Fear of Death
January 31, 2018

If you’ve ever observed your own mind as you fall asleep, you’ll notice that you begin to lose your sense of the body, and an image will appear, of a place, or a thing. You go for it. You actually go into the image. That’s the process of what they call “becoming” and “birth.” The appearance of the image of the place is the becoming. Going into it is the birth.

The same thing happens as you die—the big difference, of course, being that you’re going to be pushed out of the body. You can’t stay here anymore. When you’re sleeping, you voluntarily lose your sense of the body. No problem, because you have a strong sense you’ll be coming back. But at death, you know you won’t be coming back. That’s why there’s a lot of fear.

The Buddha said there are four reasons why we fear death:

 We don’t want to lose the body;

 we don’t want to lose our human sensual pleasures;

 we realize that we’ve done unskillful and cruel things in life, and we’re afraid of some sort punishment after death; and

 we haven’t seen the true Dhamma—in other words, we haven’t realized that there is a deathless element to the mind that will not be affected by the death of the body.

Of those four fears, one of them can be alleviated by the practice of generosity and virtue. That’s the fear that you’ll be punished for cruel behavior. People who’ve come back from near-death experiences often say that the things they regret most—when they look back on their lives, thinking that they’re about to die—are the opportunities where they could have helped someone else, been kind to someone else, but they didn’t.

So, be generous with others and have some restraint in your behavior: no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking of intoxicants; no divisive speech, no ill will. Then as you look back on your life, you realize there’s nothing for which you have to reproach yourself, or anything you have to be afraid of, that you’re going to be punished for. That’s one fear that can be alleviated by generosity and virtue.

The other fears, though, have to be dealt with by meditation. Meditation is the only activity that can get you past them. Our attachment to sensuality is such that if we don’t have a higher pleasure, we’re going to go back to it. As the Buddha said, even if you see the drawbacks of sensuality—your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures, sensual plans, how much you’re going to enjoy this, how much you’re going to enjoy that, your thoughts of how much you enjoyed the pleasure after you’ve had it: Even though you see the drawbacks that can come from being obsessed with that kind of thinking, you’re going to keep coming back to it unless you have a higher pleasure.

This is why we try to get a sense of well-being: the pleasure and rapture that come as you get the mind into right concentration. You begin to realize that sensual pleasures and your fascination with sensual thoughts really aren’t that satisfying. It’s like eating a lot of potato chips. The more you eat, the hungrier you get, and you never really get satisfied.

This is one of the reasons why we work on adjusting the breath, taking the sense of well-being that comes from the breathing and spreading it around the body, so that we can have an alternative pleasure. This pleasure that we have in the meditation is called the pleasure of form. It’s not a sensual pleasure; it’s the pleasure of being able to inhabit your body with a sense of well-being. It can help alleviate your fear of missing out on human sensual pleasures.

But then there’s attachment to the body itself. Here again, meditation helps, starting with the contemplation of the parts of the body–taking it apart and saying, “Okay, which part of the body really is you? Are you the brain? Are you the heart? Are you the lungs? Are you the eyes?” There will be part of the mind says Yes, but when you think about it, really, it’s not the case. If you look at the individual parts and could take them out, there’d be nothing there that you’d want to identify with. So why are we so attached? It’s because we fear that without the body there’d be no consciousness.

Here again, meditation could help. If you can get the mind really still, to the point where the breath stops, you begin to notice that the sense of the boundary of the body begins to dissolve away. You think of the space filling the body blending with the space all around you. You can get comfortable with that perception, not having to have a perception of “body” at all. It can give you an inkling that it is possible for the mind to survive without the body. It’s not proof, but at least you get more comfortable with the idea of not having to depend on the body, and of being able to let the sense of the body dissolve away.

With that last fear, realizing that you haven’t seen the true Dhamma: You overcome that through your first taste of awakening, where you realize there is a deathless, it can be touched with the mind, and it can be touched through our efforts. Our efforts don’t cause it, of course, because if our efforts caused it, then it wouldn’t be deathless. But they can take us there. Like the road to a mountain: The road doesn’t cause the mountain, but following the road gets you to the mountain. When you’ve seen the mountain, then you realize, okay, you don’t have to live in the marshes and bogs anymore. You look back at the body and realize it’s not you. Your awareness doesn’t have to depend on it. You’ve got proof of that now because your awareness of the deathless was totally independent of the six senses. That’s the point where you can overcome your fear of death.

But even prior to that point, meditation gives you a lot of skills you’re going to need as death comes. Things will appear to the mind as you realize, “I can’t stay here anymore in the body.” It’s pushing you out. And the mind’s response is to think of various places to go.

I was electrocuted one time, years back. I thought I was going to die. My sense of the time that I was being electrocuted was about five minutes, but people who saw it said it was just a split second. That made me realize that my mind sped up as I realized, “Where am I going to go now?” In desperation, the mind looks for all opportunities.

But if you have your wits about you, you say, “Wait a minute. I’ve dealt with this kind of thing before.” When things come to the mind, and you don’t want to go there, it’s like when you’re meditating: A distracting thought comes up, and you learn how not to go for it. This puts you more and more in control. The mindfulness that keeps reminding you, “I have choices”: That’s going to help you an awful lot at that point.

And where have you learned that? You learned that through the meditation. You learn how to turn off thoughts, breathe through them, let them disintegrate, not let them take over. You don’t go into every thought that comes your way.

The question sometimes arises: Do we have free will? The more you train the mind, the more freedom you have. Some people have more freedom than others because they’ve trained the mind, so here’s your opportunity. If you don’t think you have any choices now, you won’t have any choices then. You’ll go for the first thing that comes, whatever your kamma turns up. That could be kamma in this lifetime, kamma in some previous lifetime—you never really know.

But if you realize you have choices, you can stay with that sense of just awareness. Pains will come because you can’t stay in the body, but you’ll hold on to that awareness—just the awareness in and of itself. At the very least, you can choose good places to go. Choose a place that offers the opportunity to practice.

It’s a strange thing about some of these worlds that appear in the mind: You can have just a bare glimpse of them, but you know in a flash an awful lot about their potentials. Those images convey an awful lot of information. That’s the information you’re looking for: Is it a place to continue the practice? Go for that. Don’t try to hold on to the body. If you do, you’ll be hovering around the body afterwards.

Ajaan Fuang sometimes would go out for a little walk in the evening at Wat Makut, where he taught in Bangkok. It was one of the major cremation monasteries in the city. Especially on Saturday evenings, there wouldn’t be many people to come and see him; most of the people who wanted to see him had come during the day, so he would go out and walk around the monastery in the evening to stretch his legs. One evening he came back from his walk and said, “You know, the number of people who die and still hang around their bodies is really high.” You wonder what he saw.

Why is it that people are really attached to their bodies? They can’t think of leaving the body, they identify so strongly with the body. This is why the contemplation of the body is a good exercise. At the very least, you won’t be hanging around a miserable place like that—hanging around the corpse. It’s no place to be.

That’s what this body’s going to become. It’s going to become a corpse someday. So learn how not to hang around it now, not to be attached to it now. Use it, especially focusing on the breath, as a means for getting past your attachment to sensuality, but then also learn to get beyond being attached to the body. You can develop a sense of space around the body, through the body, and that helps you with the perception that you don’t really need this physical body in order to be aware. You feel more comfortable not latched on to the body.

It’s in this way that you prepare yourself. It’s what the ajaans are fond of saying: When we practice meditation, we’re practicing how to die well. The skills we’ll need at that point—the skills of being mindful, learning how not to go for distractions, learning how to stay firm in our intention, and not be afraid: Those are skills that serve us well as we’re living, and will serve us well as we’re about to die.