Skills for Dying Well

One of the Buddha’s most important teachings is on the topic of becoming. The Pali word is bhava. It’s a process that happens in the mind. Like everything else, it’s rooted in desire. Then, around that desire, you develop a sense of the world in which the desired object can be found. Then you take on a role in that world. That act of taking on the role is called birth.

It happens all the time in the mind: Anytime you think of something you want, you think about where it is and what you have to do in order to get it. And in that particular becoming, around that particular desire, anything that’s relevant to the desire is part of that world; anything that’s not gets put aside.

This is a process we go through day after day after day, many times in the course of a day. It’s the mind’s instinctive reaction: You want something, “Well, where is it? And what do I have to do to get it?” Then you go into it. As long as you’re interested in it, you’ll be part of that world. But if you decide you don’t want it anymore or you find that you’re stuck in a bad world and you want to destroy it, then you move to something else.

Now, one of the Buddha’s main insights was that this process that happens in the mind is also the process that leads to rebirth on a large scale. You can’t stay in this body any longer and something will appear to you, oftentimes many things will appear to you, and you focus on one. Then the world, the place, in which that thing is located appears, and then you go in. And, going in—that’s how you’re reborn.

You can imagine that when someone’s dying, they may not be especially careful about where they’re going to go because they can’t stay where they are. All kinds of different emotions can come up at that time and, under the force of some pretty bad emotions, you can make some very bad choices.

Some people start remembering things they did in this lifetime that they’re not happy about or they realize that they did horrible things, and the fear that they might get punished actually opens the way to the punishment. So people end up choosing things they really don’t want, but they feel they have to go there. That’s one way in which we can get reborn in some pretty bad ways.

Other times, we’re just desperate. We’re desperate for sensual pleasure of some kind and we’re not stopping to think about what’s going to be involved in attaining that pleasure.

You want to take on a certain identity—you’re afraid that this identity you have here is being wiped out and you don’t know how you’re going to function without an identity, so you want to take on a new one.

Or you want to be annihilated: Say, you’ve had enough of this world. It’s nothing but pain and disappointment. The opportunity just to get snuffed out for a while appears, and you go for it.

These are the big three types of craving that the Buddha said lead to suffering. Now, they lead to suffering not only at the moment of death, but also in daily life. So if you want to get some control over this process at death, you have to gain some control over it here and now. For that, you have to meditate.

Look what you’re doing as you’re focusing on the breath: You want to settle down—that’s the desire around which this becoming is going to form. And here you’ve got your sense of the body as you feel it from within—that’s the world you’re going to be focusing on. Then you’re the meditator in that world, and there you are: a state of becoming. But it’s a good one, because it calms you down and you get to observe it.

It’s good in the sense that it’s transparent because you’re settling down, making the mind quieter than it usually is. So you’re going to see things you didn’t see before. It’s also good in the sense that it’s totally harmless.

Be confident that you’re doing something good here: You’re putting aside thoughts of sensuality; you’re inhabiting the body from within—what the Buddha calls form—and you’re trying to do it in a way that’s comfortable.

So you’re with the breath. You’re talking to yourself about the breath. You focus on perceptions that lead to a sense of ease inside—the perceptions about how the breath comes in, goes out, where you are in relationship to it. So you can see these processes as they’re happening. The quieter you are, the more you’re going to see.

And because the pleasure here doesn’t have to depend on sensuality, you’re not making yourself a slave to sensual pleasures. Some people say we’re not supposed to have a physical sense of well-being in concentration, because concentration is supposed to be divorced from sensuality. Well, the pleasure of form is very different from the pleasure of sensuality. Sensuality, of course, is your fascination with thoughts about the pleasures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensastions. The pleasure of form is something else—how you feel the body from within. That’s not sensual, and it doesn’t have all the drawbacks of sensuality. So you’re lifting the level of your mind as you make it quieter.

And then, of course, other potential becomings will begin to appear. Say, the breath is not comfortable, you can’t figure it out, and the mind says, “I want to go someplace else.” And there you go. There’s a desire, and then there’s a sense of where what you want might be, and you go into it—it’s like a little thought bubble—and then you float away. But then the bubble bursts, and you’re back down here. Well, you don’t like being back here, so you float away again.

But it’s better to watch that process and not get into the bubble. That’s why we have this larger and more stable, clearer and nobler sense of becoming with the concentration. It gives you a good place to stay anchored so that you can watch these other things beginning to form. You’re not so tempted to go into them, because you’ve got something better here.

So you have to work on making this a good place. That’s why we talk about how you settle into the body in the present moment. If there are pains here or there, don’t focus on the pains. Focus on the parts of the body that you can make comfortable, because you want a place where you can feel good staying, and not be tempted to just float out after any thought that comes through. Whatever thinking you do, make it centered in the breath and the mind’s relationship to the breath.

As you get more and more stable like this, then you can really clearly see these processes as they would float away and you’d want to go someplace else. But you can pop the bubble. In other words, you see the process before they become a real becoming. That’s what dependent co-arising is for: It tells you all the steps that the mind goes through prior to becoming so that you can stop them in time.

Ajaan Chah made the comment one time that the steps happen very fast, that it’s like falling out of a tree. You go past several branches on the way down to the ground, but because you’re going so fast, the tree and its branches tend to be a blur. But as you get the mind more still, things begin to slow down.

This is a point that Ajaan Lee often makes. Either it’s because you get quicker or things get slower, but whatever the case, you begin to see these steps more clearly. And you can decide, “I don’t want to go there.” You can do this because you’re getting the mind settled through mindfulness, alertness, and being ardent in doing this well.

Now, these are precisely the skills you’re going to need at the moment of death. You can create a sense of well-being in the mind and you don’t feel so pushed out by the body.

That’s the paradox of doing breath meditation: You’re focusing on the body as you feel it from within, but after a while, the sense of the body begins to get more subtle, and the outlines of the surface of the body begin to disappear. You get more and more into awareness itself. You have a sense of being independent from the body—and that’s a skill you want to develop because there you can see even more clearly what’s going on.

It happens when the breath stops. When you get the mind really concentrated, the breath energy fills the body, and the body will just stop breathing—but not because you’re forcing it. If you force it, it’s not going to last. When there’s a sense of the breath energy filling the body and that it’s originating from within—you don’t have to pull it in from outside—then the affairs of the mind become more and more clear, and the sense of awareness itself becomes more clear.

This is where you really can see these other states of becoming as they begin to form and you don’t have to go for them. Or you can see that some of those thought worlds are actually worth entering into, because there’s something that has to be thought through—then you go in. But you go in knowing what you’re doing.

This is precisely the set of skills you’re going to need at the moment of death because different thought worlds will appear and they could potentially be places to actually be reborn. And depending on the state of your mind, as I said, you can go to some pretty bad places. But if your state of the mind is good and you have this strong sense of the mind or awareness being separate from the body, you don’t feel so much pushed out by the body, you don’t feel so threatened by being pushed out. You’re less likely to want to latch on to anything that would pull you down because you know you’ve got something better here.

So as we develop your mindfulness and alertness and ardency by trying to get the mind to settle down to create a sense of solid stillness, we’re actually developing the skills we’ll need as we go from one life to the next, so we’ll make good choices.

Our problem, as the Buddha said, is that we don’t understand the consequences of our actions. That’s because the principle that explains how one action can lead to different results is pretty complex. Some of the things we’re experiencing right now come from our present actions. Some of them come from past actions we may remember. Some of them come from past actions we don’t remember at all. And it’s really hard to sort that out, which is why people make a lot of mistakes in choosing what they want to do and where they want to go.

But again, as you get the mind more firmly established here, you can begin to see these processes as they happen—and you can see where you can put a stop to them. At the very least, you can choose a better state of becoming. Ideally, you want to get to the point where the mind doesn’t go for becoming at all. But failing that, you want to be quiet enough and alert enough so that you can genuinely see, when you make a choice of where to go, that it’s going to be a good choice.

So you want to keep this in mind—that’s the function of mindfulness. And you want to be alert to what you’re doing. And you want to be ardent in doing it well. These are the skills you’re going to need. And these are the skills you’re working on right now.

The ajaans like to talk about this. They say that meditation is preparing yourself to die well. There’s a skill there. A lot of people, when death comes, just surrender. Or else they go down kicking, but without really realizing what they’re doing.

You want to learn how to watch what you’re doing right here, right now, and have a strong sense of which choices are good, which choices are bad, which voices in the mind you can trust, which ones you can’t trust. All of these are good skills to have.

So we’ve got the rest of the hour—good time to work on them because right now is always the best time to work on these things. As they say in the Canon, death comes without forewarning, without a sign ahead of time.

Some people are sick for a long time and they just won’t die. Other people look perfectly well, seem to be perfectly well, and, oops, there they go. We don’t know how much time we have left, but we do have this time right now—this breath coming in, this breath going out. So make the most of it.