Death is an ever-present reality for most of us, whether we're thinking about it or not, it's always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of others, in our concerns about our own health, and in the attention we pay when crossing the street. If you observe yourself closely, you'll see that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die. And has long been noted by philosophers and contemplatives and poets, death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing. It's not so much what we pay attention to, as it's how we feel while doing it. And if you need to spend the next hour looking for a new font, you might as well enjoy it, because the truth is, none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present, or at least it can. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things. This is your life, the only one you've got to get back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have in it. You don't get another chance to do something you're going to get another interaction with another human being you love. You've got this one chance, and you don t know when you'll get another opportunity to do it again, so why not make the most of it? You don t have another chance? You're not running an errand, you could know nothing but which are impressively similar to your own, but which could be your own. You could know them are impressive, and they could know something you could do better than your own and you could be impressively slow, but you could have them in your own moment of life, and your own is just driving your life is your only chance of getting back to this moment of this moment, and it's not going to be much more slow. . It's made possible by the support of our listeners, and the support we're making possible by becoming a supporter of the podcast, and we don't run ads on the podcast by becoming one of them. We don t run ads, and therefore, therefore, they'll be made possible entirely through the podcast and therefore they'll have a better chance of making sense of the world they're listening to the podcast.
00:09:12.100He was, as was Jack and Sharon in the early days and many of the other Asian teachers who came through town as well.
00:09:19.640So I had an introduction to that world of Theravadan, Vipassana practice, but also in Zen practice,
00:09:24.280when I came to start the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco,
00:09:28.240which was the first Buddhist hospice in America, actually.
00:09:30.820Nice. Well, I would definitely want to focus our conversation on death and dying, which is really your area of expertise.
00:09:40.480It's amazing that someone can be an expert in that, but you are certainly one of them.
00:09:46.160Just before we begin, tell people what hospice care is.
00:09:51.500So you could think of hospice care as something on the continuum of health care that is usually accessed when people are in the final six months to a year of their life.
00:10:04.180It's generally oriented toward comfort care, managing symptoms, controlling people's pain,
00:10:09.880helping people who have chosen not to necessarily pursue more curative therapies.
00:10:16.180Hospice care might happen in people's home or it might happen in a facility.
00:10:19.340And of course, now we're seeing a kind of blending of hospice care and what is called palliative care or comfort care that's even happening in acute care facilities.
00:10:30.460So what was different about Zen Hospice, we did all the normal things that any other hospice would do,
00:10:35.960but we tried to add to that mix the component of mindfulness.
00:10:41.100We wondered what would it be like, you know,
00:10:43.780to bring together people who were cultivating what we might call a listening mind or a listening heart through meditation practice
00:10:50.380and people who needed to be heard at least once in their life, folks who were dying.
00:10:54.640And in our case, those folks were people who lived on the streets of San Francisco, at least initially.
00:11:00.320Now, was this during the AIDS epidemic?
00:11:02.640No, the AIDS epidemic was, you know, started around 1980 or so in San Francisco, a little bit earlier.
00:14:25.480Well, so everything you just said can be valued in an entirely secular and atheistic context.
00:14:34.680Most people, given the nature of my audience, who are hearing this conversation will be fairly sure that when they die,
00:14:41.420that will be the end of conscious existence.
00:14:43.820And they will be, certainly many of them, reluctant to think about the significance of death in any form of otherworldly context.
00:14:53.300You know, the idea that one would want to have a good death or be prepared to meet one's death for reasons that extend beyond the moment of death,
00:15:03.080because they imagine there's nothing beyond the moment of death.
00:15:07.120And I must confess, I'm fairly agnostic on that point.
00:15:10.860I think that obviously there are good reasons to believe that when you're dead, you're dead.
00:15:14.780I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what might happen after death,
00:15:19.000but I spend a lot of time thinking about death and about the shadow it casts back on the rest of life
00:15:26.020and the way in which that shadow can clarify life and cause us to prioritize things that we will wish we had prioritized
00:15:36.020when our lives come to an end, and whether that end comes by surprise or in a way that's more orderly.
00:15:42.720I'm happy to talk about anything you may or may not believe about the global significance of death,
00:15:49.560but to focus for a moment on just what can be learned in the context of this life that doesn't presuppose belief in anything beyond it,
00:15:59.400what are the things that people are most confused about, most surprised by?
00:16:05.000What is waiting there to be discovered by someone who really hasn't thought much about death
00:16:13.020and has avoided thinking about it, frankly?
00:16:16.480And what is the value of learning those lessons sooner rather than later?
00:26:36.580I'm always struck by the, the asymmetry between dying and having others die.
00:26:43.720I mean, obviously I haven't died, so I don't know firsthand what that's like.
00:26:46.980But, you know, having lost people close to me and seeing other people go through this experience, it is different being the one dying.
00:26:55.440And obviously the person who dies loses everyone, but he or she also loses the experience of having to live with the, with that experience of loss.
00:27:07.880And he or she doesn't have to live in a world where, where everyone is just carrying on as before and where a person's grief becomes a kind of embarrassment or, or something that, that other people have to, to figure out what to do with or, or navigate around in some way.
00:27:33.080I think we could make some distinctions there that would be important.
00:27:36.300But I mean, remember that as you say, the person who's dying loses everything.
00:27:40.240And so he or she going through this process is usually going through some kind of, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org.
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