Our group taker brought some quotations and notes that he compiled in preparation for a paper he is writing for next term. (See attached)
After an initial reading, some of the comments were:
- "Our whole lives are illusion. We are born, we live our lives getting caught up in illusion and then we die and don’t exist any more. But we keep forgetting this. We don’t really believe that we are going to die. Dying is what happens to other people. We forget what is real. All sorts of things seem important but they are not really important."
- "I find the Advaita concept of mithya a lot easier to understand than the idea of everything being illusion. i.e. The universe is mithya – both real and unreal."
- "That just makes it all more complicated."
- "We already know what we really are, but just don’t realise it. Perhaps it’s like the story of Monkey who wanted to be Emperor of the Heavenly Palace. He travels to the end of the Universe where he comes across five pink columns. He urinates on one of the columns to show that he has been there. Then he discovers that what he thought was a column is actually one of Buddha’s fingers. (See here for the story.) It’s a paradox."
- "Paradox is important – we should welcome it."
- "The whole universe is vibration."
- I am enjoying this life and would be quite happy to have several more.
- It is very common that when people are dying they think about trivial issues such whether they have paid the milkman.
- The Gita says we should be thinking about Param-Atman at the moment of death or we might be reborn in an unpleasant situation.
One person said “we tell all these stories and quote all this stuff and it’s all very nice and cosy, but what are we actually doing about it? I said earlier that I’m going to die. If we knew we were going to die in a year, a month or a week, we would behave quite differently. I would remember what is important – at the moment I remember occasionally, but most of my life is spent in illusion. But we don’t know when we are going to die and we don’t think we are.”
Another replied “we can’t think in terms of past and future – the only opportunity is Now. Then, when we remember, we can be still and try to extend that moment of stillness for as long as possible. We just need to build this up slowly bit by bit. The important thing is never to ignore a good impulse, a moment of remembering.”
A third felt that all this thinking about death is unnecessary: "when I was five years old I was shocked to discover that I was going to die one day. I thought about it for a long time and then just accepted it and didn’t think about it or worry about it again."
Someone pointed out that, although we don't talk about it much, work on oneself does also involve suffering. Another agreed, but thought that suffering would occur anyway. Attachment involves suffering, but when we are deliberately and consciously trying to free ourselves from attachment that usually brings relief from suffering. It's when work on oneself leads to something we are identified with being struggled with, without our understanding what is happening, that suffering occurs.
Someone who had not contributed much to the earlier discussion remarked: "the conversation this evening has been extraordinary. I feel like I’m sitting in the stalls watching a Samuel Beckett play."
One final question was "But what can one do if one is lying in a hospital bed in a lot of pain?" One answer was “call a nurse and ask for some stronger pain killers”. Another person explained how when he was in hospital many years ago with an eye injury he had to have incredibly painful injections twice a day which made him faint from the pain. He knew it was going to happen and would lie there in misery. Then eventually he came to accept it.