Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming this morning. So on this beautiful spring morning, I want to raise a grim subject that I actually don't know anything about. And the comforting thing is I don't think you do either. So I hope to raise a few points and questions, comments, and then maybe we can explore it later together. So the subject is death, and it's on my mind. It comes up repeatedly for various reasons.

[01:05]

One is my mother's death just about a month ago. She was a little short of 90 years old. we did not have a close relationship and I did I chose not to go to her internment and it still comes up you know in my mind for certainly and then another The reason is there's a Sangha member, a Dharma brother, who's going through the dying process pretty much right in front of us, which is... It brings up a lot. It brings for me, you know, I've known him for quite a while, and I'm very confused at my own furor and my own thoughts and actions.

[02:13]

So it comes up. And then also my brother, my oldest brother, has cancer, terminal. And that's probably the most charged one for me. You know, it comes up my karmic emotional relationship with my brothers much stronger than I thought. And that's going to be a very big deal. And Buddhism teaches us that death is a very big deal. Maybe it's the biggest deal. It's inscribed on the Han that I was just looking at. And, you know, the Han is the wooden block that is hit, is the verse. Gloat is a matter of birth and death, quickly passing, gone, gone, awake, each one awake. Don't waste this life. So the great matter. So this is referred to frequently in Zen literature, Buddhist literature. So what is it?

[03:14]

I heard it suggested recently that it's a great question. It's a big question, birth and death for us, mainly because we don't know anything about it. We're essentially... We don't know anything about either event in our own personal case. Like my birth, I certainly have no knowledge of my own birth. It's hearsay as far as I'm concerned. I mean, they tell me I was born on May 29, 1947 in Columbus, Georgia, but I have to just take it as an article of faith. These people that I find myself with are related to me somehow, and so on. So it's kind of a mystery. Where did I come from? It's unknowable. And I think the other end is, too, in essence, even with other people. I mean, we can be with other people, although I personally have not. I have never been with anyone who's at the very end of the process.

[04:21]

But even so, and it was, I've heard somebody say, somebody who's done a lot of hospice work, said, well, it's actually very simple. You know, you just, the person just breathes out and then they don't breathe back in. Oh, I don't know. Is it really? Maybe. But even so, that's just as far as our perception can reach. And then we don't go any further. You know, it's kind of like the horizon. The horizon is the limit of my sight perception. I can't see beyond that, no matter what. Or with sound, you know, there's just a definite limit of what I can experience. And so I think maybe you could be with someone... And then once that in-breath doesn't happen and the fire, the mysterious fire of life is no longer there, it's a mystery.

[05:28]

Nobody knows that I know of. And then that's with somebody else. So then with our own demise, I think the psychologists tell us that it's actually inconceivable that our egos cannot conceive of its own absence. It's beyond our conception. And I think... Even in the case of a person who's suicidal, and I've certainly been there, it isn't so much of wanting to be not existing. It's just to end the pain, to have some final. It's the end of the pain. The end of the suffering, I think, is the real wish. It's not annihilation. It makes me think of a similar thing in Buddhist meditation. In some of the Abhidharma, it says that maybe the one thing that our consciousness, our awareness, cannot focus on is itself.

[06:34]

itself. It wants to go everywhere else, but it's impossible to come back. It's kind of an interesting meditative practice to try to do that, to try to meditate on my own consciousness, my own ability to think, the thinking thing, and to see what happens. Sometimes I think maybe that is the is what Dogen is talking about of non-thinking. Because in my experience, if I try to do that, I can't do it. And it's interesting what happens. There's nothing. Non-thinking, interesting kind of thing. But again, it's the limitation, I think, of our awareness there with death. So then... Our culture, the prevailing message of our culture about death is pretty strange, I think, and partially it's what I get is to avoid death at all possible costs.

[07:40]

Literally, you know, the thing, the valiant fight, he fought a valiant fight until the very end, but death wins out every time, right? But we avoid it... At all costs, with the emphasis, I think, these days, at that, it doesn't matter what the cost is. And I read in the paper things like a new treatment for lung cancer or something like that, and you read down, and in the 12th paragraph, it says that it extends the suffering for two more months and costs, you know, $75,000 a dose or... It's very confusing to me that, although I certainly have it, that avoidance and denial of death. But there are exceptions in our culture. I remember back when I was in college, there was a book of Eden Wallace called The Loved One, I think.

[08:47]

Has anybody ever heard of that book? which was a satire on death and dying in our culture by placing it in the future. And one of the interesting parts that I remember was there were two characters called Fiora and Fiona. I think they were two beautiful twins, and they operated a suicide parlor. And people were encouraged to shuffle off this moral coil in an expeditious fashion by coming to these parlors and you would get rewards of some kind to get on with it. This was very entertaining to college students in the 60s. And more intellectually, I suppose, we can have recourse to Shakespeare, the great source of wisdom. And in his wonderful play, Night Breath, among many other wonderful things, he has the notion, the comment that I'm sure you've heard before, nothing in his life, nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.

[09:58]

But he goes further. He says, he died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owned as a careless trifle. So that changes the complexion, I think, and actually sounds quite Buddhist to me. Let's hear it again. He's talking about the protagonist there, Macbeth. Nothing in his life became him like the living of it. He died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owned as to a careless trifle. So I think Buddhism proposes to us to study death, to study our death, the whole notion. So another favorite source of quotes is this little tome. And at the very beginning, in actually the very first chapter, in the second paragraph, Suzuki Roshi raises the subject.

[11:07]

This is the fascicle on posture. And for some reason, in the second paragraph, he goes, after some years, we will die. If we just think that it's the end of our life, this will be the wrong understanding. But on the other hand, if we think that we don't die, this is also wrong. We die and we don't die. This is the right understanding. So I think Suzuki Roshi didn't know either. It was just trying to loosen up our habitual patterns of thinking about things in general and in particular. So... The unhappy message of

[12:20]

Buddhism is really that we lose in the end. We lose everything. We lose everything that we treasure through dissolution, either the dissolution of the object or of ourselves. We lose, you know, we'll gradually, everything, all of our relationships that we began will end, everything that we accumulate will leave, either along the way or certainly by our own demise. We'll lose everything. So our culture doesn't like that. But our Buddhist practice is extremely demanding and asking us to not avoid this, to not ignore it, but to look at it, to resolve essentially the unresolvable, to drop body and mind. to cut across the grain, to go upstream of what we usually want.

[13:29]

I think of the, row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. This was, in the 60s and 70s to hippies and New Agers, this was very deep philosophy you know here's this little childhood jingle and it has meaning how wonderful it has meaning and I think it does to an extent and Buddhism is asking us to say well that's not all you know there's more there's more so to go actually not just merrily down the stream but to go towards what you don't like to move towards what you want to avoid to try to accept the unacceptable and to let go, to let go of ourselves. So how to do all of this? This is the problem.

[14:33]

I mean, you know, you can talk about it and it's so how to deal with the avoidance and denial. And a way that has intrigued me over the years came up, actually, my very first practice period out at Green Gulch, and Mel Weitzman was leading this practice period. And it started in January, and he got sick during the practice period. He got quite sick, very bad cold. But he came anyway, and he was giving a talk one night, and he was sick. And he said, he made the remark, it wasn't the topic of the lecture, But he said he was practicing dying, being sick. And that really intrigued me and I thought about it over the years of what it possibly meant with that. And it usually comes up when I get sick. I don't get sick very often, but when I do, this usually comes up and I try to practice with it somehow.

[15:35]

And this came up recently when I was recently on a trip in April. I got sick in New York. I got a cold, a really bad cold. And then I went to Pittsburgh and I was pretty sick by then. But how to practice with it? So the main way that I find now is just trying to let go of wanting things to be different. You know, pretty basic Buddhist approach to just basically to just be sick, to let go of wanting to be not sick, and of trying to be okay with less. trying to admit the unreliability of my body, of my own body.

[16:42]

I call it my body, but it's not my body. It does what it wants to. It gets sick. It has a snotty nose. It coughs. And there's nothing I can do. I can try to deny it with drugs is the common way. But to try not to do that, to try to basically accept the unacceptable, so that's a pretty fairly easy thing to practice with, just accept being sick as trying to somehow edge up on the bigger question of accepting death. Essentially, it seems to be a control issue. The whole thing of our minds, our consciousness just simply wants to control basically everything that it focuses on.

[17:43]

So, of course, it cannot. And this causes the suffering. This is the source of suffering. So a patient's practice, just being sick, just be there, just be sick. To not take the... Of course, I'm not advocating not taking drugs that actually treat an illness, but things, you know, cold medicine, cough medicine, stuff like that, that just mask what's going on. Maybe it's worthwhile to experiment with not indulging that and seeing just what is it like to just be sick? What's going on? What's going on with my body? What is the experience actually like? or coughs like. So I had a terrible cough, chest cough. They're kind of like two coughs, you know. There's this very heavy chest thing, and then there's this thing that goes on up here, which they call tickling, right?

[18:49]

Tickling, except it's not funny at all. It's more like stabbing pain in here. And sneezing, sneezing is kind of interesting, interesting thing. I noticed, seems to me to be a sexual element to sneezing. Or maybe that's not the right word, but, you know, that's... And then this nice repose, sense of satisfaction. So what's going on? Just to try to observe what it's like to try to drop the description of the judgment and just see what is it like just to be sick.

[19:50]

And another thing I noticed was in myself that it's not... unchanging monolithic block of misery, I can actually feel better for five minutes, even just short. Whatever's hurting stops hurting for some unknown reason. If I just happen to be paying attention and notice it, it's not just sheer misery. And so on. But the main practice, I think, is just not taking time out. Just not taking time out of my life. Say, well, I don't feel good now, so this doesn't count. We're just waiting until I feel better and I can, you know, we're just waiting until it's more like I want it to be. And I can... anesthetize myself in various ways with television or whatever, drugs, until that time arrives. when it's more better, more like I want it to be. To just try not to do that, to try not to avoid what I happen to think is unpleasant at the time.

[20:54]

And now I basically include that in my life, of the sickness as part of the life. And the implication, of course, is way down the line, that my death is also a part of my life, and to try to start to practice and approach that. delicately, that idea. So those are some, about as far as I got with that. And another way I think of practicing dying maybe is breath. Breath is just so useful in so many ways. And the breath work of, yeah. I think the important part of the breath for us is our out-breath. And just to see, for me to see how attached I am to the other side, to the in-breath. How really attached I am to that coming.

[22:01]

So that I'm not, most of the time, It's hard to trust enough, you know, that it's actually going to come. So just to practice with that, and practice breathing out, of buying into the out-breath, just trying to breathe out completely, breathe out completely, and not worry about what comes after that. And it's doable. particularly in sitting, and I find it's very useful to try to let my out-breath go as far down in my body as possible, and just practice with that instead of holding up here, of holding up here. And, of course, the reality is that my lungs are up here. They're not down here, but there's, I don't know, there's something there. I mean, I can actually, you can actually feel it of just letting the breath go amazingly low, all the way to the bottom, all the way.

[23:04]

It was below the diaphragm, all the way to the bottom, to my sitting bones. You can, it's, it's... It's possible. And then even to abide there, just to go and then the end breath, to try to just let the end breath happen. It happens. It just happens. Where does it come from? Where is the beginning? Where is the end and the beginning? the soft belly, keeping your belly soft. But the... And then, of course, it brings all with it my obsession or compulsion with the in-breathing, you know, of just examining that. Sometimes I... get this thing, I don't know what to call it, kind of a compulsion to take in a lot of air.

[24:15]

I guess, what do you call it, sighing or something? It's almost like an addiction, like a cigarette or something else of this, it comes up in my mind, this feeling of I need more air, or it's very non-verbal though, and it doesn't go away. And at some point of feeling compelled to do that, to take in more air and somehow get a sense of resolution. It's very difficult to be articulate about, does this have any resonance with anyone? I don't actually know what that's about, but it's interesting to try to pay attention to it and deal with it with dying into the out-breath. So this very subtle work is dealing with the breath, but even more subtle, you can go to thoughts, in Zazen in particular, you know, of letting go of the control of thoughts, of be willing to let whatever thoughts are there happen and not seek for particular things.

[25:42]

particular states of mind. There, I just did it, right? I also noticed that often in preparing to go on to something else, the habitual pattern is not to breathe out, to empty myself, to be ready for the next thing, but to breathe in, to kind of fortify myself or something. I don't know. I think our basic problem here, with all of it, but with death in particular, is that I think that there is something to lose. And the problem is my ego, that I'm a prisoner of my own ego. request is to drop my separate self idea, to drop body and mind, and Zazen is a very good place to practice this.

[26:52]

I think it's a safe place to experiment with accepting the unacceptable, the very scary notion of dropping all this stuff. We don't have to actually do anything. It's just open, open to our lives, all of it, all of our lives that we possibly can, including the end of it, open to the good and the bad and all of it. We don't have to do anything. Just open. Buddhism teaches us that everything is there. Everything is everywhere, all the time, around everyone. All we have to do is open. There isn't something else. There isn't an other. There isn't you and me. There isn't space. There isn't over there and over here. There isn't time. There isn't... then or now or later, all of those, the teaching is our illusions, constructions of our mind, that everything is right here, now.

[28:00]

No birth and no death. Just to try to approach those ideas by examining what's right in front of us all the time. and accepting it. If we can accept it, that's the end of suffering and that's enlightenment, liberation.

[28:27]

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