We went on vacation last week and of course I needed to purchase a few books for the long plane ride. I’m always looking for an excuse to acquire more books!  Here is one that I bought:

Awakening the Luminous Mind by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: This book is about Tibetan Meditation. It comes with a CD for meditation. It is a really wonderful book on how to find “space” by meditating. This space is bigger than all the conflicts and/or hurts that we may experience in life and so finding this space through meditation brings peace.

I haven’t yet finished reading the book. It’s the type of book where you have to read a little bit and then think about it and then later read some more. You can’t just read it cover to cover straight through. One of the subjects it touches on concerns one of the biggest fears of all which is the fear of death.  I feel like it helped me nibble away just a little bit at the subject. It’s a subject I never wanted to think about and I guess I thought that somehow I’d just live forever and never have to deal with it. And I was so fortunate that I never had close loved ones that died. So it was easy to not think about it other than that it was some scary subject out there, far away.

But being in my mid-forties, I guess it’s time to at least start thinking about the topic to figure out some type of way of thinking of it. None of us will live forever. So it’s worth taking time to think about the subject and to wonder how anyone anywhere can ever come to terms with it.

While reading and learning about the concepts presented in the book, it seemed that the author was saying that not wanting to die has something to do with the “ego” portion of our mind and that “ego” is not part of our true selves or the essance of who we are. From the way I understood the book, “ego” is the part of our mind that wants something – recognition, power, etc., but it’s not who we actually are. There can sometimes be a negative connotation to the word “ego.”

Of course, we all have a survival instinct and that is good and healthy but on some level or at some point, we have to come to an acceptance of death because we are not immortal. None of us will live forever, and at some point, each of our lives will end. It’s part of the natural order of the universe.

That’s not to say that it isn’t tragic when someone dies prematurely but I’m just saying that no one can live forever. So I guess that the first part of accepting that death is a part of life is realizing or recognizing the ego piece of our wish to never die. I can understand this on an intellectual level, but I don’t feel it. But chipping away at the subject will hopefully bring me closer in time to an understanding of death as a part of life.