In Your Right Mind at Death

There’s a fire not too far away, which reminds you that it could come in our direction someday. The question is, are you ready? We have this tendency to block out the fact that because bad things can happen in the world to other people, it means that bad things can happen to us. We block that out.

That’s complacency, heedlessness—which the Buddha said is the basis for all unskillful qualities. So we have to cultivate heedfulness instead, reminding ourselves that there are dangers. The big danger in life, of course, is that we’re going to die, and that’s unavoidable. It’s going to happen someday. You can avoid it in specific instances, but it’s going to get you someday, and the question is: Are you ready to go?

I was reading a series of biographies one time, in French, to get the language back. I noticed that, especially with people in politics, as they got older, the challenges against them got stronger and stronger. You’d think that people would let up, seeing that these people were old and weak, but that’s when the challenges got really savage.

The same thing happens at death. You’re weak; the body is malfunctioning; and then on top of that, you’re going to die. There’s the challenge. You can’t just give up and go. You’re going to be making choices. Those choices will determine your future course, and they’ll be determined by your state of mind.

You want to make sure that your state of mind is as good as possible. This is why we meditate, so that no matter how bad things get in the body, no matter how bad things get in the world, we can still be strong in mind. We can maintain our mindfulness; we can still keep our wits about us.

A lot of people, when they die, end up choosing places to go that no one in their right mind would want to go. But then again, when you die, you’re very rarely in your right mind. To put yourself in your right mind, you have to prepare.

The Buddha says there are four reasons that fear comes up at death: fear of losing your body, fear of losing human sensual pleasures, fear that the bad things you’ve done in life will lead to punishment in the next life, and the fear that comes from not knowing the true Dhamma.

The people who have this last fear wouldn’t necessarily express it in those terms. What it means is they have no idea for sure what’s going to happen at death; they have no proof that there is such a thing as the deathless. So there’s a big, gaping hole in their awareness—a big blank—and it’s scary.

So we try to prepare for these kinds of fear through our meditation.

Like fear of losing the body: It’s one of the reasons why we do body contemplation. You go through the body, part by part by part and you ask yourself: Which part is really worth holding on to? Which one is really worth coming back to? Taken apart like that, there’s nothing with any appeal.

We do this so that we’re not attracted to the idea of coming back to any body. What usually happens is that you realize you can’t stay in this body at the point of death, and the opportunity comes to go to another one. Many people just jump. In some cases, it’s simply the opportunity to have any body at all, and you go for that.

In other cases, you might have a vision of a very attractive body: either one that you would be able to take on yourself, or the body of someone you might get as a partner in that particular world. But just because your body looks good by whatever standards you measure good-looking bodies, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be healthy, doesn’t mean that* *life is going to be a good life. And just because someone else is attractive doesn’t mean that they’re going to be good people to live with.

There are a lot of really beautiful people who live miserable lives. Their beauty becomes a curse—so you have to think about that. Again, this is why we contemplate the body. Get used to taking off the skin in your mind and taking the different organs out and placing them on the ground, so that when the time comes to die, that will be a very quick reaction to any beautiful body that appears to your mind.

If a heavenly body comes, you can ask yourself: what? A deva body may not have the parts of a human body, but devas tend to get complacent. Can you imagine what life would be like in one of the heavens, where as soon as you think of wanting something, it appears? You can imagine how you could become spoiled. And when you fall from there, you fall hard.

But if in your meditation you can develop any of the formless states—staying with a sense of infinite space, a sense of infinite consciousness, nothingness—you don’t feel so threatened when you’re being pushed out of this body. You know that the mind has good places to go that don’t require having a body. It can be okay about the fact that the body is deteriorating.

Ajaan Fuang had a student who, one night as she was meditating, had a voice appear in her meditation saying, “You’re going to die tonight.” She told herself, “Well, if I’m going to die, I might as well die meditating.” So she continued to meditate.

She said it was as if her body had turned into a house on fire. No matter which room you went into, you couldn’t stay because it was all on fire. Then she remembered space. So she focused on the space element and she didn’t feel threatened by the fire in the house at all.

Then, when she later came back to the body, everything had settled back down to normal. And she learned an important lesson: If you can access space in your meditation, you don’t feel so threatened when the body pushes you out, and you’re less likely to make quick and unwise judgments. You’re more willing to take a little bit of time and be a little bit more picky about where you go. That can help overcome at least some of your fear of losing the body.

As for the fear of losing sensual pleasures, the Buddha has you reflect that there are better sensual pleasures than just the human. And it is possible to meditate as a deva.

There’s a great story in the Canon where a person who dies gets reborn as a deva. He meets up with another deva—it turns out that they were friends in their human lives, and they used to chant together. The other devas says, “Let’s chant some more!”—and so they do. That leads to more Dhamma practice, which protects you from the usual problem in the heavenly realms, getting complacent.

We have the same problem in the human realm: You get comfortable—you have a nice hut, a nice house, you feel secure—and you tend to get lazy. When you become a deva and you have a deva palace, there’s an even greater tendency to get lazy. So you want to be clear on the fact that wherever you go, you want to practice, you want the opportunity to practice, and you want to take advantage of it.

Which is why it’s good to foster the kinds of delight we talked about the other day: delight in the Dhamma, delight in abandoning, delight in developing. You want that to become second nature.

If you can develop the pleasure and rapture that come from concentration, you provide yourself with an alternative to sensuality. You don’t feel so pulled to go for sensual pleasures of any kind.

Otherwise, you get easily trapped.

Ajaan Mun talks about remembering that he’d been reborn as a dog for 500 lifetimes in a row. It’s hard to imagine him as a dog, but he said it happened. And if it’s happened to him, it’s probably happened to you. As he said, why was that? It was because he got satisfied with the sensual pleasures of dogs. So be careful about sensuality.

This fascination we have with thinking about sex and food and all the other pleasures of the senses can appear as you die, and it can pull you down. So remember, there is this alternative. Develop this alternative and develop a taste for it: the alternative offered by the pleasure and rapture of concentration, the pleasure of form, or the pleasure of the formless. That way you won’t feel so desperate and threatened when you die.

As for fear of being punished, sometimes, as you get close to death, you start thinking about the things you did: times when, as the Buddha would put it, you were cruel, times when you didn’t give protection to people who were in danger. It may happen that a bad world appears to you.

The worst thing that can happen at that time is that you’d say, “Gee, I did all this good in my life, and I’m going down to a bad place. The Buddha must have been wrong. Right view was probably wrong.” That would really pull you down.

But if you remind yourself that you haven’t done any of the things that would automatically require that you go down to a lower realm, you do have some goodness to you, and you maintain right view, that can close off the paths to those lower realms. So remember how important right view is.

Even if you’ve done bad things in this life, they don’t necessarily pull you down. It’s the attitude that rejects right view that pulls you down. So have strong conviction that your actions—your good actions—really do have power, and that you can depend on the memory of those actions.

Finally, knowing the true Dhamma: That requires that you’ve had at least a glimpse of the deathless, so that you know there is something in the mind that’s outside of space and time. Death goes only as far as space and time. There’s something in the mind that death can’t touch.

When you’ve seen that, as the Buddha says, there’s no fear about where you’re going to go after death. There may be fear of the pain that comes with death, or of the fact that your life will be interrupted. But then that’s the nature of life. It always gets interrupted.

Think about people living in a war zone right now. Whatever plans they had for their lives and their families just got chopped off—and that’s the nature of life in general. The end of life is not a nice closure, where everybody gathers around and talks about how much they love you, and all the projects you had planned come to completion. The nature of life is that things get chopped off, they get interrupted. So you’ve got to be prepared.

You may say, “Well, maybe not this time around. Maybe next time I’ll be able to complete what I wanted to do,” but the only real completion that comes in this world is when you gain awakening. Everything else is just a world of loose ends, interrupted lives.

So do your best while you have this opportunity to practice, while things are comfortable. Don’t be heedless. You can prepare for death so that you’re not afraid of it. When you’re not afraid of it, then you will be in your right mind as you die, and you’ll be in a much better position to make wise choices.