controlling, knowing & letting go

In this very short series of talks we will be considering death and how death relates to the spiritual journey and enlightenment.

Ordinarily, people fear death. We have a strong aversion to it. In a sense there are two parts to that sense of aversion. One is a natural, healthy, biological urge to stay alive. But as with many of our natural, biological instincts, our human psychology has taken our aversion to death and magnified it, taken it out of proportion and created this great fear. This fear of death and psychological aversion to it is enough to stop us from realising our enlightenment. And actually, becoming enlightened is a process of a psychological death. We do not die physically, but the sense of one’s self as a separate autonomous being dies, and this is why death and enlightenment have a lot in common. When we physically die, our psychological sense of self also comes to an end. There is just also the ending of the physical body, finished, but that’s a relatively small matter compared to the ending of the psychological self.

So becoming enlightened and dying have much in common. This gives us another approach to enlightenment. If we can look at death, explore it, understand it, look into the fear of death and perhaps go beyond it, then in doing so, we will be opening up the way for enlightenment. A fear of death – the psychological aspect of this – is as I’ve indicated a fear of the disappearance of the sense of self as a separate being. This is also the fear of not being in control, for the sense of the separate self is tightly related to the feeling of being in control of one’s life, and so to let go of that sense of a separate self, we have to let go of the need to feel in control. Almost nobody chooses to die, it’s very rare. Almost everyone is not in control of that final event.

A fear of death is also a fear of the unknown. Whilst we are alive here on earth, we can look around and see other people, interact with them, communicate with them. We can begin to feel that we know what is going on, that we understand things. We can feel, at least to some extent, that we can predict the future. Strictly speaking, this is an illusion, but it’s a happy illusion that we play along with. But, of course, we don’t ordinarily communicate with people who are dead. We don’t know what happens at death, we don’t know what comes after, if anything at all: it is a great unknown. And our psyche, our thinking mind, has a great disliking for the unknown. Its whole purpose is to try and make things known and predictable, secure, comfortable, and death violates all of that.

Death is the ultimate unknown and unknowable. We resist the unknown so much that we would rather create fantasies about a life after death, we would rather believe in those, than face the fact that we just do not know. This not only goes for death, but also for enlightenment. To become enlightened is to live with the acknowledgement that we do not know, we do not know the future, and our rational mind does not even know the present. It creates a story about the present and extrapolates it into the future. But for enlightenment to come, we have to let go of living in those stories. We have to let go of believing them.

This letting go, psychologically, of our attachment to the storytelling mind, our identification with those stories, this is one of the most difficult aspects of the spiritual journey. It is humbling. We have to give up everything that we have ever learnt; see that it is of no real consequence. And so it will be a death too. We will finally have to face the fact that we know nothing. All our knowledge has merely been the storytelling mind creating thoughts that more or less accurately portray the real world. But all these stories and thoughts are a secondary phenomenon. They do not carry the truth in a direct way. At the time of death we will go through a great let go process: letting go of this need to be in control, letting go of this need to feel that we know things. But letting go of everything in our life, all our possessions, all our beliefs, our friends, relatives, loved ones, our job and position in society, our prestige – everything has to be let go of in that moment. And that great letting go is also a part of the spiritual journey. It is only when a total letting go happens that the space comes for enlightenment. Enlightenment is our natural state when we are empty of such things; when we are spacious, and still. When we have a silence having let go of all that noise.

So these are some of the ways in which we can contemplate death and help our spiritual journey in doing so: investigating our need to be in control and how that will feel at the time of death; also looking at our need to understand things with the mind; our need to believe in our thoughts, to live in the world as a known place; and thirdly, to see if we can imagine what it would be like to let go of everything.

Enough for now.