'll find myself arguing for the possibility of a transcendent dimension or rebirth. To my surprise, I seem to be just as likely to argue that mind is brain, brain is mind, and that your consciousness is nothing other than your brain tissue itself, and that rebirth is a fantasy. Whether I'm making one argument or the other seems to depend on my mood!

So, at least for me, the point seems to be to continue to practice and to keep an open mind. It might be the case that at a certain point the Answer to such a fundamental question will be clear to me, or revealed to me. I kind of doubt it, though! Seems like you find this out only when you actually die....

Right now I see no value in pondering this question, but then I've always been much more materialist than not, so I fully expect to die completely when I die. "My" mind is a temporal phenomenon that's only present when the molecules that comprise it are working together to form the illusion of "me," anyway, so since there isn't a permanent entity, a soul if you will, that cannot expire... why worry about it? I find it far more beneficial to spend my time and energy figuring out how to better live this life, right now.

Joel,

I have always believed in life after death, or even thought of it as a certainty. I have not lost any family or close relatives, but for some reason the idea of death and especially life after it has always been of great interest to me. When I was younger I read all kinds of literature about the subject to find answers. From various sources I have constructed my own model of life beyond, which is probably completely wrong as all models inevitably prove to be. I have found my own fear of death getting smaller after years of practise, but as I said I have never met death face to face. My confidence could very well turn out to be overblown.

There does not seem to be an agreement among Buddhists about the existence of soul and life after death. For some reason Buddha did not think that is an important issue. On the other hand, could Tibetan Buddhist have got it wrong with all their supernatural skills?

Hi Antero.
I have a friend who is a neurologist. He was telling me about a condition called "neglect," which he sees periodically with stroke patients. The person will be completely paralyzed on one side of the body, but also totally unaware that anything at all is wrong. How, my friend asked me, could awareness exist independently of the body? It's a good question. We're now seeing that out-of-body experiences can be induced by stimulating the right angular gyrus. Scientists will say, "See. All spiritual experiences are an illusion." Well, you can also induce auditory, visual and somatic experiences by stimulating the brain with electrodes. Does that mean that everything we see, hear and feel, outside of a laboratory, is just an illusion as well? Hmmm...
I do find some of the Tibetan descriptions/models to be kind of compelling. They say the "me" that reincarnates is the same thing that is watching during a dream--lucid or not--and that whatever you are at the relative level--i.e. that which is a pure function of the brain/memory/physical body/aggregates--dissolves at death. All that is left is this impersonal, subjective sense of a center-point. I don't understand how that could work, but then again, I don't understand how the universe could have come into being or what consciousness actually is, etc.
I can't rule it out, which is why I think there's some place for at least agnosticism about this stuff. I have to admit, I'm still somewhat interested in reading the occasional book about these topics. I might read Charles Tart's new book, for example, just 'cause the stuff is interesting. However, it ain't practice!
So do you think your model makes logical sense?

Hi Antero,

I did quite a bit of "mindfulness of death" last year, with interesting results. The way I did it was to ask myself why I don't want to die, to cease existing, just now - what are the real honest reasons for my wanting to live on? (This kind of practice may not be conducive or even suitable for everyone).

As with any practice, it's not the answers which drive progress but the asking, the attention to detail. Still, one funny "answer" I got was that the notion of "life after death", immortal souls, energy bodies, or rebirth in paradises, heavens, animal realms and hells and what have you - all that stuff is *denial* of death. If I believe in that stuff, I don't, by definition, believe in death. If I somehow continued to exist after death, it was not a very good death, was it? I'd be fooling myself, cheating myself over the only certain thing I know about the future: that I will certainly die. Everything else I think I know about my future is guesswork. Death is not.

I actually found that very funny when thinking about it that way. I was christmas shopping, holding bags with pastic toys and books, in the middle of people hounded by the holiday spirit, and smiling and beaming at them, thinking about death. A few even smiled back - good thing nobody knew what was going through my head...

So death (obliteration) became more interesting to me, but for all the wrong reasons. It's really the *denial* of death, re-interpreting death as (re-)birth, the, well, *ignorance* of death in the good old Buddhist sense, which looks like a problem to me now.

Now *dying*, that might be unpleasant - I've watched a family member die from cancer, and a co-worker die from a nasty virus that gradually destroyed his nervous system. Different subject matter, though.

Cheers,
Florian

The possibility of dying unenlightened, impermanance of karmic connection with the Dharma, a cycle of unenlightened rebirths subject to confusion and changing circumstances -- isn't it a core Buddhist tradition that this is why the Buddha warned against staying unenlightened in Samsara? I'm not informed about Buddhist history and philosophy, so maybe I have a simplistic idea. I think I got this picture 40 years ago from my 1st Buddhist teacher, Philip Kapleau, and have heard many references to it in the inspirational type Buddhist articles and meditation books I've read. This un-blinkingly bleak analysis of Samsara has probably motivated me to practice more than my 1/2 baked insight disease over the years. Probably why I'm racing with old age right now!

"How has your spiritual progress / Enlightenment affected your views on the death of your body? Does awakening strengthen the faith in life after death, or will the whole issue somehow become uninteresting? For some reason there seems to be more emphasis on these ideas in some Buddhist schools than others."

While not enlightened, practice has reinforced my conviction that this life we have right now IS IT. There is not one moment that is not precious, not one moment to waste suffering needlessly. LAD, to me, is a fantasy not to cling to.

Interesting question. The culmination of a series of meditations on mortality led to my first major spiritual breakthrough and established me on the path. I also used to emphasize the finality and ultimacy of death, as it seemed that turning to different kinds of life-after-death ideas were attempts to avoid one's own non-being and thus miss the liberating side of death. Over time I have developed what I believe is a more balanced view. I think that there are three general aspects our existence: our physical being, our psychic being, and our ultimate being. At death our physical being, and all that goes with it, is dead; finished. Our psychic being continues to wander in the dream realm and may find other physical manifestations. Our ultimate being continues to be what it always is. This is a general picture and Im sure there are a million refinements that could be included if one really gets interested in exploring the matter.
I think the really interesting question is how meditation practice relates to an understanding of these matters. I feel like I have developed some direct knowledge of death and post-death reality, but its not totally clear where this came from. Im saying this because I think that this kind of discussion, while theoretical can eventually relate back to practice and point us toward new aspects of our being that we can explore in meditation (or at least new aspects through which we can explore the basic terrain of reality.)

A friend recently asked me: if scientists invented some kind of immortality fix, would I take it? My spontaneous response was that it doesnt matter. Either way reality is going to be here, dealing with **** and developing realization.

Florian,
I have also found mediating on death very liberating and valuable experience. It kind of cuts away all the redundant things from life and helps to concentrate on the essential. I think you speak the words of wisdom, though one can be afraid of death even if he was certain that life continues after in some form or other. After all, you have to let go of many things when going over the border.

Solxyz,
My theoretical model of life after death is very similar to yours. Could you please share what direct knowledge you have gained through practises? This is exactly what interests me. There are advanced practitioners on this forum who have gone beyond limits that are possible for normal people. I would very much like to know how advanced practises have changed their views on the existence of soul and continuing of life without the body.

Antero.