The idea of dying bothers me. The other night I had nightmares about it. Buddhist thought on the existence of an afterlife is varied and runs the gamut from belief in reincarnation (an idea carried over into Buddhism from Hinduism) to a kind of merging of the consciousness into a spiritual whole and even to the denial of an afterlife. Buddhism easily holds in its ranks many atheists for whom there is firmly a belief in no creator and no afterlife.
It's just plain scary! And the fact that I feel this way tells me I have not come to grips with my own mortality. I don't want to die. I don't want the education and experiences that enrich me now to perish when I'm gone. I want to know who comes to my funeral and to watch over my loved ones from another dimension of being.
But I increasingly am not sure there is anything once I die. Moreover, -similar to the Buddha's answer that we cannot know if there is a God and to focus on something we can do something about now- I don't think there really is any way for me to know if there will be an afterlife for me. So I feel the hot, rushing wind of time speeding by me when I think of my own death.
And thus I had to kind of laugh and grimace the other day when I was agonizing through a long meeting and so wishing time would speed up so the meeting would be over. I laughed and grimaced inside because of the oddity of juxtaposing my desire to live longer with my desire to have time pass faster. Should I, this frail mortal creature, be relishing every last second I have? Isn't even a boring or painful moment of experience better than no experience at all? It all kind of seems absurd and again brings me back to this core concept that we must live in the Now. Until that meeting, however, I had not realized that the Now I seek is one of intense peak moments of pleasure...or mystic oneness...or joy...or even poignant feelings of grief that highlight life. A lot of daily life though is kind of boring, and those moments too are enriched by experiencing them in the Now. It seems I need a good bit more wisdom and meditation though to train myself to serenely experience all those meetings!
