TLDR. Writing this, I realise, turned into a rather large wall of text. I've probably written this as much for myself as for this forum, to digest some thoughts on death and practice I've been having over the years. To atone for some of the verbosity below, here is an attempt to lower the cost of entry by means of a tldr

1.  One core conception I have of my practice is as an art of dying into the world.

2.  As far as I can tell, these are 5 meaningfully distinct aspects of death

- oblivion/fragmentation
- isolation
- agony
- meaninglessness
- annihilation/extinction

3. Encounters with death along these categories draw a map of the path that is very much like the POI map, possibly with a different emphasis. 

4. Posting this in the hope of providing some inspiration for people to riff on, point out blind spots and relate other ways they have found death to shape their practice. Cheers. 

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So I've been thinking about death a lot.

Partly because it's the end of October and the days are getting short. Partly because of an assignment by my dharma teacher and partly because death is fairly close to me. Not that I am, statistically speaking, likely close to my individual death. As a critical care physician, I encounter death more routinely than most. It's a background threat that keeps me alert, an adversary who may also come as a relief at the end for a suffering patient. 

But this is about practice and on a more personal level, I have come to think of the practice, or at least my practice, as learning the art of dying into the world. A habitual dying that stands opposed to trying to stay alive, fretting over a death that comes at the end and means to take us out of the world. One fruit of the path I believe is the freedom gained from having died small deaths so many times. Enough that I may learn to face the large death and bear both its illusory nature and remaining mystery. 
I'm not sure what came first, my love for Buddhism or my love for things in list form. Luckily, with Theravada, I don't have to choose. So when I do get insight, it tends to structure itself into neat little lists (except of course, for the part that can't really be put into words at all)

I would like to share this little map of what I believe are distinct aspects of death that I have encountered in practice. The Five Faces of Lord Yama, if you are poetically inclined, and what looking into them has opened up for me. These five faces are - in particular order - fragmentation/oblivion, isolation, agony, meaninglessness and annihilation/extinction.

1. Oblivion/fragmentation. Death of the mind comes in two forms: Oblivion, or the fear of conscious experience ending and fragmentation or psychosis, the fear of our centre not holding together. If you've never had even a whiff of psychotic experience in your life, the latter might be the hardest to relate to. If you had, you will be instantly familiar to its particular sense of fear. It is death of self not as the realisation of non-self, but as its fragmentation, a helpless mind shattering into a thousand shards. The ground of consensus reality dropping away beneath our feet.

Especially during my first few years of retreat experience, I've personally gathered a colourful collection of psychotic episodes. The first one that comes to mind was on my first fire kasina retreat with Daniel, when I spent an afternoon firmly convinced that Buddhist doctrine was a mind virus which fed on the existential self of its victims, transmitted by dharma teachers who were themselves hollowed out beings (If you're reading this, Daniel, thanks for striking up a conversation back then and showing me quirky stand-up comedy videos on your phone. It was the dharmic equivalent of Remus Lupin handing out chocolate on the Hogwarts Express.) Over the following years I encountered numerous similar episodes, from the now more familiarly theatrics of experiencing sensations of my body being taken over by a cosmic parasitic caterpillar, to more mundane ones, like freaking out that I was never going to feel emotions again in a psychotic break from lower equanimity. Luckily, all these episodes were of a self-limiting nature. Or rather non-self-unlimiting, pardon the pun, since watching my mind break apart and put itself back together again has given me valuable insights into the nature of anatta. Likewise, a deepening understanding of non-self and the resulting trust in the spaciousness of my mind has helped tremendously to navigate later episodes, to the point that I have gotten rather chill about them. For the past few years they have stopped occurring at all. 

I don't easily experience a lot of cessations, at least off-retreat, which is a fact about my personal practice that I had to make peace with. However, especially the ones entering through the no-self door, feel like a result of having made peace with and inviting oblivion as a friend. 

2. Isolation - as social animals, not only has isolation meant for most of our existence near certain physical death. A large part of what we fear about death is that it leaves us alone. Both in the sense that we are left behind alone by the death of our loved ones and that ultimately each of us must face our own death alone.

Even as an introvert, the silence that can be found in meditation has felt at times unbearably lonely, before - in surrendering to it - that loneliness turns peaceful. As the initial layers of understanding of anatta became apparent, they were accompanied by pangs of isolation in my practice. This, too, has been tempered by love. Realising that the conditioned nature of self applied not only to me, but also to my husband, has strangely made him more precious to me, not less. I also get way less annoyed about him leaving his used cereal dish out. On a broader level, while there is still a tension both in my practice and my life between seclusion and community, the tension is alive because both lean on each other. 

3. Agony - the suffering of death. More so perhaps than we fear death as an end, we fear death as the act of dying. We are frightened by the thought of pain at the end, of suffering that is more than we can bear. The most brutal face of death is the one that appears to take away a person's dignity before it takes their life.

In the first few years of dharma practice after I had read MCTB, I tried my best to follow one of its central pieces of advice. I focused my practice on the make-up of conscious experience, neglecting its content as much as possible. This changed on another fire kasina retreat, with what in hindsight is best described as an involuntary heart opening. Baked in my belief of a separate self there is a belief, a mad hope of this self having plot armour. That somehow in a world of war, genetic diseases, cancer and dementia, fate will somehow turn out alright for us and the people around us. Main character syndrome, if you will. When for a moment and on retreat doses of concentration, this part of self-belief dropped away, the utter inevitability of suffering came flooding in. All of the content, or at least the part that concerned suffering, all at once. My own suffering, suffering of my loved ones and by extension the world. The unadulterated suffering of existence, undeniable and inevitable. However, in the face of suffering, compassion arises. From compassion, equanimity. And suffering, held in equanimity, nourishes gratitude and love. My practice that had until then been quite nerdy, fascinated by deep concentration states and map-oriented insight, softened considerably, with metta or more generally the Brahmaviharas as new core elements and a new found love both for myself and the world. 

4. Meaninglessness - the death of our relationship to the world. A professor I had once compared death to a careless adult that walks past a child sitting on the floor. The child has carefully stacked a tower of toy building blocks to their delight. Without noticing, the adult's step knocks the tower over, leaving the child‘s work in pieces. Sometimes death comes well narrated, at the end of a meaningful biographical arc, in old age and surrounded by loved ones and the fruits of a life well lived. We fear more the other face of death, the one that comes at random, like a thief in the night. Seeming without rhyme or reason, it leaves lives in pieces, work undone and things unsaid. 

It's harder to point to a particular experience in my practice here. But over the years, recurring experiences of equanimity have at times eroded and even dissolved my carefully constructed toy towers of meaning. What used to matter to me, suddenly didn't anymore and there have been small and large changes of my life trajectory as a result of these crises of meaning. I would want to caution that there is a false friend of equanimity. Apathy is also a result of looking meaninglessness in the face, but without being able to really hold its gaze. As mentioned above, when encountering suffering, true equanimity nourishes gratitude and love. Similarly, when encountering meaninglessness, equanimity should nourish, well, new and deeper meaning. So, if after a particularly erosive retreat experience you may decide to take the axe to vital structures of your life, such as work or even relationships, I would advise to wait until that axe swings not from the point of lack of meaning, but of making space for new meaning to grow. 

5. Annihilation/extinction - because maps should be neat and symmetrical, the aspect of death of all material form also comes in two. Annihilation, the grinding away of time on our physical body, old age, sickness and well, death. And extinction, the inevitable death of everything we think we can leave behind. Our life's work, our children, the memory of us we want to live on in the world. 

Like many other practitioners, I have found impermanence of being the most intuitively easy one to grasp of the three Cs. At least in the beginning, because I strongly suspect that further down the path there are deeper layers that are very much elusive to my current understanding. It also seems a bit obvious to write that, facing impermanence, what opens up is a quality of presence to the moment. With some practice, that presence to the moment can hold appreciating my memories of a past and making plans for a future, while each remain seen as being constructed in a continously shifting moment. This is very much an ongoing practice. 


So, summing things up, this is a map of death with 5 categories

1. Oblivion/fragmentation
2. Isolation
3. Agony
4. Meaninglessness
5. Annihilation/extinction

with the aspects of 1,3 and 5 pertaining to the 3 characteristics of existence - anatta, dukkha and annica. And the aspects 2 and 4 pertaining to our relationship to a perceived outside world through relationships and actions respectively. I have suspicions that these two map well on sunyata as a characteristic of a non-dual relationship with the world, but this still needs a lot more fleshing out. 

This map offers a view on how my path unfolds, very much like the POI map, but framed as seasonal cycles of small and large encounters with death and dying into the world. 

For example, paying attention to the clinging of my mind and its attachments leads to a recognition of the characteristic of dukkha, encountering my fear of agony, which if born out leads to compassion, equanimity and out of that arises love. Love in a conditioned mind is eventually solidified, clinging to new attachment, leading to another cycle of unfolding. 

Similarly, paying attention to how I construct continuity out of impermanent moments leads to a recognition of annica, confronting subtle or gross fears of annihilation and extinction, which if born out lead to a quality of presence to the moment. Presence in a conditioned mind is again sooner or later solidified to new false sense of continuity and the fractal cycle of insight continues. 

From the point of view of my place on this map, progress on it seems fractal. I can't imagine an end in sight, apart from the obvious.

What I deeply appreciate about this map, is that following it bears out two directions of spiritual growth. One is following a yearning for transcendence and stillness that culminates in the experience of cessation and the solidified form of stillness experienced along the  jhanic arc. The other is a movement towards immanence, of a richer, compassionate and meaningful being in the world. 

Lastly I’m hoping that posting this does something skillful. I would be curious and appreciate if it leads to someone riffing on its theme, and even more grateful for someone to point out the blind spots of this. I am also curious about other ways death has been an influence on other people‘s practice. Finally, leaving this big wall of text with a big chunk of metta for everyone that has made it through. Cheers.

  

Awesome.

This is a great post. Having had a widowmaker heart attack this year that left me with heart failure, and having a few friends who are in similar kinds of situations, I've had occasion to look at death but it's rare to find people who want to talk about it.

I think your five faces do a good job of covering the biggest negative reactions to death, and you balance these with compassion and equanimity. Since you invited people to riff, I'll give it a shot.

I am basing this on my recent experience. In three hospitals and numerous ambulances, over the course of two weeks or so, I saw much suffering around me but did not suffer. Fear didn't come up. The predominant experiences were interest, beauty, and compassion, which surprised me (if you are interested, you can read about it in the "off the cushion section of https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/view_message/23922732#_com_liferay_message_boards_web_portlet_MBPortlet_message_27398061).

It's worth noting that, unlike Daniel's friend Richard, who gave Daniel a wonderful interview including his experience of being near death (https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/21552294), I have not completed the path to the end of suffering, but I haven't been suffering in the face of death. I wonder if that is because when the stimulus that prompts the reactions described by the five faces occurs, the mind naturally goes to the far enemies of those reactions. Of course, I am looking at this through a Buddhist lens but it's not uncommon to be comfortable with death in other religious traditions and there may be some commonalities in terms of ways of seeing.


1. Oblivion/fragmentation (Anatta/Liberation)
Some practitioners have a fearful reaction to anatta experiences, especially early on, but they are also commonly experienced as liberating. With death, too, there can be both a reaction of fear and a sense of liberation. Liberation in death is a common religious theme and a motif routinely found in art. When we are a self, we are shackled to a situation, to a body, to a history, to the world. When that self dissolves, the shackles have nothing to hold.

2. Isolation (Communion)
I was less sure what this maps to but the flipside may be communion. In death, we are moving away from our loved ones because they cannot follow but, at the same time, we are going where, not only everyone, but everything, has gone before us, and where everyone and everything will follow. We are going from being a separate individual to being mixed with that which has gone before us. This is also a theme in many religions.

3. Agony (Dukkha/Second Arrow)
Suffering in the act of dying may appear to strip away dignity because the suffering is part of a defeat. If you have a painful condition, from which everyone expects you to fully recover (a nasty bone fracture, for example) then the pain is almost dignifying. One can be proud of struggling through it. People can be jovial in their encouragement. But when physical suffering does not lead to a desired outcome, which is to say, in the context of failure, in the context of oblivion/fragmentation, isolation, meaninglessness, and annihilation/extinction, it can seem sinister. However, if death seems close without being frightening and without death being seen as a defeat, so that one is not overwhelmed, physical suffering can be dealt with in ordinary ways.

Pain and discomfort while receiving care also be a very interesting experience. I was amazed by the compassion of the strangers who were caring for me. All those people. All those hours. All that infrastructure. Humans are amazingly kind! If someone, anyone, is seriously unwell, there are whole buildings full of people who want to help. Wow! Had I actually died, my last thought would have been along the lines of, "This is so cool!"

4. Meaninglessness (Sunyata/Freedom)
This is, for me, a surprising benefit of now being close enough to death that it doesn't seem like just an idea. Whatever tower of toy blocks I may construct, it's going to get kicked over. So I can go ahead and make towers but I can see that there is no need to get attached to them. It takes the importance out of things. The outcomes of elections, the long-term cost/benefit of nuclear power, my colleague's opinion of me, the best price for laundry detergent, even my health? Yeah, sure, interesting. But I see myself as having much less skin in the game because I know that, one way or the other, I will step away from the table. This is the lazy person's route to unbinding :-)

5. Annihilation/extinction (Annica/Unborn and Undying)
As you say, annica is where it starts, and it's where it ends (in more ways than one :-)).With practice, we see that both birth and death are, if not illusionary, then at least arbitrary. Thich Nhat Hanh talked about this in The Fullness of Emptiness (https://www.lionsroar.com/heart-sutra-fullness-emptiness/).

Moments of eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, mind-consciousness are continuously ending and, when a sense of self was also born from that moment of consciousness, that self dies too. So death is not some rare, isolated event that comes only once. Within each of us, selves disappear from existence countless times a day. Likewise, on the physical level, as I write this, cells that make up my body are dying, bacteria, which had lived in cooperation with me, are dying, birds and squirrels that played in the trees around my house yesterday are dying, billions of microorganisms in the soil that my neighborhood is built on are dying. Death is ubiquitous and constant. And all of those things, including the person writing this now, are also being born.

This aspect of anicca is a great vantage point for equanimity. It is a guard, not only against nihilism, but also against the mistake of confusing being unafraid of death with craving for non-existence. The unbinding, communion, and openness that are facets of death are not only already available to the living but are actually only available to the living. All of the things that we have talked about so far, both the negatively valenced and the positively valenced, are not, in fact, features of death. They are features of the ways in which the living see death and, as such, they are features of life.