My Dear Friends
Sitting here at Orgyen, cancer and covid within and around me; a natural retreat – a blessing. I find myself contemplating life and death and dharma in an expansive field of memories; reviewing and reflecting. Some thoughts have emerged which I would like to share with you in the form of a poem. I have added a few notes afterward in an attempt to make my meaning a bit clearer for those who might feel confused.
good wishes are with you always
Tarchin
Sit down in the unimaginable fullness of your living
and savour this wild and wonderful truth.
From a first person perspective,
death does not exist.
I exist in the living process that I am.
so why should I fear what doesn’t exist?
This is true for me.
It’s also true for you.
Of course, death does exist from a third person perspective.
All ‘he-s’ or ‘she-s’ will die
and eventually do die.
We can fear that,
the loss of connection once they are gone.
I can grieve for that.
But I will never grieve for my own loss
when there is no me-process to grieve.
Perhaps this is why people find it so difficult
to really contemplate the fact that they will die.
Ernest Becker said we are trying to deny death;
that our culture is a colossal immortality project.
But there may be an even deeper truth here.
It’s only by taking up a third person perspective,
treating themself as an other,
that death becomes real.
In the utter silence of first person perspective
there is no place here for death.
Join me in this,
sitting together in fundamental zazen.
Settle in the unimaginable fullness of your living
and savour this wild and wonderful truth.
————
Sit down in, abide as, merge with, sitting is a stationary posture; not going anywhere; rooted right here; being this here. “Stillness and movement have merged in the womb of the uncreated” Sit down into the fullness of your walking. Sit down into the fullness of your running, the fullness of your wrestling with life. Sit down in the fullness of sitting.
“I exist in the living process that I am.” I exist in and as this living process that is giving rise to me realising that I exist as this living process, sharing these thoughts with you.
Ernest Becker was a social psychologist /anthropologist who wrote a widely quoted book called “Denial of Death”.
“It’s only by taking up a third person perspective,
treating themself as an other,
that death becomes real. “
We have become a society of observers and in the process of observing, we craft stories, explanations, and understandings in an effort to make sense of the seeming distance between ourselves and everything we experience.
Zazen is a Japanese Buddhist term for complete absorption in the fullness of being. Although traditionally it often takes the form as sitting cross legged in meditation, this sitting is really the stability of abiding where there is no abiding, pointed at in the first line of the poem.