Satsang with Mooji [...] An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept.

[01:03]

I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. You know, usually we don't have a title for our workshops, our, excuse me, our lectures. But today's does because it's linked to a workshop in the afternoon. Today's talk is on death and dying. And I was curious as to what the attendance would be like for such a lovely topic. I was actually a little surprised when I came in and found the Buddha Hall so full on such a beautiful day. I don't know if you're here by mistake or if really death and dying is so popular.

[02:06]

Many years ago, I became a monk in Thailand and one of the first practices, I think it was the first practice I was given, was to everything you look at, every person and everything to say, this tool is impermanent. this tool will pass away, perish, and disappear. And whoever you looked at, you know, reflect on that or whatever you looked at. And so after a couple of days, I went to the teacher and I said, you know, this is not a good practice for me. I don't have the greatest attitude about life to start with. I'm a little negative. A little pending towards depression. So in consideration, I think, you know, really, this is not what I should be doing.

[03:12]

All these years later, I wouldn't say that was ridiculous. I just say it was kind of curious and humorous maybe. But also I think it speaks of when is it appropriate to pick up a difficult topic? How can you pick up a difficult topic in a way that in a straightforward way doesn't exacerbate your suffering? I think there's a practicality of the appropriate medicine, you know, Dharma medicine for who we are at a particular time. I mean, Buddhism is sprinkled throughout its teachings, you know, with the powerful practice of contemplating impermanence, of acknowledging, you know, sooner or later, every one of us is going to die.

[04:21]

And more directly that throughout our lives there are changes, there are transitions, and often they're experienced as loss. And loss is difficult. It's a difficult experience to have. You know, last Sunday, on Monday, I went to Kasahara. our monastery down in the Ventana wilderness behind Big Sur and did a memorial for someone who had been a long-time supporter, a doctor who'd come to Tassajara in the winter for many, many years to give free medical assistance to the monks who were living there. And then he moved to Hawaii when he retired and he died and his wife brought his ashes to Tassajara and we did a memorial service.

[05:23]

What she told me, and she was there, and his sons and daughter were there, his two sons and his daughter, and their families, and there were some friends, some old Zen students who had known him over the decades. Not a big group, 12, 14, 16. And we did a service. And she told me it was very powerful, very significant closure. to come back to a place that he cherished and to finish something, to acknowledge something. So this is part of our contemplation too, how to bring things to closure. How do we open up to loss and how do we bring closure? So those are the ways I would like to talk about this subject this morning.

[06:35]

And to think about it, firstly, in a general term, that there's always transitions in our life. Transition going through puberty. You know, some transition where we... shift from being our parents child to being an adult starting relationships breaking relationships moving from here to there having significant people in our lives die having our parents die registering our own mortality in all these transitions and many more they offer us in Buddhist terms in terms of the Dharma in terms of how to be awake to the nature of life and be relating to it with courage and honesty

[07:58]

but more subtly relating to it in a way that ripens us, that nourishes our zest for life. So there's a wonderful paradox there, how facing death nourishes our zest for life. We learn how to live through exploring in a way what frightens us. We learn how to live by being less demanding about how life should be and more capable of relating to life as how it is. And so that's what these moments of transition, small and large, offer us. They offer us a way to explore what's entailed in loss and losing. And Buddha's teaching tackles this in a whole variety of ways.

[09:09]

You know, there's a famous Zen koan where the monk and the teacher go to visit the coffin, the body of someone who's died. And the monk asks the teacher, alive or dead, raps on the coffin, alive or dead. The teacher says, I won't say. But the great mystery of life and death can't be contained in trite statements. The great mystery of life and death, no one else can resolve it for you. This is your life, and you will die your death, and that's your journey. And that's your teaching. No one can resolve it for you. And no one can take that teaching away from you, even if you want them to, to do either or both.

[10:12]

So we have that, that kind of almost existential proposition. And then we have this wonderful early Buddhist heritage. Why was I started on death? It wasn't exactly what they saw in me. It was a very significant part of the heritage, is that deeply getting that everything changes in a very substantial way shifts how you relate to life. If you realize that everything changes And that wanting to create stability, predictability, things you can know are always going to be there. If you're trying to craft that in your life, not only will you be disappointed because everything changes, but in a way you'll be misdirecting your efforts and also creating an illusion.

[11:27]

So that teaching that I skillfully rejected after two days is one of the significant teachings of early Buddhism. There's sort of a curious image where the Buddha says, contemplation of death is the most noble of all contemplations. It's like the elephant's footprint. The footprint of all the other animals fit inside the elephants. So it's like the contemplation of impermanence holds all other contemplations. They're all a subset of it. So this range of relating. The way I'm going to relate to it in a few minutes captures some territory more in the middle. You know, we can think of the process of awakening, of meeting our experience.

[12:36]

Within the range of Buddhist practice, we can think of three modalities, three avenues of approach or ways of relating. And one is what in Buddhist terms we would call the recognition of suchness. It just is what it is. It's like something appears in your life. Okay, that's what it is. This just profound, simple, direct acceptance. Life is what it is. You're born, you live, you die. In the meantime, things make you happy, things make you sad, they frighten you, they delight you. That's it. It is what it is. And then in this realm of being frightened, saddened, resentful, disappointed, this indeed is the human condition.

[13:42]

This is who I am. This is where I learned to live and learned how to nourish life inside me and all other life. This is a whole realm of practice, a realm of discovering the Dharma. And then the third realm is what we might call antidotes. I mean, in the first realm, we simply can pick it up and say, okay, there's life and death. What else? In the second realm, we pick it up, we study it. Yeah, but life and death, living and dying, bring up enormous issues and fears and joys and hopes in our human lives. And there's skillfulness about it.

[14:44]

When I was doing that memorial for my friend's wife and family, I had my ideas of what I could do. But really, I was really listening very carefully. What was important for them? What kind of inclusion, what kind of chant, what kind of ceremony? If we offered incense to the Buddha, was that going to turn them off? Or were they going to feel that was a deeply appropriate recognition of Bill, was his name, Bill's heritage as a Buddhist practitioner? So in this second realm, there's skillfulness, there's discovery. We're seeing how to work skillfully and compassionately with the human condition. And then the extension of that in the third realm is that not all the experiences that come up for us can we just look at them and turn them

[15:52]

and see sometimes they're held tightly and they become substantial and unchanging. And then the practice is more one of antidotes. If you can't stop being angry that your mother died when you're six, Maybe you could try practicing love and kindness in your meditation. The antidotes for our resentment, for our fear, for our disappointment. All of these can be practiced with in that way. So those would be the three approaches.

[16:57]

So you can keep that as a background. And so then, what I'd like to talk about is this middle territory, our human response to this. There was a wonderful teacher, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, not necessarily a Buddhist teacher, although quite compatible with Buddhist teachings, what she taught. And at one point she laid out or presented what she considered to be five stages of dying. And of course the danger is that we think we go one, two, three, four, five, when really we're all too unique and obstinate to fall into any neat pattern. Sometimes the fifth stage is acceptance. Sometimes we just have our moments of acceptance followed quickly by moments of complete denial.

[18:06]

Sometimes we don't know whether we're in deep acceptance or in deep denial. They have common features. Sometimes in deep denial, we're just numb. It's just too overwhelming. We've shed time and we think, yeah, I'm accepting it all. Until you find yourself weeping and then you think, hmm. Or angry. But her thinking was something like this. Our first response to change is especially traumatic change that's upsetting and difficult to accept. It's a kind of denial. We don't want it to happen and we're not that ready to admit that it is happening or has happened.

[19:10]

Sort of all no response. Then our second response is to be annoyed that it's happened. Why does this have to happen to me? Why does this have to happen now? About a month or so ago, I was out running an errand and I was coming back and then I had to go, we were doing a fundraiser over at Green's. So I had to get back, get changed and go to Green's. And about three blocks away, I was coming across an intersection Someone drove into the front of my car. And apart from all the other thoughts I had, one thought was, this is like, this is messing up my schedule. I have to be places.

[20:16]

I've got to go there and I have to say something and I need to be calm and composed. And this is just ruining my agenda. that kind of annoyance or rage or anger or wherever we fit in that continuum. This is not what I want and I'm annoyed. I'm angry. I'm resisting it. And then the next phase is kind of bargaining. If I behave a certain way or I relate a certain way, can I craft the result I want? I think many of us try to be diligent in exercising and solicitous in our diet and things like that.

[21:29]

and hope that this will give us a long, happy life. I try it myself. I think it's a reasonable enough proposition. Well, you know, we can take it too far, right? We can think, yes, it's guaranteed. I'm going to live to 120. Or somehow we think, you know, if I meditate, if I practice kindness, I'll be blessed. I'll have a blessed life. Everything will go well. And then the next phase is when, despite all our skillful efforts, Things just go the way they go.

[22:32]

I was driving across that intersection. I had a green light. I had the right-of-way. Still that person drove right into me. Can't be helped. It's the way life is. We love people and we cherish them and we hold them in our hearts and still we do things that frustrate us and annoy us. And then they insult us even more by dying. Why love anybody if they're just going to die on you? why get involved in anything if it's just going to disappear or if our emotions are so troublesome why not just push them all down why not just suppress them and of course

[23:57]

If you push down the ones that you don't like, you also push down the ones you do like. And you end up being sort of flat and disconnected, disengaged from your life. And then the fifth one, so that's number four. The fifth one is acceptance. So in one way we can think of this as a passage, everywhere from denial, resentment, anger, bargaining, figuring out how to change it, this disillusionment, disappointment, depression of not being able to master it, ripening and maturing into acceptance. So we can think about this

[24:58]

as, oh, this is the passage of dying. And anyone who's done hospice work or who has taken care of someone who dies can let you know that dying has significant transition points. I remember learning this very vividly once when a good friend of mine who had AIDS and his T-cell kind dropped at the time what was considered to be a significant level. And when you cross below this, the notion then was that the chances of recovery, of rebuilding your immune system, had gone. And I remember how incredibly painful it was for him and by association for me at that point. And it was nothing more

[25:59]

than having a test done and having the doctor say, your T-cell count is this. And he was devastated, fell into depression, confusion. And contrasting that with the last moments of his life, which actually had a lot of things went wrong. They sort of messed up his medications and he got an all-body inflammation. But he was a tremendously good spirit. And even in the midst of his physical pain, he kept making these dark humorous jokes and died with immense dignity and courage. So sometimes we might think, oh, well, death, you're building up to catastrophe, you know? You're getting closer to the cliff of disaster and at some point you fall off it.

[27:01]

The difficult moments are the transition moments. They're not any different from our life. And similarly in our life, often we think that's the terrible thing that may happen or will happen. And then we build up anticipatory anxiety. And then if we watch carefully, often what we thought that was going to be isn't quite what it was or turns out to be. But the anxiety, the anticipation is often very painful. And often this is where our denial comes in. Death is falling off a cliff into bottomless pain and disaster.

[28:12]

So how can we possibly face that? How can we possibly admit that to ourselves? But actually death is a process that moves along and usually has moments of great difficulty. And as we pass through them, something else happens. It's not any different from our life, from the rest of our life. Our life's the same, you know? You have a relationship, it ends. You're deeply hurt, confused, brokenhearted, don't know how you'll go on. And then something else happens. that you couldn't have guessed or expected or controlled. Some new way of living opens up and you become that. But denial, avoidance, trying to not engage, towards that process.

[29:27]

And so it's a formidable event in our lives, those moments where something visceral in us says, no, I could not handle that if it happened to me. Or no, I won't relate to that. Or more strictly, it happens to us in a way that we're not quite conscious of. So this turning towards instead of turning away. And then what our Buddhist practice does, it offers us a way to cultivate the stability, the courage, the acceptance to turn towards. Okay, yes. This is painful. This is difficult. This is breaking my heart. But this is also what's happening. In a way, it's not unlike the simple practice of sitting cross-legged or sitting still and paying attention to what's happening.

[30:48]

I remember once, I went to visit someone and he was dying. And I went and he was in the bedroom by himself and about 20 of his friends were in the room next door. And they were talking And it was like the middle of the afternoon. It was a little bit like social hour. And they were talking and he was in there by himself. And I went in there. You know, one thing you learn about hospice care is a lot of the time you don't know what the heck to do. What you do know, put yourself close by. Be available. Make connection anywhere you can. even just holding the person's hand. So I held his hand and was trying to figure out how conscious he was.

[31:53]

He was semi-conscious. And then one person came in, and then another, and then pretty soon we were all in there. So we had these formidable experiences And sometimes our denial is just keeping ourselves distracted. Just to make contact in whatever way we can. And let that initial contact open something. Some way to make a more substantial contact, to be more fully involved. And then, of course, this is confusing because often this does bring up our anger. This does bring up our aversion.

[32:54]

We don't want what's painful. We don't want what causes us suffering. It's pretty basic for us. Nobody wants to suffer. So that activity of pushing away, of rejecting, of blaming other. We look at our shared life and we blame them. Or we consider them the problem. Or we separate from some part of ourselves. Maybe we separate it and we deny it. Or we criticize it. We look at our own fear that can cluster in a sort of self-centeredness or self-concern. And then from the sincerity of our Buddhist practice, we condemn it.

[34:03]

How could a good Buddhist be so selfish? Because they're afraid. Because they don't want to suffer. That's why. That's how. And as we start to contact that, we can start to see our compassion, our patience, our being thoughtful about the human condition can help to unlock something, can help us to find a way to tolerate our own aversion. Because otherwise, we take up our practices with the notion, this is the latest and greatest fix. I'll meditate, I'll exercise, I'll eat properly, I'll smile at everybody, I'll give every homeless person my meat a quarter, and that'll do it.

[35:14]

Whatever doing it is. And they're all wonderful things to do. They're marvelous things to do. However, if they're all held in this notion, this is how you fix things, something fundamental at the basis of it is out of whack. If they can be practices that come in guided by our wisdom and compassion, guided by our acceptance of the human condition, our realization that everybody suffers, that everybody struggles with their suffering. Everybody has their fears and their resentments. In Buddhist language we talk about the conditioned and the unconditioned.

[36:31]

It's like you practice to get something. That's a conditional response. And then the unconditional to practice is you just do it because life is the way it is. And you're not fixing anything. You're just deeply accepting and opening to it. Not resisting it. Not holding back. So my friend got the report on his T-cell cunt. And he was living in the building at the time. And he became... Depressed. He didn't want to talk. Actually, he didn't much want to get out of bed. And yet, physically, he was as healthy and vibrant and strong as he was before he got that information.

[37:38]

But now, it had been given this kind of definition that was so powerful that everything shifted. To know that we're capable of that. To know that the challenge of transition can do this to us. It can just knock us over on our ass. And our resourcefulness, our resilience is depleted. And, of course, when we're caring for others, to know that that can happen to them. and cannot step in either with them or ourselves and think, okay, here's the fix.

[38:39]

You'll feel better tomorrow. Or just practice love and kindness and it'll all change. There's a way in which when we allow the immensity of our life, this great impermanent event that we go through, this great unpredictable journey from birth to death, the immensity of it, the mystery of it, when that really registers, all the contrivances that we have There's like a powerful not knowing. Sometimes in spiritual literature, this is called the dark night of the soul.

[39:50]

Sometimes just in our emotional, psychological life, we just seem bereft of options for future happiness. In our Buddhist practice, our practice is to hold still. to let something register. Our emotions communicate to us, whatever that means, but there's a way in which our emotional life informs us that's distinct from our cognitive life. And this is part of the deep work of when life is going through very powerful changes. is to allow those deep changes to register in your body, in your emotional life, is to see things are different now.

[41:08]

Things are different from how they used to be and I don't know where they're going. So let that register deeply. And it's like this powerful catalyst for change, for transformation. But it's also scary. And it's also not something you can just take hold of and turn it the way you want it. Things are changing and they're going to change like this. Things are changing and they're going to change the way they change. And your part is to let go of what you're clinging to. And then something emerges. Some acceptance.

[42:15]

And often in the stages of dying, when someone reaches that point, they don't have so much to talk about anymore. Okay. Often in their life, being with them is like a blessing, like a treasure, because there's an immediacy around who they are. And you know, the tantalizing teaching of our practice is that this blessing, We don't have to wait until we're dead, almost dead, to experience it. We can experience it all the time in our living. This is the gift that's offered to us each time we sit, each time we practice mindfulness, each time we're present for any relationship, interaction, feeling, moment.

[43:31]

answer in case your knees are hurting. So that's the five stages and I'm going to leave it there for the sake of time. And I'd like to complement it with one more teaching. The four Brahma Viharas are sometimes the four called the four immeasurables because there's no limit to how they can be practiced. But also in another way, you know, this human life, this course, this journey from birth to death is not something we can change. But how it's related to, that's within our human capacity. And that's the realm of practice. And the teachings offer us four ways to enhance or allow life to flourish. with four teachings. The first one is loving-kindness.

[44:44]

To recognize that we can come to this human process with an attitude of benevolence. When somebody dies, we don't have to ask who's to blame. That very same person I was telling you about with a T-cell He died in general. And indeed, a couple of days before, they misdiagnosed and gave him a wrong medication, and his whole body inflamed. And another dear friend of his, right after he died, said, let's sue the hospital. Let's sue that doctor. Will you help me sue him? When difficult things happen, and I said, let's not. Yes, they made a mistake, but they worked endlessly to support him and did their best.

[45:50]

That's just what happened. When something difficult happens in our life, we can approach it with benevolence rather than revenge. We can approach each other. When any of us contract around fear or sadness or have it turn into aversion, okay, we're suffering. That person's suffering. Can we bring that kind of kindness to each other? Then the second immeasurable is compassion. We all suffer. We're all going to die. We're all going to have difficulties. We're all going through transitions of one sort or another, pretty much all the time. And they upset us and confuse us and disappoint us and discourage us.

[46:53]

Can we hold each other's suffering? And at the same time, the third one is sympathetic joy. Because amazingly, mixed in with all those difficult things are good things. You know, let's not forget that. Yesterday there was a homeless guy on our front steps, and he asked me if I'd give him something to eat. I made him a sandwich, peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And then I gave it to him. And then we had this very kind of fun conversation. And we both got a good laugh out of it. I asked him, what made life worth living? And he said, with a twinkle in his eye, satisfaction. Satisfaction throughout everything you do.

[48:02]

And I said... And what creates satisfaction? And he said, non-separation. So, there's teachers everywhere. So in the midst of difficult circumstances, there's also blessings. There's also joys. There's also humor. Now, let's not forget that. And then the fourth one is a capacity to hold it up. That's our life. We can desperately try to maneuver to only be happy and never be sad. Or we can just take a deep breath and loosen up and open up and say, okay, this is the whole works.

[49:10]

This is how it is. That kind of deep equanimity. Equanimity is not that nothing affects you, that you live this kind of exalted, neutral existence. It's more that you are affected and it's okay. And, of course, it's not okay because to be affected is to be moved. But it's okay to be moved. It's okay to be delighted. It's okay to be saddened. When I was talking to the homeless person, I couldn't help but notice the effects of hard living on his body. And that was sad. And the conversation we were having was just a delightfully sweet moment. This is our life.

[50:16]

They're interwoven. Just to accept that. The brightness and the darkness, the sadness and the joy, the fear and the courage, they're interwoven. That's our life. So that's my talk on living and dying, and this afternoon Jennifer is sitting right over there, will offer a workshop on how to translate these kind of broad sentiments into tangible strategies, ways of relating around the the steps of taking care of each other through this process. Thank you.

[51:37]

Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to show you what I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you what I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you what I'm going to show you.

[52:41]

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