Healing Our Collective Fears
One of the best ways to heal our fear of death is to spend time with the dying. If you don’t have a friend or family member who is dying, you can train as a volunteer with Hospice and assist with a dying patient for several hours a week. It’s enough simply to be with them, respond to their needs, listen to their experiences and observe your own reactions. You’ll know something has shifted when you’re no longer running away from death by avoiding the subject, or trying to put a positive spin on the situation. When you can feel both the pain of personal loss and the exquisite beauty of a passage which is shared by every living being.
After the passing, if you have the opportunity, just sit quietly with the body and feel the silence in the room. During the first hours after death, we can sense that our loved one is still very much alive and present in the room. And then at some point during the transition period, we can sense that they’ve gone and what remains is just a dead body. This experience is palpable and makes a deep impression on the mind. For reasons we can’t fully understand, our fear of death has become lighter and more transparent. Some deep tension within us has been released.
For centuries, contemplation of death and the impermanence of life has played an important role in every spiritual tradition. The great sage Ramana Maharshi underwent a radical and permanent spiritual transformation, triggered by a sudden and involuntary contemplation of death. Plato maintained that all true spiritual aspirants practice dying continuously. To this day, Christian mystics and monks contemplate death as part of their formal spiritual practice. Books are filled with accounts of spiritual transformations following near death experiences. Just being in the presence of someone dying can trigger a profound spiritual experience. What is it about the contemplation of death that has this effect?
When we contemplate death, the question naturally arises: Who or what dies? We know the body dies. But am I the body? Do I die? If we continue along this line of inquiry, we may stumble upon something inside of us that we know is deathless. We don’t know how we know. We just know. This knowing is not in the mind but on the the intuitive level, in the heart.
This is one of the many paradoxes of life and death. We experience ourselves as bodies, and yet we know intuitively that we are something more. When we contemplate death, or witness it, the dynamic tension between what appears to be the case and what we know intuitively, can eject us out of our thinking mind and put us face to face with the mystery and beauty of this paradox.
