Dying in the Zen Sense
By Shozan Marc Joslyn
We human beings are God’s only creatures who are aware of the fact that we are going to die. Everything we take up, our arts, sciences, the children we give birth to and raise, the wonderful things we create, will eventually fade away and so we suffer.
Let us speak about dying in the Zen sense. It is often said, that the center of Zen practice is dying before you die. So let me share a few insights with you about this. What is it that dies? What do you conceive yourself to be? As a psychologist, I think what we call the “self” is something that gets created when we are about three years old, and for the first time we separate from the flow of pure experience and become a thinking self. An entity is born that is no longer completely at one with whatever is going on, but has the ability to look at something other than itself. This is the beginning of the human. We learn to attribute it, thoughts, and memories and so on. This is evidently what we fear losing when we think about dying. You can bring in all kinds of ideas about physical death, old age, pain and so forth, but the gist of it is not that, it is your memories, your values and everything that you built up around this sense of a separate self that has the ability to stand apart from pure experience. This is what we are afraid of losing.
Now when we die in the Zen sense, what is there to be afraid of? Our fear comes from which we are not, that which we have yet to experience, that which we value we could lose. If you have experienced all, embraced all and realized that all future, and all past is yourself completely, then what is there to fear?
When you get born, you come out of your Mother’s womb; there is a differentiation, separation, a new life. But be careful. When you get born, it is true you get born but at the same time you are dying to that wonderful womb. You were in there for millions of years, biologically speaking. From one point of view you might say that the life we have outside of the womb is a very small part of the whole process. When you get born, you left that wonderful warm, liquid, upside down world to come into this world; that is in a sense, a form of dying. So, living and dying are two sides of the same process, and to get hung up with either one is to miss the point. When you go to sleep at night, you are dying, you are trusting that you are going to wake up in the morning, we have no guarantee of that. When you are asleep at night, you are recharging your batteries, so to speak. It is like winter, if there is no proper winter, the whole biological world suffers. You have this rest, this returning home, this giving over, or ending if you wish.
Right now at this moment, if you can completely give over with your whole body, your whole mind, no tension, now at this moment how do you simply let everything go? No need to try anything, no need to observe anything no need to go anywhere, no need to be defensive, no need to be anything. What you are doing is simply saying to this “little self” this so called “ego”, you are okay but you are not the center of things, you are not the foundation.
