Thinking About Your Fears

Ajaan Lee tells a story when he was a young monk living in Bangkok, but occasionally would go out and do a little tudong during the dry season.

One time he was in a forest where there was an elephant in rut, crazed with sex. It’s called “rut” because there’s a liquid called rut that comes out of glands near its ears. It was going around, as he says, stabbing people with its tusks. So the villagers near where he was staying came into the forest and said, “Please come out of the forest, because it’s dangerous.” But he said No. He was confident in the power of his mind.

One day, as he was sitting and meditating, the elephant did come to the clearing where he was staying. He took one look at the elephant, and before he knew it, he was climbing up a tree. Then something in his mind said, “You’re not for real. You’re afraid to die. Those who are afraid to die will come back and die many more times.”

So he sat back down on the ground, faced the elephant, and then spread lots and lots of goodwill. The elephant stopped for a bit, wiggled his ears a bit, and then walked out of the clearing.

That’s a story that’s good to keep in mind.

The forest tradition is one of the few cultures in the world where, when someone asks, “Are you afraid to die?” they expect you to say, “No.” You have to be ready. You have to learn how to think about death. And when you think about death—what you’re going to have to leave, what you’re going to have to give up, and prepare yourself to leave and give up those things—then it puts all your other fears and worries and anxieties into perspective.

Our problem with a lot of our anxieties is that we know we have to think about them, we know we have to prepare, but we don’t know how. We’re afraid to even think about them. We think that if we think about them, our thoughts will make them happen. You run up against an obstacle that you can’t figure out how to handle and you just stop thinking.

You’ve got to learn how to think things through. The Buddha, of course, thought through death. As he said, there are four things that we fear about being dead. The thing we fear about the process of dying, of course, is the pain that we may have to meet up with in the course of dying. But beyond that, there are four things about leaving this human life that we tend to be afraid of. People who are well-practiced, who’ve fully trained their minds, don’t have to be afraid of those things.

One is that you’re afraid of leaving this human body. Of course, you’ll be leaving your own body. Your fear is there will be nothing left.

This is one of the reasons why we practice meditation. We get the mind into the states of jhana, using the body, and then we can go beyond them. But even before we go beyond them, we stop and think: What is this body we have here anyhow? You can go down through the different parts. Is there any part that you’d like to put on your pillow next to you when you go to sleep? Even your skin: If you took it off the body and put it on a pile next to you, you’d run away. And that’s what makes the body okay enough to look at. Without the skin, all the different organs, it gets even worse. Yet here we are, attached to it.

Of course, a lot of attachment has to do not with the parts of the body, but with what we can do with the human body. This is why it’s good to be able to get the mind into a state where you can focus on the sense of space, realizing that the mind can be perfectly content, perfectly happy, without any reference to the body at all. Space, consciousness, nothingness: These are states of concentration you can work on and dwell in.

As you get the mind to settle down, you find that there is a happiness that comes without the body. That way, the fear of leaving the body is not quite so strong. It doesn’t totally do away with it. That fear is going to end only when you gain the Dhamma eye, when you see that there’s a dimension that doesn’t die.

But you can work on it. You can think about it. Most of us don’t like to think about these things. As soon as our mind touches them, we either spin out of control or push these things away. Sometimes we push them away because they have spun out of control in the past. Which is why it’s good to have the training of the forest ajaans, the training of the Buddha, to help you think straight.

Another fear is the fear of losing human sensual pleasures. This is another reason why we practice meditation, finding a sense of well-being that doesn’t have to do with sensuality at all. Just as by inhabiting the body fully from within, there’s a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, as you balance the different elements. When it’s cold outside, you can focus on the warmth in your body. When it’s hot outside, you can focus on the coolness in the body. If you maintain a steady focus, you can emphasize those properties and bring things into balance.

Even though this is a pleasure that depends on the experience of the body, it’s not a sensual pleasure. It’s a pleasure of form. That again helps you realize that if you had to leave this human body, it wouldn’t be all that bad. You could have this as a place to go to.

One of Ajaan Fuang’s students was meditating one night, and she had a voice come into her head and say, “You’re going to die tonight.” So she told herself, “Well, if I’m going to die, I might as well die meditating.” She continued sitting in meditation. She said her body was like a house on fire. No matter where she focused in the body, she couldn’t stay. It was all pain.

Then she saw a space. So she focused on the sense of space that surrounds the body and permeates the body. And there was no suffering there at all—at least none of the suffering that would come from the body.

After a while, she returned to the body and found that everything had settled back down to normal. She didn’t die. The voice had been lying to her. But she learned a good lesson:. When you can’t stay with the body, there is space. When you have to leave human sensual pleasures, there’s the pleasure of concentration. So this practice we’re doing actually gives you some tools to deal with some of these fears.

Another one of the fears of death is that after death you’ll be punished for whatever cruel and heartless things you’ve done. But if you maintain the precepts, you can look at your behavior and say, “There’s nothing bad there. That means I don’t have to go to a lower realm.”

Even when you’ve broken some of the precepts, there are only a few that would actually guarantee you’d have to go to hell: killing an arahant, killing your parents, causing a split in the Sangha. You haven’t done any of those things.

This is one of the reasons why, when someone is on his or her deathbed, people will come and say, “Remember all the good things you’ve done—the times when you were generous, the times you were virtuous, the times you meditated.”

Realize that you have some goodness to you and hold on to that. That way, if scary things come up, you have something good to hold on to: “I don’t have to go to those scary places.”

Finally, there’s the fear that comes from not having seen the true Dhamma. Most people don’t express it to themselves in these terms because many of them have never heard of the true Dhamma. What the Buddha is basically saying is, “Those who have seen the deathless know that there is this deathless element. The body will die, the different aggregates will go, but there is this deathless element that doesn’t die. Because it’s outside of space, outside of time, it can’t be touched by things within space or time.” When you’ve seen that, that puts away all your fear of death.

If you haven’t seen it, well, work on it and meanwhile be confident that it is possible. Have some conviction in the Buddha’s awakening. Don’t be like the secular Buddhists who say, “I want to hold on to my secular worldview and then take little bits and pieces of the Dhamma that’ll fit into that worldview”—as if they were chopping it up, and sticking it here, sticking it there.

But the whole reason for the teaching is that there is this deathless. And it is attainable. The first thing the Buddha said to his first students, after his awakening, was, “The deathless has been attained. If you follow my instructions, you’ll be able to attain it too”.

That’s what the teaching is all about.

Taking bits and pieces out of the teaching, out of that context, will of course change their meaning and deprive them of their power.

So take these teachings and look at your own fear of death to see where your fear of death fits into these things. Learn how to think calmly about your death—realizing that there’s work to be done and you’re prepared to do it. At the same time, you can look at your other fears and anxieties, and they seem awfully small in comparison. If you can think fearlessly and clearly about death, then it’s a lot easier to think fearlessly and clearly about other things that you’re anxious about. It puts things into perspective.

This is why the teachings on karma and rebirth were among those that the Buddha included in his handful of leaves. As he said, in his awakening he learned many, many things that he didn’t tell anybody. He spoke only about things that would be useful in putting an end to suffering. So when he chose karma and rebirth to talk about, he definitely knew what he was doing.

You read people who say that he was enlightened about some things but didn’t realize the full implications of his discovery. Or that he was bound by his culture. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re the ones who are bound by their culture.

The Buddha taught karma, he taught rebirth, because they’re useful teachings for putting an end to suffering, helping us think about the situation we find ourselves in—this body that’s going to die—and how we can think clearly about our situation, so that we don’t have to be afraid; so that, in the Ajaan Lee’s terms, we can be real—we can be for real.

Trying to find the deathless means that we have to face death squarely and think about it clearly. When you think clearly about death, it helps you think clearly about a lot of other fears so that they don’t dominate your mind.