Death
This week’s Zen story is about death. A hot topic. Yes?
I have a little thing here that I think that most people are not going to get, so I am interested in seeing your comments. You can comment on the Youtube video.
What Happens When You Die?
Soooooo… think about what happens when you die. What’s your answer to that?
You probably had some sort of immediate answer. There’s so many.
Some people will say, “Nothing it’s just black. You go away and there is nothing.
Other people will say that you leave your body and float into this or that.
Some people will say you go to heaven, or you go to hell. There are all sorts of different ideas. I bet that you, reading this, had one of those many millions of ideas.
The Body
Probably you didn’t think, or notice, that hey! your body is dead! Laying there dead! You probably didn’t even think about the body… even though that’s the most obvious thing that has happened.
Why is that? Why isn’t that the first thought that comes into your mind?
The Stories
The reason is that we have all, in some way, accepted the fact that the body will die. We’ve reconciled ourselves to the fact that the body will die
All these other things that we create are stories around the fact that we accept the body dying. It justifies the fact that we know the body dies.
But notice how we don’t have a huge issue about the fact that the body dies. We know what’s going to happen to it as a matter of fact. Some of us have it planned. Someone will bury it, or you’ll be cremated, or something like that.
We’ve accepted that as reality. As just part of life.
Think about that. The fact that you, on a fundamental level, have accepted the fact that the body will die.
The Certainty
Can we use that same certainty to know that the thing works? There is little to freak out about what happens to your soul, or what happens to your mind, as what happens to your body. There is no more reason to freak out about that more about about the fact that the body dies.
It’s all part of the same thing. It’s already taken care of.
It’s already taken care of, so what you think about it doesn’t matter.
So in our Zen story about drath the master is saying, “Live your life. Don’t ask me about death. I know about life.”