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| I will live forever. |
Into The Twilight Zone
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| There, there, my dear, you can still be famous. - How and where? - In the afterlife, of course. |
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| Life is samsara is beset by rebirth |
PLOT: Wanda Dunn is an elderly and frail woman, who lives in a dark basement apartment in an abandoned tenement flat.
She is awakened one morning by an altercation outside, in which Harold Beldon (Robert Redford), a young police officer, is shot and falls just outside her door. Although he cries out that he is dying and pleads for her help, Dunn is reluctant as she knows Death takes many forms and is coming to claim her life.
While she eventually relents, she tells Beldon that she has no phone to call a doctor. Dunn is relieved when she touches him and doesn't die, which convinces her that he can't possibly be Death. (But it is).
- More: "Nothing in the Dark"
Why did the Buddha recommend recalling "mindfulness of death"?
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| Attain The Deathless, and then you will never die. |
Avoid it, deny it, never think of it, and become angry with any reminder of it in polite company? No, this is no way to peace and enlightenment. Instead, we should practice vigilantly and assiduously (appamada), with a sense of urgency (samvega) in every moment, even in the time it takes to draw in a single breath.
Not being diligent every moment is called "negligence" by the Buddha (AN 6.19). In the earliest discourses (sutras) of the Buddha, the term maranasati is only explicitly defined twice, in the two suttas (AN 6.19 and AN 6.20).
Later Buddhist schools expanded the meaning of marana ("death") sati ("mindfulness") to include various visualization and contemplation techniques to dispassionately remain aware of death, which is as natural as rebirth.
Just as we keep being reborn in samsara, "the continued wandering on through life and death in pursuit of pleasure and fulfillment," so we keep dying. How could it be otherwise, for how could there be a coin with only heads and no tails (only a front without a back)? It is not possible. As soon as one springs into being, the other arises simultaneously.
The cultivation of maranasati is said to be conducive to right (balanced) effort and helpful in developing a sense of spiritual urgency (saṃvega) and letting go/renunciation (nekkhamma) [1]. More
- Maranānussati: recollection of death
Solution to Death: The Deathless
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| The Buddha awakened to Truth |
Suffering (dukkha = disappointment, dissatisfaction) soon finds us. But it is not so bad as drowning and bobbing and being thrown around out in the rip currents of the water. There is a balance here. We see death. We can't hardly forget it for long. We have our sandcastles wiped out. We can't hardly build an impervious abode to rest in. Even when it is the epoch of long life, even human lives of 80,000 years, it is still too short, not long enough to attain all we wished for.
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| Why did so many place faith in the Buddha? |
Then there is NIRVANA, the ultimate bliss, liberation from the cycle of samsara, freedom from all suffering and all further rebirth. This nirvana has a synonym in "the deathless" or amata (amrita, ambrosia, the "elixir of immortality" used in a figurative sense for deathlessness).
It is hard to conceive of because all we have ever known in the phenomenal universe is conditional and composite, with everything composed of impermanent constituents. But nirvana is the unconditioned element. So there is nothing to compare it to. It would be like a turtle being asked by fish where he had been as no one had seen him.
The Turtle and the Fish
- The turtle answers, "on dry land."
- "Dry land? What is this 'dry land' you speak of, friend Turtle?"
- "Well, Fish, um, you see, uh... Hmm."
- "This 'dry land' of yours, is it cool and wet?"
- "No, it is not cool and wet, Fish."
- "Can you swim and dive into it?"
- "No, you can't swim and dive into it."
- "Can you drink it?"
- "No, you can't drink it."
- The Fish would determine, "Well, if it isn't cool and wet, can be swum or dived into, and is not drinkable, then this 'dry land' of yours must be complete nothingness and nonexistence!"
- And the Turtle would be left with little to say other than, "That may be, Friends, that may be" as it went onto dry land again and bathed in the warm sun.
- Robert Redford (RIP), The Twilight Zone (Ep. 81); Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit
