Who Dies?
Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, was written by Stephen Levine and published in 1982, the year of my birth. This is the first blog post I’ve written about death. Granted the one I wrote on the book Meditations, by the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius, was almost entirely about that topic, but that particular book doesn’t have death in its title, and it touches on a lot of other aspects of the human condition. I could also say the latter of Who Dies?, though, because one cannot talk about death without exploring the many complexities of life itself.
When first considering which book to write about for this death exploration, I was torn between Kathleen Dowling Singh’s The Grace in Dying, and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. But then I saw Stephen Levine’s book right next to those on my shelf, and realized that was the text I should use. The other two are quite heady and dense, with Singh going pretty deep (if memory serves me) into transpersonal psychology stuff, and Becker into the far reaches of psychoanalytic thought. I highly recommend both books, but for this blog post I wanted to be able to read a text in its entirety, and I worried that the intellectual rigor of the other two might make that too challenging and stressful. The Levine text is simply easier to read, and it doesn’t sacrifice intelligence for accessibility.
I first heard about all three books while in conversation with my husband’s cousin, who is a hospice chaplain. I later contacted her via email, and she sent me a list of book titles to check out, three of which were The Grace in Dying, The Denial of Death, and Who Dies? Reading these and other texts inspired me to sign up for an online death doula training through the International End of Life Doula Association, an eight-week Zoom-based program that I completed in the Fall of 2021. I learned a lot from the training—including that I didn’t actually want to be a death doula. But I do intend to be present for the deaths of loved ones whenever circumstances allow, and I’d like to help therapy clients through grief experiences and fear-of-death issues, and to give lectures on the topic and generally be a calm voice of reason to counter the all-too-typical message we usually receive about death: namely, that it’s the enemy. This blog post is one way that I can help disseminate the message that death is safe, totally ordinary, and nothing to be afraid of. When we fear death, we fear life.
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Stephen Levine was a long-time friend of American spiritual teacher and countercultural icon, Ram Dass, whose book Be Here Now I devoted a blog to back in May. Ram Dass and Levine collaborated on books and co-facilitated conscious dying retreats. They also shared a guru in Neem Karoli Baba. Levine is one of a generation of pioneering teachers who have made the teachings of Theravedan Buddhism more widely available to students in the West. He also worked extensively with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, famous for identifying the five stages of grief that people too often interpret in an overly linear way. At the time of the publication of Who Dies?, Levine was the director of the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project, which he founded, and he acted as a consultant to many hospitals and meditation groups throughout the country. He himself died in January of 2016 after a long illness, at the age of 78. He was survived by his wife and writing partner, Ondrea, and their son, Noah.
Ondrea’s name does not appear on the cover of Who Dies?, but Levine dedicates the book to her, saying that she worked page by page with him on the manuscript and that her love “reminds me again and again to let go of the mind and die into the heart.” For over 34 years, Stephen and Ondrea counseled concentration camp survivors and their children, Vietnam War veterans, and victims of sexual abuse. Although Stephen acknowledged that personal experience of grief is perhaps at its most intense when a loved one dies, he also drew our attention to grief's more subtle incarnations. "Our ordinary, everyday grief" accumulates as a response to the "burdens of disappointments and disillusionment, the loss of trust and confidence that follows the increasingly less satisfactory arch of our lives." In order to avoid feeling this grief we "armor our hearts," which leads to a gradual deadening of our experience of the world. The book Who Dies? has been described as a "central resource" of the "conscious dying movement,” and as "one of the key New Age texts on dying.”
As its title suggests, Who Dies? deals a lot with the concept of identity. We all move through life with certain ideas of who we are and how the world is supposed to be. Levine insists that “each concept becomes a bar that blocks the reception of the truth. Each idea of how things are limits our ability to experience them as they really may be.” We perceive death as the thing that will erase the construct that we’ve come to call “me” or “I.” And we set about doing everything we can to prevent that erasure. But “the more we attempt to protect this idea of ‘I,’ the less we experience anything beyond that concept.”
That last bit bears repeating: “the more we attempt to protect this idea of ‘I,’ the less we experience anything beyond that concept.” This is how “our fear of death is directly equatable to our fear of life.” When we perceive ourselves as a solid, static thing, we are on some deep level already dead, because the truth of the matter is that we, like the rest of life, are a constantly changing flow. "Moment to moment, who we think we are is born and dies.” And so in the actual moment of death—when our hearts stop beating and our neurons stop firing—who does die?
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One of the primary ways that we reinforce our concept of “I” is by identifying with our emotions. This identification is baked right into the way we talk. We say things like, “I’m angry” and “I’m depressed.” But actually, we are the space in which that anger and depression arise. Levine points out that identifying with anything—be it our thoughts, our emotions, another person—is a sure-fire way to learn nothing about that thing, to gain no meaningful understanding of it. “Whenever you call anything ‘I,’” he says, “that’s where you stop.” When we become aware that we are not the thing we’re identifying with, but the space that all of it is floating in, we’re better able to connect with some essential part of ourselves. And the more we cultivate that connection—a connection to the truth—the less distracted or influenced by life’s vicissitudes we’ll be. Not even terrible pain, or our own impending death can sever us from the truth. This connection, Levine says, is something that all of us must cultivate right now. “There’s no other moment,” he says, "to begin preparing for death.”
To appreciate how much you might be in need of such preparation, consider how often it can be difficult, even when you’re feeling good and your brain is sharp, to be present with what-is. What Levine calls “the latent tendencies toward judgment or fear” too often take over, determine our behavior. We behave in ways that give us some sense of control. And that’s when we’re feeling pretty good, overall. So imagine how hard it would be when we’re really sick, to resist our latent tendencies toward judgment and fear. Unable to resist such tendencies, we’ll resist death itself. Such resistance indicates that unconscious forces are running the show. Do we want to experience our final months, days, hours, minutes—even seconds, depending on the nature of our death, be it a slow but persistent illness, or a bullet in the brain—on some unconscious plane, recoiling from reality? Or do we want to die consciously?
If you choose the latter, of course, that means you’ve got to live consciously. Levine writes, “When you start using death as a means of focusing on life, then everything becomes just as it is, just this moment, an extraordinary opportunity to be really alive.” But the real poetry in all of this lies in the curious fact that, in preparing for death, we’re ultimately preparing for the unknown. And how can you prepare for the unknown? The only way to do that is to practice acceptance of anything that happens. Resist nothing. This doesn’t mean we let people enslave us or abuse us or what-have-you—we definitely do what we can to assert and defend ourselves when needed—but that’s not the kind of resistance I'm talking about. I’m talking about a state of mind whose motto is something like, “Only happy if things go my way.” But: things aren’t supposed to go your way. Not all the time. Not even close to all the time. This is a fundamental truth that we humans have a really hard time grasping. I am no exception. When something bad or inconvenient happens, I get irritated because that something isn’t supposed to be there. It’s messing everything up. But that line of thought suggests that there is a Way Things Are Supposed To Be, and that way just so happens to be the one that I concocted with my thoughts! Coincidence? Of course not. I’m delusional about life. This is what the Buddhists are talking about when they say that if you are suffering, it’s because you aren’t seeing things as they really are. I think Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest, said that, too. I talked about him and his book Awareness in my very first blog post.
The next time you feel irritated or angry or upset in any way, get curious about it: are you just mad at life for not behaving the way you think it should? For not being easier, essentially? That’s the kind of resistance I’m talking about. And when so much energy goes into that resistance, there’s very little left for cultivating our inner life. We’re so focused on controlling our outer life that our inner one dwindles and dies.
Martin Luther King actually addressed this notion in his Nobel Prize Lecture from 1964, which I recently heard quoted an as epigraph in the audio version of Norman Fisher’s book, The World Could Be Otherwise. (By which he means, we are not seeing it as it really is.) King put it beautifully when he said, “Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: ‘Improved means to an unimproved end.’ This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual ‘lag’ must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the ‘without’ of man’s nature subjugates the ‘within,’ dark storm clouds begin to form in the world."
Dark storm clouds have been forming in this world for some time now, haven’t they? While things have certainly improved on the civil rights front since MLK’s day, there’s obviously still a lot of improvement that needs to happen, and I’d say that otherwise the world has gotten worse—much more characterized by what King called a moral and spiritual “lag”—since the 1960’s. We now live in a world where mass shootings are a regular occurrence. This year alone, as of November 22nd, there have been over 600 mass shootings in the U.S. We are destroying one another, and it’s because the “without” of our nature has subjugated the “within.” When this gets taken to the extreme, in a person whose temperament already lends toward extremes, evil results. No two ways about it. If your inner wellness is totally dependent on external ease, you are dangerous. If we are to live in a more peaceful world, we must all be better prepared for adversity. Prepared and open, and willing to experience it because that is part of what we were born on this planet to experience.
Levine writes about a saying in the Sufi tradition that supports this concept. “Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world, who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy, instead of self-pity.” These are the sorts of lessons our children should be learning in school, if we must keep insisting that they go to school in the first place. All of those mass shooters out there are acting out of self-pity. They feel victimized by society. In many cases they have been victims of other people’s cruelty. But they’ve totally identified with their victim role, so they feel justified in causing great harm, usually to people who never actually harmed them. They have not learned how to offer their heart, as the Sufis say, as a vehicle to transform cosmic suffering into joy. They take it all personally, as something that shouldn’t exist, rather than a major reason for their existing in the first place. They are not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to them. And a big reason they aren’t up to the challenge is because we as a society don’t talk about pain and suffering in this way. We’re taught that if we are in pain, something is wrong—wrong with us or wrong with the world or other people. And sometimes pain is a sign that something is wrong. But not always. We’d all be well-advised to shift our perspective on pain and see it as something that is simply part of being alive. Part of all of life’s sacred dichotomies: without darkness we wouldn’t know what light was; without winter we wouldn’t know what spring was; without pain we wouldn’t know what pleasure was. We need all of it in order for anything to have any meaning. And we humans need meaning in our lives.
Without death, life would have no meaning. So if you fear death, you fear life. Conversely, when you accept death, you can actually set about preparing for it—which is so much different than resisting it or avoiding it or acting like it should never be a viable option for us. And Levine says, “Whatever prepares you for death enhances life.” And how do we actually engage in such preparation? Well, we can reframe any adversity as an opportunity to prepare for death. Levine uses illness or injury as an example. If we can open to pain or sickness and see it as a teacher, “it no longer reinforces identification with ‘the sufferer,’ ‘the victim of circumstances.’ It’s just what is.” And in its very is-ness, it’s the “perfect preparation for whatever might come next, a deeper letting go… Being sick or accidentally hitting my thumb with a hammer becomes preparation for the impossible, for dying, for living in the next unknown moment of life.” Unknown is the key concept here. Our constant desire to know is what causes so much of our suffering as humans. We relate to the world from our minds, instead of vice-versa—relating to our minds from the world—the world from which we are not separate in our constant becoming-ness and dying-ness.
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Levine references the philosopher and spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, whose book The Awakening of Intelligence I did a blog post on in September of 2021. Krishnamurti famously said, “The observed is the observer.” Levine explains this mind-bending concept by saying, “When we look at the world, all we see is our mind. When we look at a tree, a face, a building, a painting—all act as mirrors for who we think we are. Seldom do we experience an object directly. Instead we experience our preferences, our fears, our hopes, our doubts, our preconceptions.” And of course, we perceive our own selves through this delusional lens, too. In his extensive work with people who were in the process of dying, Levine saw firsthand how much suffering is created by “our models of who we think we are and how the world is ‘supposed’ to be.” If we spend our lives identifying with our doing selves, and then suddenly—or even not so suddenly, as is the case with normal aging—we cannot do the things that we believed made us who we were—then we become very insecure, because we don’t know who we are anymore! We can no longer take the stance in the world that we’d become so attached to taking.
Our models of who we are—and of course who we think others are and how we think the world should operate—ultimately become prisons. Levine quotes a young-ish man dying of ALS, in the latter stages of the disease that even made it physically difficult to speak, who said, “I’ve never felt so alive in my whole life, because, ironically, I see that I am not just this body. As my body gets weaker, somehow I get stronger. Now that I can no longer do all the things I used to do to be someone in the world, I see how unreal all those things were.” And Levine heard many dying people express some version of the following sentiment: “I had to lose it all to see that little of it was worth having in the first place. Somehow there is more to me than I ever imagined.” I take so much comfort in these words! Jesus Christ expressed something very similar when he said, “Whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (If you can’t get on board with doing stuff for Jesus’ sake, you can reframe that last part as “for the sake of life itself.”) As a forty-year-old in a capitalist society, one of my top priorities in life is supposed to be earning and saving money. And therefore one of my biggest fears is that I will somehow be denied a way of earning money and/or will somehow lose all that I’ve saved. So it’s very nice to know that if such a scenario should come to pass, it might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I might realize that the less I have, the more I am.
And then of course the flip side to fearing loss or adversity of any kind is that we cling to its opposite. As Levine writes in Who Dies?, “Most of the moments of satisfaction in our life are clung to, making a temporary heaven into an increasing hell. We fear that we will lose our short-lived paradise and crouch in the dark corner, denying the inevitable. Grasping at heaven,” he says, “creates a life of hell.”
In order to not create a life of hell, we must accept life on life’s terms. Such acceptance means, among other things, that we must be willing to Not Know. Levine writes about the concept of “don’t know” mind in Who Dies?. He says, “Our minds are so full. We are constantly rushing to answer each question that arises. We seldom allow the mind to not know. We wish to answer the question and thereby stop asking, ‘Who am I?’ Most answers that the mind comes up with are just excuses not to go deeper. It is the mind’s answers that cause confusion. There is no confusion in ‘don’t know.’ There is just the truth.” Yes: the truth is “don’t know.” He puts it differently later in the book when he says, “We cannot know the truth. We can only be it.” Think about how much harm is done in this world by people who insist that they Know what the truth is! People hurt other people based on this presumed knowledge, and: they hurt themselves. Toxic thoughts, for instance, are so damaging because we believe they’re true. We believe they are a reflection of something that we Know to be True. But in the case of toxic thoughts and so many other phenomena—a big one being what other people think of us—we really don’t know. We really have no idea. And we need to get better at sitting in the no-idea-ness. There’s actually a lot of freedom to be found in that practice.
Speaking of freedom: I love what Levine has to say about that problematic concept. In a chapter called “Letting Go of Control,” he writes, “What many people call freedom is just the ability to satisfy desire. Many say, ‘I want more freedom,’ and what they mean is they want to be able to have more of what they want. But that is not freedom, that is a kind of bondage. Freedom is the ability to have or not have what you want without it closing your heart. Freedom is not to act compulsively on all the contents of the mind, to let the contents flow away and tune to the unfolding.” Viewed this way, freedom really is free. People don’t need to drop any bombs or even protest in the streets—although the latter is certainly appropriate at times—in order for me to be free. The ultimate freedom is in non-attachment.
In a chapter called “The Thirsty Mind,” Levine addresses non-attachment, clarifying that it is not the elimination of desire, but an “active receptivity to life.” When we practice non-attachment we nurture our awareness of the “pure witness of being.” It’s a spaciousness we cultivate, making room for any and every thought and feeling to arise and then pass on through. In some cases, of course, we need to act on a given thought or feeling, because we need to function on the material plane and might sometimes need to defend ourselves or others—but I’d wager that a large majority of our thoughts and feelings do not need to be acted on and do not need to be resisted or feared—all the things we do when we attach to a given phenomenon: when we are attached, we are either reaching for something—grasping at it—or actively (though often unconsciously) avoiding it. As Levine points out in a chapter about pain, when we withdraw from something, we never get beyond it. When we can just let a thing be, and let ourselves just be in its presence, we are free. We have gone beyond the beyond, as the Buddhists say.
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The skill of just-being is not only invaluable when it comes to our own discomfort, be it physical or emotional, but also to the discomfort of others. In that same chapter about pain (in which he tells a remarkable story about passing a kidney stone), Levine points out that “much of our pain is reinforced by those around us who wish us not to be in pain… Those who have little room for their own pain, who find pain in no way acceptable, seldom encourage another to enter directly into their experience, to soften the resistance and holding that so intensifies suffering.” Again—resisting stuff and clinging to stuff—it makes stuff worse! And when helping someone who is ill or in pain, we can’t be resisting or clinging to any of their experiences, either. In fact, according to Levine, we shouldn’t be trying to “help” at all. We just need to be open in “an honoring of the truth we all share.” This is happening right now. We are here. We are not separate. If I feel myself as separate from you, I reinforce your feeling of separateness, and thereby reinforce your suffering. Levine addresses a particular technique he used in his work with terminally ill people, wherein he’d talk to them from his heart, or through his heart, silently sending them love and understanding. When communicating in this way, you’re not asking a person to get better or be anything other than they are, though you may have a strong desire for them to do so. You don’t put that desire on them. You just send them your love, straight from your heart.
It’s a compassion practice, pure and simple. Levine differentiates compassion from pity by saying, “When you’re motivated by pity, you’re acting on the aversion you have to experiencing someone else’s predicament. You want to alleviate their discomfort as a means of alleviating your own. Pity creates more fear and separation. When love touches the pain of another, it is called compassion. Compassion is just space. Whatever the other person is experiencing, you have room for it in your heart.” He goes on to say that people in caregiving roles experience burn-out when they’re motivated by pity—or anything else that originates in what he calls the “small mind.” The small mind identifies with what we do, with our role. We are “helpers.” “Because the little mind, the little personality, doesn’t have much room,” he says, “we don’t have space enough for the suffering of others. We feel isolated and struggle to keep from being submerged in our separate suffering.” The way to not get burnt-out is to give from the source, to respond to a given situation from the heart, not the mind. We don’t give from who we think we are, but from the process that we actually are. In this way, working with the dying is working on oneself. It helps you realize—or it helped Levine realize, at least—“that it is not ‘you’ who has to do anything. All you have to do is get out of the way so that the appropriate response to the moment can manifest itself.”
In a later chapter of Who Dies?, Levine revisits the notion of getting out of the way. He attests to witnessing many a self-proclaimed “healer” be prideful and grandiose about their work. While in some cases the interventions they perform do result in a strengthening of the body, the mind remains weak, and “the clinging that has always obscured the heart is not affected or encouraged to dissolve.” In their efforts to “heal,” some people are essentially trying to change others, to take something away from them. Levine says that “the healer’s priority [should be] that each individual directly experiences their original nature.” And when that is the priority, “healing becomes a lens that focuses the potentialities of the moment.” Furthermore, any healing that happens is not something that any “healer” can take credit for. To say to oneself, “I healed that person,” is to further reinforce feelings of separateness, which is what, according to Levine, “most obstructs the conduit for the healing powers always available in the universe.” If we are attached to the notion of someone getting well—attached to that particular result—then we will limit the depth of true healing that might occur. Levine asserts that for many people, sickness itself is healing. He writes, “Some have told me they have looked their whole life to find a teacher or a teaching that would bring them into some deeper wholeness and that at last it turned out to be their illness, that it was cancer that became the teacher, the mirror for the truth. For many, disease is the way back into life.”
We must be prepared for any possibility. I’m reminded of what Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca said, as quoted by Meister Eckhart in his Book of Divine Consolation, which I devoted a blog post to last September. Seneca said, “A man [should] accept everything as if he had wished for it.” It’s a tall order, but so is life itself. So much is asked of us as human beings! If we constantly resist any given challenge, we will suffer. And we’re suffering, aren’t we? By trying to accept everything as if we had wished for it, we prepare our hearts for any possibility. Levine says that it’s only to such hearts that the truth presents itself. To accept everything as if we’d wished for it means that we are working in collaboration with the universe, instead of being worked on by it. But we are not separate from the forces of Life. Each of us is the “space out of which all things originate and into which all things recede.” And to quote Levine further, “Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore and we have no actual difficulty in our life.”
It’s important to mention, though, that if we make it our goal to have no actual difficulty in life, we will only prolong our usual suffering. Levine references (though not by name), Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whose book Meditation in Action I’ve written about on this blog. Trungpa coined the phrase “spiritual materialism” in another of his books, titled Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which I’ve yet to read. Levine describes the concept as a pitfall of desiring liberation. It is “a longing for clarity or ‘deeper experiences,’ which slow the process of letting go into our original nature. To be free, we must eventually let go of even the desire for freedom so that the underlying nature may present itself free of the mind’s clingings.” Being motivated by some goal we long to reach in the future can be great, is indeed essential to thriving on the material plane. But it simply cannot be the source of motivation when it comes to thriving on the spiritual plane. Such a way of being would indicate the kind of desire that Levine calls “unfinished business.” He says, “Whatever has its goal in the future is an incomplete transaction with life.” So we must make like the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers and accept ourselves—and therefore Life, from which we are not separate—as we are, in this moment, right now. Only by doing that do we change.
And you know what? Who we are and what Life is, is changing all the time. So to accept ourselves and Life in this moment will mean that we’re accepting something different in another moment. And “there is nothing in any moment,” Levine says, “that obstructs us from investigating the truth.” This is very Marcus Aurelius of him. He goes on to say, “There is nothing absent in any situation that keeps us from our potential, [if] we can fully open to it.” Another way to sum all this up is to say, as Levine does in Chapter Fourteen, the title chapter of Who Dies?, “Liberation is not something you get. It is your inherent nature.” In an earlier chapter he takes up a similar thread, saying, “The difficulty with our desires is just that they are too small. They are the desires of me and mine. They do not include the universe. They are a desire for what we want, not for who we are.”
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The title of Who Dies? draws our attention to a very important inquiry: when we say that someone has died or is dying, to whom or what, exactly, are we referring? To that person’s body, which hasn’t been the same from one day to the next since it started forming in the womb? To that person’s mind, which is comprised of thoughts that are constantly changing and often contradicting one another? To that person’s emotions, which can also change drastically from one moment to the next, dependent on external circumstances, which are notoriously mercurial themselves? If we answer no to all of those questions, what are we left with? That person’s essence, right? Consciousness itself. And where does that stuff go—the stuff of Life—when the heart stops beating and the neurons stop firing? Does it disappear? Accounts from people who have been medically dead and then brought back to life tell us again and again that it does not. They say consciousness does not exist in the brain. Levine asserts that “the body depends on the presence of consciousness/awareness for its existence, though we have been given to believe that it is precisely the other way around.”
In a diary entry dated March 14th, 1858, Louisa May Alcott writes about the death of her sister Beth, an experience which would, ten years later, appear in fictionalized form in her novel Little Women. Beth was just shy of twenty-three when she died of lingering complications from scarlet fever. Alcott herself was twenty-six when writing in her that “a curious thing happened, and I will tell it here, for Dr. G. said it was a fact. A few moments after the last breath came, as Mother and I sat silently watching the shadow fall on the dear little face, I saw a light mist rise from the body and float up and vanish in the air. Mother’s eyes followed mine, and when I said, ‘What did you see?’ she described the same light mist. Dr. G. said it was the life departing visibly.” Departing for where, though? Is it like Fiona Apple says in her song “I Want You To Love Me,” and when I die, “all my particles disband and disperse and I’ll be back in the pulse,” which Marcus Aurelius said over two millennia before her? I sure do like to think that’s what happens, and anecdotes like Alcott’s seem to support that theory, but really, who knows? Or as my husband likes to say, because it sounds funny, “Whom knows?” None of us ultimately knows what real death—the kind we aren’t brought back from—actually is. It is the ultimate unknown, and that’s what it’s supposed to always be. I’m not interested in making a case for some deathless part of us, the existence of which would enable us to answer Levine’s question, “Who dies?” with a confident, “No one.” And yet I do feel confident in providing that answer, though for a different reason. No one dies, not because we’re all eternal, but because no one really exists—not, that is, as the fixed, separate entities we’ve all been conditioned to believe we are.
The still-common practice of dressing dead people in their Sunday best and putting make-up on their faces to hide the fact that their skin has turned gray is a prime example of how deep that conditioning is. Even in death, we must look as we did in life—with all the same trappings that we thought made us, us. The very self-image that likely made one’s death fear-filled and heart-hardening is upheld after the battle is lost—when it shouldn’t have been seen as a battle in the first place. And of course so much else of what goes on in funeral homes is yet more proof of how hell-bent we are on trying to elude the experience of death. Most of us are deprived of the chance to be with a loved one’s body after their spirit has left it. In his chapter on funerals, Levine says, “To be able to be around the body of one who has just died for four or five or eight hours afterward allows an understanding of the process of death unparalleled in our experience…” And too few of us are able to be present with loved ones as they die, which Levine asserts is the most intimate experience people can share. That’s why he continuously sought out the experience himself.
And as for the losses that come suddenly, via car accident, heart attack, getting shot, drowning, or whatever the case may be, Levine recommends that you “picture [that person] in your heart, and say to them something like, ‘My friend, you have died. Your body is no longer a suitable dwelling for your spirit or your consciousness. Just look around you with love, there is nothing to fear.’” Even fear itself, Levine says, is nothing to fear. “It is just a state of mind whose magnetic and seductive quality has drawn us away from the spaciousness of awareness again and again, has caused identification with our suffering. The only way out is in.” I don’t think any of us can say that we don’t fear death when what we actually mean is that we don’t fear a certain kind of death—the kind that causes no fear to arise.
I like what Zen Master Yasutani Roshi has to say about fear. Levine quotes him in his chapter titled “Letting Go of Control.” “There is nothing to fear,” Yasutani Roshi says. “Just deepen and deepen the questioning until all your preconceived notions of who and what you are vanish, and at once you will realize that the entire universe is no different from yourself. You are at a crucial stage. Don’t retreat—march on!”
