Perhaps it is only those who understand just how fragile life is are those who know how precious it is. Once when I was taking part in a conference in Britain, the participants were interviewed by the BBC. At the same time they talked to a woman who was actually dying. She was distraught with fear, because she had not really thought that death was real. Now she knew. She had just one message to those who would survive her: to take life, and death, seriously.
Taking life seriously does not mean spending our whole lives meditating as if we were living in the mountains in the Himalayas or in the old days in Tibet. In the modern world, we have to work and earn our living, but we should not get entangled in a nine-to-five existence, where we live without any view of the deeper meaning of life. Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overstretch ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modem lives is simplicity.
In Buddhism this is what is really meant by discipline. In Tibetan, the term for discipline is tsul trim. Tsul means “appropriate or just,” and trim means “rule” or “way.” So discipline is to do what is appropriate or just; that is, in an excessively complicated age, to simplify our lives.
Peace of mind will come from this. You will have more time to pursue the things of the spirit and the knowledge that only spiritual truth can bring, which can help you face death.
Sadly, this is something that few of us do. Maybe we should ask ourselves the question now: “What have I really achieved in my life?” By that I mean, how much have we really understood about life and death? I have been inspired by the reports that have appeared in the studies on the near death experience, like the books by my friend Kenneth Ring and others. A striking number of those who survive near-fatal accidents or a near-death experience describe a “panoramic life review.” With uncanny vividness and accuracy, they relive the events of their lives. Sometimes they even live through the effects their actions have had on others, and experience the emotions their actions have caused.
One man told Kenneth Ring:
I realized that there are things that every person is sent to earth to realize and to learn. For instance, to share more love, to be more loving toward one another. To discover that the most important thing is human relationships and love and not materialistic things. And to realize that every single thing that you do in your life is recorded and that even though you pass it by not thinking at the time, it always comes up later.
Sometimes the life review takes place in the company of a glorious presence, a “being of light.” What stands out from the various testimonies is that this meeting with the “being” reveals that the only truly serious goals in life are “learning to love other people and acquiring knowledge.”
One person recounted to Raymond Moody:
When the light appeared, the first thing he said to me was, ‘What have you done to show me that you’ve done with your life?’ or something to that effect… All through this, he kept stressing the importance of love . . . He seemed very interested in things concerning knowledge too .. .” Another man told Kenneth Ring: “I was asked—but there were no words: it was a straight mental instantaneous communication—’What had I done to benefit or advance the human race?
Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts.
—Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
