Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Death and#038; Clarityand#8221;, by Vajradharshini brings us a beautiful piece on the hardest of subjects. Using zen poetry and a happily wide-ranging series of quotations (from Tibetan lamas to Ezra Pound), Vajradarshini explores her own fatherand#8217;s death as a way to approach attitudes to death and dying. This excerpt, from the talk: and#8220;The Transitoriness of Life and the Certainty of Death,and#8221; focusses on practice, a sense of urgency and being in the moment, she asks us: how do we want to spend our time?
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
Death and Clarity
[Music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. [Music] So if we develop this kind of certainty that we are going to die, one of the things it does is it liberates us from unfocused practice. So it focuses the mind. When we're quite close to death, whether it's the prospect of our own death or whether it's death somebody else, I think what happens is it brings a certain clarity. Suddenly you are perfectly clear about what is but important and what isn't important. And you just want to do what is important. So it brings this kind of focus, this clarity. So then when we reflect that the time of death is uncertain, that leads us to think, I must practice now. So it gives us this sense of urgency. So I must practice and I must practice now. So there's not necessarily tomorrow. So we've done all this kind of forward planning, but we're not necessarily going to be here to kind of see out those plans. And it's worth thinking about what does this mean in terms of being in the moment. I think it's something that we can kind of get the wrong end of the stick with this kind of being in the moment business. And think that being in the moment means that we don't make any plans for the future. Whereas it doesn't mean that, it just means that we know that all plans are provisional. And we're in the moment with our forward planning, knowing that all that forward planning is provisional, yet we still plan. So this sense of urgency is going to make us ask ourselves, how do we spend our time and how do we want to spend our time? So one of the things I've done recently is I've given up watching rubbish films. I've just certainly got this sense that life is too short to watch films that aren't really, really good. So I still watch quite a lot of films, but I only watch films that are really good. And I think that's quite interesting because I used to be a bit like, there was a sort of middle ground. I don't think I've ever watched awful films, but there was a kind of middle ground of these kind of films that would be quite kind of entertaining. Really, they would be a way to sort of kill an evening, so to speak, kill a couple of hours, vege out. So they were in the kind of middle ground and sometimes I'd just quite fancy a movie like that actually. And I think recently I've just like, no, I only really want to watch good films. And it's this idea of like killing time, isn't it? You know, people talk about killing time. I mean, other people might not experience this with such the same amount of horror, but those word puzzles. You know those word puzzles that you do, where you may not, not sudoku, no, no, no, that's a different movie. [laughter] Those word puzzles, where you have to find the words and then you circle them. I have this sort of like, when I see somebody doing them, I just have this kind of like, it fills me with a sort of horror. Because it's like, they're not even challenging, are they? They're just, they're literally like, how to lose half an hour sort of things. So this idea of just kind of losing time like that. So what are we doing with our time? And there's this, this little poem that I love. It often comes into my mind. And I can't think of who it's by actually, but it says, and the days are not long enough, and the nights are not long enough. And life slips by like a field mouse, not even shaking the grass. So it's like, I love this image of life being this like field mouse. You know how they kind of run through the grass, so fast, and they don't even, the grass doesn't even move. And that that's life is going that fast. So just to have this feeling that the days are not long enough, and the nights are not long enough. Yet it also brings up the question, well, what does it mean to make the most of our lives? So life is certainly too short to waste it by being busy all the time. So making the most of our lives, and the days not being long enough, and the nights not being long enough, isn't about how much we can kind of cram into our precious opportunity of life. So we develop this sense of urgency, and it's a combination. This urgency I think is a combination of energy being freed up. So there's that sort of aspect to urgency, but there's also a really sort of disciplined focus. We know what we want to do with our time, even if we sometimes want to do nothing. We know that quite clearly, that's what we want to do with our time. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]