The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

by Frank Ostaseski

Want to know some of what death has to teach? Begin to look at endings. The end of an exhale, the end of a day, the end of a meal, the end of this sentence.

The breath invites us into the body. John O’Donohue, the wonderful, wild Irish poet, once wrote, “We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong … it is our minds that make us homeless.”

When we gather our attention fully and completely into the present moment—whether on a meditation cushion, along a trail in nature, or lying down absorbed in a great novel—we discover the ease that emerges when we are not striving, scattered, or struggling.

We are always messing with ourselves. We tell ourselves what we should be experiencing and what we shouldn’t. We work hard to define ourselves, hoping that we are doing it in the right way. This constant activity is totally exhausting. Personal development easily becomes endless and effortful. We try—in fact, we can’t seem to stop trying—to be better, to be someone special. There is a certain aggression in all this so-called self-improvement. Better to return to the true intention of meditation, which is to let go of the striving, to embrace things as they are, and, with equanimity, to discover freedom.

My friend John Welwood, the psychologist who first coined the term spiritual bypassing, once said, “We often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it.”

In Buddhist circles, we often say, “Meditation doesn’t solve your problems; it dissolves them.” Our minds are wild. We don’t tame them by trying to stop our thoughts, by repressing our emotions, or even by resolving our problems. We have a lot less control over life than we imagined. To paraphrase Suzuki Roshi’s very kind meditation instruction, which he recited often at the Zen Center, “To give your cow a large, spacious meadow is the best way to control him.”

Here is a counter-intuitive suggestion: allow it all. The thoughts, the strong emotions, and the associated energetic patterns—don’t be bothered by them. Let it all stop by itself. Your cow will be much happier.

For many years, I have appreciated the teaching of the Indian guru of non-dualism Sri Nisargadatta, who famously said, “The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.”

There are three types of courage needed to live fully, face death directly, and discover true freedom: the courage of the warrior, the courage of a strong heart, and the courage of vulnerability.

The courage of a strong heart activates a fearless receptivity to what is happening, which creates space for us to recognize, explore, and integrate our fear. Then, we can include whatever it is that we had wanted to avoid. Not only that, but this type of courage opens us to a deep compassion for the suffering of all beings. We realize that we all have fears, and, like bodhisattvas, we stand with others in their fear.

Vulnerability, the third type of courage, is the doorway to the deepest dimensions of our inner nature.

Vulnerability is not weakness; it is non-defensiveness. The absence of defense allows us to be wide open to our experience. Less defended, we are less opaque and more transparent. We become sensitive to the ten thousand sorrows and the ten thousand joys of this life. If we are not willing to be vulnerable to pain, loss, and sadness, we’ll become insensitive to compassion, joy, love, and basic goodness.

In our culture, invulnerability usually implies a stance against emotion, a false sense of being impenetrable, that this body cannot be hurt or will not die. But the invulnerability of our essential nature is a pure openness, an undefended spaciousness in which we step back and allow the winds of fear to blow right through us. There is no place for our fear to stick, no ground on which it can land. We can drop the struggle, relax our unnecessary efforts, and rest in a state of defenselessness.

Don’t know mind is one characterized by curiosity, surprise, and wonder. It is receptive, ready to meet whatever shows up as it is.

Ignorance is usually thought of as the absence of information, being unaware. Sadly, it is more than just “not knowing.” It means that we know something, but it is the wrong thing. Ignorance is misperception.

Many spiritual traditions and most transpersonal psychologists point to dimensions of the mind that reach beyond conventional views of memory, past neural networks and synapses and the limiting idea that we are only thinking machines. Ancient Buddhist texts speak of a moment-to-moment continuum of our very subtle minds that has no beginning and no end, which is called Mind Stream. But even contemporary scientists agree that there is something more to the human mind, something subtler and more complex, which we often refer to as consciousness.

I prefer the word intimacy because it is an invitation to come closer, to fully embrace and lovingly engage with your life right where you are, rather than trying to move beyond it. It is a recognition that we already belong. To me, intimacy better expresses what I imagine enlightenment might actually feel like. It’s relaxed, receptive, ordinary even. It is not found elsewhere, apart from life, but in the middle of it. As another Zen teaching says, “The path is right beneath your feet.” Intimacy offers an encouragement to connect to the sound of the birds, the spring breeze, each other, and this very life, here and now.

At the deepest level of intimacy, subject and object fall away. There are no longer any hard and fixed boundaries. “I” am not intimate with “you.” Our separateness dissolves. We experience undefended openness, complete union. This is the real heart and beauty of don’t know mind.

The great Tibetan master Kalu Rinpoche famously wrote, “We live in the illusion and appearance of things. There is a reality. You are that reality. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing. And being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”

At Zen Hospice Project, we adopted the view that when people are dying, they need intensive care—intensive love, intensive compassion, and intensive presence.

Normally, we only see the suffering of impermanence, the coming and going of constant change, the coming together and falling apart, without realizing that all this appears and disappears on the background of perfect harmony. When we take what in Zen is called the “backward step,” we can look from the vantage point of open awareness, we know ourselves to be this background, this pure, bare awareness, against which all personal and universal change occurs. This is what we surrender to.

Suzuki Roshi said that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away.

Surrender is not the same thing as letting go. Normally, we think of letting go as a release often accompanied by a sense of freedom from previous restraints. Surrender is more about expansion. There is a freedom in surrender, but it is not really about setting something down or distancing ourselves from an object, person, or experience, as it is with letting go. With surrender, we are free because we have expanded into a spaciousness, a boundless quality of being that can include but not be constrained by the previously limiting beliefs that once defined us, keeping us separate and apart. We release the fruitless habit of clinging to changing objects as a source of happiness. In surrender, we are reconstituted. We are no longer enslaved by our pasts. No longer imprisoned by our former identities. We become intimate with the inner truth of our essential nature. In surrender, we feel ourselves not gaining distance, but rather coming closer.

Surrender is infinitely deeper than letting go. Letting go is still a strategy of the mind occupied with the past. It is an activity of the personality, and the personality is primarily concerned with perpetuating itself. Letting go is still me making a choice. Ego cannot surrender. Surrender is the effortless, easeful non-doing of our essential nature without interference. We are simply aware.

In Buddhism, the reflection on death is an essential spiritual practice. It is not seen as an ideology to be adopted as a protection against death. Rather, it is an opportunity to become more intimate with death as an inevitable part of life. While such reflections may seem morbid to some, I have found the practice of cultivating a wise openness to death to be life affirming. The value of these reflections is that we see how our ideas and beliefs about death are affecting us right here, right now.