http://www.amaravati.org/dhamma-books/anthology-vol-2-seeds-of-understanding/
(for me this text came with the revelation of the contemplation of not-knowing, when i contemplate the not-knowing my mind stops the endless speculation).
For those who practise the Dhamma, life is a time for contemplation and reflection on the way things are. Even the death of our loved ones is part of our contemplation. We recognize that having been born means that we’re going to separate from each other, that we’ll see the death of those we know and that we’ll all die eventually. So this involvement with life and death is Dhamma for us. It’s the way things are; there’s nothing wrong with it.
Our society refuses to accept and really contemplate death. We are so involved with life and trying to make everything nice during our lifetime that we tend to ignore the finale of life. So we’re totally unequipped for it. If you think of what the most important events in a human life are, you realize they are birth and death. Well, the idea of birth – of having babies – is dear to the hearts of people, but the idea of death is baffling. What happens when somebody dies? What does it mean?
The very perception of death leaves us in a state of not-knowing exactly what’s happened. What happened to that person we once perceived as being alive? Where did he go? Did he go anywhere, or is death just oblivion? Heaven, hell, oblivion – does anybody know?
What we can know is that we don’t know. We can know that we’re still alive, and we haven’t died yet, and we can know that we don’t know what happens when somebody dies. Now this may not seem like a lot, but it is very important, because most people fail to understand that they don’t know. Instead, some people will believe anything, they’ll settle for anything, any kind of speculation or creepy idea.
The way of meditation is the way to die before your body dies. It’s a way of dying before death and dying to death so that, poetically speaking, death is dead, rather than anything else. By ‘death’, I’m talking about that perception in the mind.
If the perception of death is taken personally, then we become frightened because we think we’re going to die. Our perception of being alive is based on the view that this body is mine and that I am this body – so the perception of death is frightening. We live in a world of anxiety and fear over the death of our bodies, separation from what we love, or the mystery of what happens when we die.
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