Reflections on Dying, Our Last Thought(s), and Living a ...

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Journal of Humanistic Psychology50(2) 197 –223

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DOI: 10.1177/0022167809342550http://xxx.sagepub.com

Reflections on Dying, Our Last Thought(s), and Living a Spiritual Life

Mehrdad Massoudi1

Abstract

In this essay, the importance of living a spiritual life while maintaining a regular meditative (reflective) attitude toward life, death, and dying is explored. A review of some clinical studies pointing to the importance of having a spiritual outlook in life and toward death is provided. The basic teachings of the Buddha are used as the foundational theme of this paper to discuss death and the possible barriers to its acceptance. The concept of process from a thermodynamical perspective is discussed, implying that life also consists of many processes, resembling a journey with many stages. I then look at the relationship between spirituality and dying. The article ends with a few remarks and reflections on living a spiritual life.

Keywords

spirituality, death, (Mahayana) Buddhism, Hinduism (Vedanta), mysticism, thermodynamics, processes

If we want to answer the question, How tall can the human species grow, then obviously it is well to pick out the ones who are already tallest and study them. If we want to know how fast a human being can run, then it is of no use to average out the speed of the population; it is far better to collect Olympic gold medal winners and see how well they can do. If we want to know the possibilities for spiritual growth, value growth, or moral development in human beings, then I maintain that we can learn most by studying our most moral, ethical, or saintly people.

Abraham Maslow (Hoffman, 1988, p. 185)

1Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:Mehrdad Massoudi, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USAEmail: [email protected] to the memory of my father.

at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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198 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(2)

If as Socrates said (Plato, 1961, Dialogues: Apology 38) “the unexamined life is not worth living” and if death is a part of life, the final stage or the stage in between, then “an unexamined death is not a death worth dying.” In most religious traditions, this life, that is, the present life, is looked upon only as a preparatory stage for another (everlasting) life. In most traditions, there are certain rituals and ceremonies to be performed for the deceased. Yet, some-how, questioning the dying process and the necessary preparation for death has not entered, in a serious way, into our discussions and the educational system. To study death, we must study life; to be more accurate, we must study living. The Dalai Lama (1997) says,

One of the principal factors that will help us to remain calm and undis-turbed at the time of death is the way we have lived our lives. The more we have made our lives meaningful, the less we will regret at the time of death. The way we feel when we come to die is thus very much dependent on the way we have lived. (p. 26)

Religions have provided a basic framework whereby questions related to the origin of life, the meaning of life, life after death, and so on, can be studied. Similar frameworks have also been provided by philosophy and science, even though there are those who say that science cannot deal with questions related to meaning. Organized religions through their dogmatic view and stance on what constitutes a (meaningful) life and how one should prepare for death and afterlife sometimes have closed the gates to fundamental enquiries.

How does one begin an enquiry (Massoudi, 2008), and how does the gen-uine curiosity of a child change to cynicism or to the all-knowing arrogance of an adult? One can say that a child has a “beginner’s mind,” that is, a mind prior to conceptualization, discrimination, and judgmentalization and prior to thinking and comparing; in short, a child’s mind is the closest to the “no-mind” of Zen (Kapleau, 1979, 1980): a mind, empty yet full of potentiality and creativity, a mind full of awe and wonder. However, over the years, whether in school, a family, or society, the beginner’s mind is transformed into an expert’s mind, where there is little room for awe and wonder, the essential ingredients of and prerequisites to Wisdom. When later one is faced with the most fundamental questions in life, one is already entangled in a web of concepts. Greening (1981) said, “Education is by nature a subversive, dis-ruptive activity. It encourages people to question, explore, and experiment . . . Most of what goes on by the name of education is really brainwashing, preaching, and skill-training” (p. 101). True education, in a sense, is a



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continuous process of enquiry and learning, which generally begins with questions, observations, and problems, seeking creative solutions and imple-menting them and, if necessary, revising them. In the Buddhist Scripture (Majjhima Nikaya, 1995, Sutras 63 and 72) there are 10 basic questions that the Buddha refused to answer (Dhammananda, 1987, p. 34):

1. Is the universe eternal? Is it not eternal?2. Is the universe finite? Is it infinite?3. Is the soul the same as the body? Is the soul one thing and the body

another?4. Does the Tathagata (a perfectly enlightened being) exist after

death? Does He not exist after death?5. Does He both (at the same time) exist and not exist after death?

Does He both (at the same time) neither exist nor not exist?

John Hick in his book Disputed Questions (1993) proposes that, in gen-eral, there are two different kinds of questions that need to be considered: the unanswered versus the unanswerable:

The difference, then, between the two kinds of avyakata [the undeter-mined questions] is this. The unanswered questions are legitimate questions to which there are presumably true answers, but to which we do not in fact know the answers. It is not excluded, in logic, that human beings might some day come to know the truth of these matters. But it would still be the case that salvation/liberation does not depend upon such knowledge and that the search for it is not conducive to salvation/liberation. In distinction from these, the unanswerable questions are about realities transcending the systems of categories available in our human thought and language. They are matters which, in St Paul’s words, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man con-ceived.” It seems appropriate to refer to the subject matter of these unanswerable questions as mysteries, matters that are beyond human comprehension and expression. But once again we do not, according to the Buddha, need to be able to penetrate these mysteries in order to attain liberation; and to feel that we must hold a dogmatic view con-cerning them is soteriologically counterproductive. (p. 108)

After years of teaching a course on the World’s Religions, mostly from a philosophical/dialogical perspective, I have observed that the following (fun-damental) questions appear in the various religious and philosophical




traditions:1 (1) Who am I? (2) What is the meaning of life? (3) What should I do or not do? (4) How do I know, or how can I find the truth? (5) How do I know what I think I know? (6) How was the universe (or I) created? (7) What happens after I die? (8) Is there a God? (9) Why is there so much suffering in the world? Perhaps, a question to add to this list is “How would I (like to) die?”—with a possible follow-up: “What would I be thinking (or saying) at the last moments of my life?” Interestingly, as mentioned in one of the sacred epics of India, the Mahabharata (Smith, 1992),

Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?

That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die. (p. 99)

The mystery of life and death has been one of the primary motives for humanity’s search for the meaning of life. This perhaps has most aptly been provided in the spiritual traditions of the world, especially in the Wisdom Traditions2 (Smith, 1991). Religions at their best guide, provide meaning, inspire, and question. It is the spiritual aspects of the religions that we are concerned with here; these are often known as the Inner Ways, or the esoteric, mystical, contemplative paths of the religions. McGrath (2003) stated that “one of the assumptions that underpins the literature is the belief that facing a life threatening illness is a life crisis that intensifies the individual’s search for meaning” (p. 882). In fact, this along with death of loved ones are perhaps two of the most common reasons why people have turned to religions, and continue to do so, not only for comfort but also for finding the answer(s) to this enquiry.

A recent study by Kubsch, Hankerson, and Ghoorahoo (2005) indicated that spirituality3 is an important principle that should be included in a list of holistic ethical principles, especially in complementary therapies. Nakashima and Canda (2005) indicated that in their study of 16 hospice patients, among the core resiliency factors were “empowering relationships with significant others, spiritual beliefs and practices, ability to skillfully confront mortality, and a stable caregiving environment” (p. 109). Interestingly, they also men-tioned that “spirituality as the search for a sense of meaning and purpose in life implicitly imbued all of the other aspects of resilience as well” (p. 120). Many health care professionals are becoming convinced about and attuned to the spiritual needs of patients, especially those with life-threatening illnesses (Astrow, Puchalski, & Sulmasy, 2001; Nolan & Mock, 2004; Sheehan, 2005). McClain-Jacobson et al. (2004) reported that among the terminally ill patients



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they studied, those who believed in afterlife showed lower levels of end-of-life despair than those who were either unsure or did not have such beliefs. Their study was consistent with the findings of Marrone (1998), who had suggested that having a spiritual outlook has a more powerful effect on one’s psychological attitude than merely believing in afterlife. One can learn much from a near-death experience not only of oneself but also of others (Groth-Marnat & Schumaker, 1989). Death also makes us face certain “unpleasant” situations in life, although most of us may prefer the “postponed living” (Cain, 2002). Studies have shown that physically healthy individuals with a well-balanced spiritual life also have better psychological health (McClain, Rosenfeld, & Breitbart, 2003), while other studies have confirmed that a patient’s spiritual beliefs have a significant impact on their health and at times have a direct effect on clinical outcomes (Daaleman, Cobb, & Frey, 2001). Boerstler (1986) not only discussed the importance of meditation in the dying process, but he also advocated comeditation, which “is an ancient transpersonal method for bringing about ‘peaceful heart and clear mind,’ even with individuals who have never meditated before” (p. 106). And stud-ies that have a humanistic-existential psychological perspective have also shown that for many people the attitude they take toward death has much to do with the process of self-actualization and meaning (Widera-Wysoczanska, 1999). The notion or belief in afterlife, even with a certain degree of uncer-tainty, sometimes referred to as “uncertainty comfort,” has been shown to be comforting not only for survivors but also for some hospice patients (McGrath, 2003). As stated by Connelly (2003), “And finally, the art of dying consists in having cultivated throughout life a sense of acceptance and the will, the intuition, and the prudence necessary to know when to dully commit to this duty at the end of life” (p. 60). One of the important conclusions of a study by Moraglia (2004) was that the awareness of and facing “one’s finite-ness can promote personal growth in the second half of life” (p. 337). Narrative ethics, primarily based on an inductive method of moral reasoning, whereby stories, texts, and so on, are used to help patients deal with certain (spiritual) issues, has been shown (Fins, Guest, & Aces, 2001) to provide insight into the care of dying hospitalized patients. Narrative ethics uses more qualitative themes than the more structured quantitative analyses usu-ally performed in (medical) science.

With this review of the clinical/medical studies pointing to the importance of having a spiritual outlook in life and toward death, I will explore the importance of living a spiritual life while maintaining a regular meditative (reflective) attitude toward life, death, and dying. The basic teachings of the Buddha are used as the foundational theme of this article to discuss death and




the possible barriers to its acceptance. In the next section, the concept of process from a thermodynamical perspective is discussed, implying that life also consists of many processes, resembling a journey with many stages. Then I will look at certain analogies pointing to the importance of a support community in our spiritual struggles. The relationships between spirituality, as prescribed in the Buddhist tradition, and dying are also explored. The arti-cle ends with a few remarks and reflections on living a spiritual life.

Processes, Experiences, Meaning

The day is no more, the shadow is upon the earth. It is time that I go to the stream to fill my pitcher.

The evening air is eager with the sad music of the water. Ah, it calls me out into the dusk. In the lonely lane there is no passer by, the wind is up, the ripples are rampant in the river.

I know not if I shall come back home. I know not whom I shall chance to meet. There at the fording in the little boat the unknown man plays upon his lute. (Tagore, 1971, p. 90)

There are many ways in which one can study death. One can actually die and see it for oneself (conscious dying); one can see what happens when someone else dies (this might be an emotional encounter, especially if that person is a dear one); one can read about the death accounts of different people; one can consider death as another stage in life; one can look at death as the end of life; one can think of death as a release from this prisonlike life. However we look at this issue, the existential point remains: Until a few minutes ago, there was a being here, in a body, and now the body is here, but something is not there. We may not know what death is, or we may not be able to define it exactly, but we certainly know when life is no more. This sort of experience is a “hmmm” experience. If there is a moment of realization or an insight into this mysterious process, then it is an “ahhh” experience. If a genuine transformation of heart or mind has occurred, the attachment to the body is dropped. As Dorothy Sayers (1987) puts it,

The only two things we can do with death are, first: to postpone it, which is only partial solution, and, secondly, to transfer the whole set of values connected with death to another sphere of action—that is, from time to eternity. (p. 197)



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Death is a mystery, and there is very little that a comparative religious study can reveal about it that the actual existential experience of dying cannot teach us. The difficulty is that this experience is often shielded from most of us. Examining death leads to examining life.4

The question of meaning—meaning of life and death—is one that has been considered and discussed in the world’s religions (Coward, 1997; Easwaran, 1992; Hayes, Fisher, Hill, & Cassiday, 1994; Hick, 1994; Kirven, 1997; Klass & Gross, 1999; Kramer, 1988; Kumar, 2005; Kung & Jens, 1998; Lamm, 1969; Puchalski & O’Donnell, 2005; Segal, 2004; Thondup, 2005). This question, however, is by no means limited to the domain of reli-gions; it also belongs to philosophy and psychology (Becker, 1973; Doore, 1990; Kubler-Ross, 1969, 1995; Marrone, 1997; Singer, 1994). It can be said that this question goes to the core of our humanness, as Marrone (1999, p. 508) indicates: “When one listens to a dying person, or reads the accounts of terminally ill people, it is clear that, as death nears, the perennial idea that grips the imagination is the idea of meaning or value.”

Many people consider the process of dying as the Ultimate Journey, with death as its destination. We do not know exactly how or when we will get to that destination or whether there is somewhere else that we have to go after we reach there. At the same time, we do know (based on observation) that we will get there. Different spiritual traditions provide, sometimes detailed, explanations about how to prepare for such a journey, how to have the knowl-edge of when our death might happen, and what happens to us after we have died. A journey usually begins at one point and ends at another.5 This is not necessarily the case for a spiritual journey.6 A sacred quest starts with oneself and ends with oneself; for this reason it is often called an Inward Journey.

Before we begin a journey, we need to know our destination. With that, we study the various ways of getting from Point A to Point B, arranging for the necessary materials, and so on. A guide, sometimes considered to be indis-pensable, is one who knows the way, who has already gone from Point A to Point B, and is willing to show the way. Some say that a guide is absolutely necessary and that one should not venture or start the (spiritual) journey with-out a proper guide (Massoudi, 2002). There is a school of thought that says that the real guide is already within us—often called the Divine seed or the Buddha nature. A spiritual journey, in many ways, is similar to a regular jour-ney. It takes time; it needs supplies and ammunition; it requires strength, discipline, faith, and hard work. Tillich (1957) says,

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned; the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern. Man, like every being, is




concerned about many things, above all about those which condition his very existence, such as food and shelter. But man, in contrast to other beings, has spiritual concerns—cognitive, aesthetic, social, polit-ical. (p. 1)

As mentioned earlier, death and the process of dying can be or have been theoretically studied according to the world’s religions, mythologies, philosophies, and science (Feinstein & Mayo, 1990; Norman, 1990). For example, Keleman (1974, p. 16) discusses the five styles of dying from a mythological perspective: the hero’s death, the wise person’s, the fool’s, the martyr’s, and the morbid death. If life is a series of experiences, then there are certain experiences that we can avoid, for example, by seeing the effects they have (had) on those who experienced them. Then, there are certain experiences that we cannot avoid, some of which might be pleasant, in which case we might try to repeat them, and some of which might be unpleasant, and we try not to repeat them. In all these experiences of varying depth and value, there is one element that is common—that is, the experiencer, who can review and evaluate the experience afterward. Among one of the experiences that cannot be avoided, there is one that holds the supreme position, for the experiencer afterward is no more: That ultimate experience is death. Interestingly, the experience of enlightenment, as depicted in various spiritual traditions, is similar to the experience of death in the sense that the experiencer, although still alive, is no longer the same person. As Lama Govinda (1976) indicates,

Life means giving and taking: exchange, transformation. It is breathing in and breathing out. It is not the taking possession of anything, but a taking part in everything that comes in touch with us. It is neither a state of possession nor being possessed, neither a clinging to the objects of our experience nor a state of indifference, but the middle way, the way of transformation. We are transformed by what we accept. We transform what we have accepted by assimilating it. We are transformed by the act of giving, and we contribute to the transfor-mation of others by what we are giving. (p. 182)

There are yogis who practice “meditation on death and dying” throughout their lives so that they can have a peaceful and aware death. There are those of us who avoid or postpone thinking about death and dying. Perhaps a proper dosage would be frequent (meditative) reminders (Shantideva, 1992; Suzuki, 1983; U Pandita, 1992) of the inevitability of death; more important,



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it is recognizing that living well determines, to a large extent, dying well. Living well means living a spiritual life. To the question of “What is death?” Robert Thurman (1994), a scholar of Buddhism, says,

The question is a scientific one. Western science holds that a “flatline” on the EEG means cessation of heartbeat and brain activity, and there-fore represents death. The illusion of the subjective “I” in the individual consciousness assumed by materialists to correspond with the presence of brain wave activity, should cease with the cessation of brain waves. Yet the picture of death as a nothing in consciousness is not a scientific finding. It is a conceptual notion. There are many cases of people being revived after “flatlining” for some time, and they report intense subjec-tive experiences. (p. 23)

Schrodinger (1955) in his pioneering and influential book What Is life? provides a preliminary answer to his question by saying, “The obvious inabilities of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such things is no reason at all for doubting that they can be accounted for by those sciences” (p. 4). Nearly 50 years later, another Nobel Prize winner, de Duve (2002), provides a simple answer to Schrodinger’s question by saying, “Life is what is common to all living beings” (p. 8). He immediately clarifies that this “is not a tautology, as it allows many attributes to be excluded from the definition of life.” Ho (1998) gives a very useful and general definition: “Life is a process of being an organizing whole” (p. 5). We can see that with every definition additional parameters and constraints appear; for example, now one has to define “living beings,” “an organizing whole,” and “a process.” An area of physics that does talk about some of these, especially about processes and systems, is thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics makes a distinction between reversible processes and irreversible ones (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, p. 12), where the former refer to processes that are independent of (the direction of) time, whereas the latter depend on time. Another idea that again finds commonality between the life sciences and physics is the idea of equilibrium (or nonequilibrium) of a state or a system. As mentioned by Chauvet (2004), “In its normal condition, the body is not in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. In fact, true thermody-namic equilibrium would correspond to death” (p. 103). In equilibrium thermodynamics, a system goes or changes from one equilibrium state to another; the system is then said to have performed a process. Kestin (1979) says, “If the system undergoes a process at the end of which it returns to the initial state, it is said to have performed a cyclic process or cycle for short”




(p. 81). The laws of thermodynamics basically describe the relationships between the changes in the states of a system. Similar ideas can exist and can be defined for nonequilibrium or irreversible thermodynamics, whereby the processes are now dissipative. We can see that life as a whole consists of many processes, most of which, if not all of them, are irreversible and dissipative.

Figures 1 and 2 depict simple, and perhaps naive, ways of looking at life. Life consists of various stages (or processes) of birth, growth, decay, and death. Seen in this way, life is not the opposite of death. Keleman (1974) says, “Viewed as process, dying is a continuation of living” (p. 72). In fact, this perspective is used in the world’s different religions and mythologies as the merging or unification of the individual’s consciousness with the Infinite (the Divine, the Ultimate). Campbell (1968) says,

The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the uni-versal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. (p. 238)

In a sense, the process of growing already includes the process of decaying; Figure 2 is an attempt to show a more sudden death rather than a gradual one. Thus, the two stages of growth and decay can simply be named dying. Although dying is a process, death is but a moment. As Tagore said, “Death is just the moment when dying ends.”

The life of a being is composed of many (transformative) processes, which ordinarily are called experiences. There are some who believe that there is a continuous cyclic process, implying not returning to the initial state but repeating birth (more accurately called “appearance or formation”), growth, decay, and death (more accurately called “dissolution”). Those who hold this view, in a certain sense, subscribe to the continuity of life, with all its ramifi-cations, such as rebirth, or reincarnation, and karma.

Analogy of NailsIf avoidance of pain and maximal comfort are supreme values, then indeed illusions are preferable to the truth. If, on the other hand, we consider that every man, at any time in history, is born with the potential of being a full man and that, furthermore, with his death the one chance given to him is over, then indeed much can be said for the personal value of shedding illusions and thus attaining an optimum of personal fulfillment. In addition, the more



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seeing individuals become, the more likely it is that they can produce changes—social and individual ones—at the earliest possible moment, rather than, as is often the case, waiting until the chances for change have disap-peared because their mind, their courage, their will have become atrophied. (Erich Fromm, 1992, p. 43)There is a story in Buddhism, usually referred to as the Mustard Seed story. A mother who has just lost her child hears that the Buddha is in town; she goes to him, weeping and begging him to use his supernatural powers to revive the child. The Buddha consents to this request provided she would fulfill a task. The task given to her is to go to the village, knock on each door, and get a mustard seed from any house where there has never been a death. The mother goes around and after some time comes back to the Buddha, having realized that death is inevitable and that there is no one who is not

Figure 1. Various Stages of Life

Figure 2. Various Stages of Life—Sudden Death




affected by death: Everybody has to die. What the Buddha indirectly taught her by this exercise was the First Noble Truth in Buddhism, known as Dukkha (Buddhaghosha, 1991; Dalai Lama, 2002; Kalu Rinpoche, 1986; Rahula, 1974; Ross, 1981), often translated into English as “suffering”: Existence in this realm, in this form and with our sensory organs, is unsatisfactory in its essence. Life is full of anxiety and uncertainty. We are born, we grow, we get sick, and we die. We have to be with those whom we do not like, and sometimes we have to be away from those whom we like. Even when we have health and wealth, we seem to be unhappy. Our existence is described in the Diamond Sutra (1969):

Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world,

A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream,

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. (sect. 32, p. 74)

In the story of the mustard seed, there is a (relatively) happy ending. It is not that the Buddha cold-heartedly taught the mother about the inevitability of death but that through this process of enquiring and searching the mother came to an understanding of death. If the story had ended there, it would have only pointed to a part of the truth—namely, the inevitability of death. But what about the other parts—for example, on how to cope with death (and other miseries in life)? It is here that we can see the importance of Sangha, a spiritual community of like-minded people. The grieving mother joins the Monastic Order and with support from them and efforts on her part eventually achieves enlightenment. Perhaps, one of the reasons why we avoid talking about death or tremble at the idea of facing death is that we can see our own end; we can see our own loneliness.7 We may study about death in books, and we may think that we are prepared, but when a loved one dies, there is nothing more helpful than having a few caring friends and family members around us, not so much lecturing us about life and death, or what happens after death, but simply being there and sharing the pain with us. It is this sharing that we can see in the analogy of nails.

Most of us have seen a magician/entertainer lying flat on a bed of nails. Sometimes a cement block is also put on his chest, and someone else with a hammer breaks it, while the person remains unmoved, as if the nails were not there. No sane person would stand or lie down on a single nail. For an aver-age weight of 100 to 200 lb, the single nail would penetrate the body, if the



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person were to lie down on it. But if there are 2,000 nails or even more, the load gets distributed. With 20,000 nails placed properly, the person can stretch comfortably, for the weight is distributed so evenly that it feels as if one is on a hard surface and not on sharp nails. So it is with the sharing of pains. The pain, whether that of a sickness or the death of a loved one, is too much to bear by oneself. But with caring and wise people around, acting as extra nails, some of the pain will be taken away and distributed.

The Buddha traced the root causes of all our psychological problems or sources of misery to three qualities or characteristics of mind:8 ignorance, greed, and aversion. Spiritual traditions encourage us to become better, wiser, kinder, more unselfish, and more peaceful people. The self (which includes the body, the ego, the sense of identity or individuality) seems to be our most precious possession. As Rollo May (1967) says, “Anxiety occurs because of a threat to the values a person identifies with his essence as a self” (p. 41), and “a person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stron-ger than the threat” (p. 51). He elaborates, “Death is the most obvious threat cueing off anxiety, for unless one holds beliefs in immortality which are not common in our culture, death stands for the ultimate blotting out of one’s existence as a self” (p. 73). Death appears to be the ultimate enemy, and always the victor. With death, we lose our most treasured possession: the body. Fear of the unknown seems to be one of the basic fears of dying. As Yalom (1980) puts it succinctly, “Many studies investigate death in an impre-cise fashion; for example, they fail to distinguish between one’s fear of one’s own death, one’s fear of the death of another, or one’s fear of the effects of one’s death on others” (p. 50).

The Dalai Lama (1995) says,

According to the textual instruction, we should meditate here on three fundamental topics: the certainty of death, the uncertainty of when it will occur, and that when death does take place, only the individual’s spiritual realization will be of any help. (p. 70)

Nearly everyone accepts the first point; however, very few of us can predict with any degree of certainty the place of our death, the time of our death, or the manner in which our death will occur. The task that anyone of us, with any degree of certainty, can work with is the last one, that is, the individual’s spiritual realization. This is a motivating factor to live a spiritual life. Lama Govinda (1991) states,

In any case, it is a matter of remembering the right thing at the right time. In order to make this possible, it is necessary to prepare ourselves




during life. Every quality that we want to make into a decisive direct-ing influence on death (and beyond) must be produced, built up and cultivated in life, so that when the decisive moment comes we are not confused and dismayed, but spontaneously enter on the right path, even if the conscious will be inhibited. This spontaneity is not a characteris-tic of the surface of consciousness, but is deeply anchored in the subconscious. Accordingly, it cannot be produced through intellectual convictions and intentions, but only through the penetration and trans-formation of those levels of consciousness that cannot be reached through logical conclusions and discursive thinking. (p. 140)

How one lives has much to do with how one dies. It is this awareness that helps us prepare for the final departure; every person we meet might be the last person that we face in this life. Every action that we perform might be the last action that we do.

Spirituality and Death

Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over 35—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. (C. G. Jung, 1955, p. 229)

Nowadays, we can easily access the spiritual or medicinal teachings of the traditional systems, such as Yoga and Ayurveda of India, Sufi healing of Islam, Chinese (herbal) medicine, and native peoples’ healing arts. The self-help sections in many bookstores is filled with “How to” books and video and audio tapes: how to remain young and beautiful, how to be happy, how to be healthy, how to be free of pain. It is not that one should ignore the health of one’s body or mind, but when the focus of spirituality becomes solely the improvement and the appearance of the physical body, with little emphasis on the mind and the spirit, then that spiritual system has gone out of balance.9 There is therefore a possibility of diluting the highest values of these traditions to simply leading a healthy, peaceful, and happy life.

In many mystical traditions, there are different forms of meditations and spiritual exercises to help the individual face the process of dying. For many of these traditions, death is just another stage in life.10 An interfaith or



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multifaith approach can show how various traditions look at the process of dying, afterlife, grieving, and rituals and ceremonies for the dead. Specifically, one can look at the lives of the sages from the various religious traditions and see how they died and how they viewed death. Having pre-sented a brief survey of the death accounts of many sages from Asia, Blackman (1997) stated,

The masters from the East maintain that to live righteously, let alone to die well, one must act without any personal attachment to one’s actions. To be delivered from the fear of death and the certainty of rebirth, one must act without desire, without a personal agenda, and without attach-ment to results. (p. 8)

Inevitably, one then begins to see that the lives of the sages signified their deaths.

In my studies, I have also noticed that the sages from the Wisdom tradi-tions (of both the East and the West) have considered their teachings in life to comprise various connected elements, such as (1) liberation: showing ways of being liberated from the mundane attachments of daily life and overcoming one’s ego; (2) union: showing ways of reuniting or reconnect-ing to our true nature, to God; (3) transiency: teaching us about the illusory or impermanent aspects of life; (4) wisdom: providing us with the means and ways of seeing the Reality and how to live peacefully with ourselves and with others. Many of these sages, who through years of discipline and spiritual practice had achieved mastery of mind and body, did not use these powers to remain young, to heal themselves, or to have a peaceful death. Some of these sages died very young, some were killed, and some died of very painful diseases. They never thought that the Eternal Life was this material life. They were all good physicists, knowing that any living physi-cal organism is subject to the laws of nature. What they perceived was a different dimension, a dimension that the laws of physics, as we know them at the present time, are not capable of identifying or describing. Most came to this conclusion through a “mystical” experience. This experience is often called the experience of the unity of existence. To that extent, having a body was and is necessary to carry out the daily activities, but at no time was the focus of the sages’ attention or thoughts the beautification, the excessive maintenance of the body or the prolonging of life.

According to Buddhism, and perhaps Hinduism, the last thought in the present life is the impulse or the imprint for the first thought in the next life




(Kapleau, 1989; Levine, 1982; Ramana Maharshi, 1985; Sogyal Rinpoche, 1992; Story, 1988). The Buddha said,

Rebirth arises from two causes: the last thought of the previous life as its governing principle and the actions of the previous life as its basis. The stopping of the last thought is known as the decease, the appear-ance of the first thought as rebirth. (Kapleau, 1979, p. 68)

Similarly, Sri Ramakrishna (1987) says,

According to the Gita, one becomes afterwards what one thinks of at the time of death. King Bharata thought of his deer and became a deer in his next life. Therefore one must practice sadhana in order to realize God. If a man thinks of God day and night, he will have the same thought in the hour of death. (p. 583)

Thus, what one says, thinks, or does at the last moments of one’s life is of crucial importance. If one has lived a pure life, the chances are that at the last moments, thoughts of love, compassion, forgiveness, and equanimity would arise.11

Remarks and CommentsWhat was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves, and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and, instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right con-duct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual (Victor Frankl, 1984, p. 85)

There are different reasons why we become interested in spirituality in general and as a special path in particular: the loss of a loved one, a terminal or a painful disease, an enquiry of existential magnitude. According to (Mahayana) Buddhism, the relative realm of existence (Samsara) is not different from the ultimate realm (Nirvana), and it is only in the Samsaric realm that one can recognize the Ultimate. Buddha (1989) identified eight worldly concerns as the basis of human misery:



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Monks, these eight worldly conditions obsess the world; the world revolves round these eight worldly conditions. What eight?

Gain and loss, fame and obscurity, blame and praise, contentment and pain. (Anguttara Nikaya, Vol. 4, p. 107)

These four pairs deal with one’s attachment toward what one thinks are desirable (gain, fame, praise, and pleasure) and one’s aversion toward what one thinks are undesirable (loss, shame, blame, and pain). Because of the impermanence and transiency of all things and phenomena, we experience Dukkha, the unsatisfactory nature of existence,12 the main cause of unhappiness. In Buddha (1987), one reads,

And what, monks, is the Noble Truth of Dukkha? Birth is Dukkha, ageing is Dukkha, death is Dukkha, sorrow, lamentation, pain, sadness and distress are Dukkha. Being attached to the unloved is Dukkha, being separated from the loved is Dukkha, not getting what one wants is Dukkha. In short, the five aggregates of grasping are Dukkha. (Digha Nikaya, Sutra 22, verse 18)

Once this unease is felt as an existential experience, some will probably look for paths or teachers. As a result, sometimes a religious (or spiritual) materialism comes into being whereby we begin making deals with God or karma. In other words, we take the attitude of materialism into spirituality by expecting something material for our spiritual efforts. The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi (1993) says,

Between a man and God there are just two veils, and all other veils manifest out of these: they are health, and wealth. The man who is well in body says, “Where is God? I do not know, and I do not see.” As soon as pain afflicts him he begins to cry, “O God! O God!” communing and conversing with God. So you see that health was his veil, and God was hidden under that veil. As much as a man has wealth and resources, he procures the means to gratifying his desires, and is preoccupied night and day with that. The moment indigence appears, his spirit is weak-ened and he goes round about God. (p. 240)

What used to take many years, and perhaps many lifetimes, is now thought (at least by some) to be achieved in a short time, and the process of natural maturation and spiritual growth is artificially hastened, providing a




market for genetically engineered spirituality; meanwhile, many sages have said that there are no such shortcuts to enlightenment. The spiritual maturation process, or spiritual fermentation, involves an earnest, hardworking, and sincere student who is ready to work, an honest and enlightened teacher who is willing to teach, and a society that supports many spiritual activities. Sri Aurobindo (1983) says,

Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be attracted to any set of religious or spiritual ideals does not bring with it any realization. Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change of consciousness, it can only bring a change of mind. And if your mind is sufficiently mobile, it will go on changing from one thing to another till the end without arriving at any sure way or any spiritual harbour. The mind can think and doubt and question and accept and withdraw its acceptance, make formations and unmake them, pass decisions and revoke them, judg-ing always on the surface and by surface indications and therefore never coming to any deep and firm experience of Truth, but by itself it can do no more. There are only three ways by which it can make itself a channel or instrument of Truth. Either it must fall silent in the Self and give room for a wider and greater consciousness; or it must make itself passive to an inner Light and allow that Light to use it as a means of experience; or else, it must itself change from the ques-tioning intellectual superficial mind it now is to an intuitive intelligence, a mind of vision fit for the direct perception of the divine Truth. (p. 161)

Every inhalation and the following exhalation signify life and death: There is a continuous dying.13 The moment when the next breath does not arise is considered by many as the moment of death, a transition, or a step toward the next rebirth. Chuang Tzu (1968) says,

Life is the companion of death, death is the beginning of life. Who understands their workings? Man’s life is a coming-together of breath. If it comes together, there is life; if it scatters, there is death. And if life and death are companions to each other, then what is there for us to be anxious about? (p. 235)

Things and beings come into existence when the conditions are appropriate; they last for a while, growing and decaying, and finally when conditions are



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again appropriate, they simply disappear or dissolve. The last moments of our life are perhaps the most important and precious moments, since to a large extent our thoughts during these moments will determine who we will become in the next life.

Would we be conscious and aware at these last moments? Would our mind be in a peaceful, relaxed, and compassionate state? Would we be sur-rounded by family and friends in a conducive environment? When the time has come to leave, can we let go? Can we forgive all those who may have knowingly or unknowingly hurt us? Can we ask forgiveness from all those whom we may have knowingly or unknowingly hurt? Can we look back and have no regrets about the things we should have done or should have said? Can we review our life, even if it is in a few seconds, and feel that we have done what we came here to do? Would we be able to look back at life and sing along with Tagore (1971),

I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed.

My eyes have seen and my ears have heard.

It was my part at this feast to play upon my instrument, and I have done all I could.

Now, I ask, has the time come at last when I may go in and see thy face and offer thee my silent salutation? (p. 35)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or pub-lication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

1. Similar questions or concerns also arise in existential psychology (see Schneider, 2008; Yalom, 1980). For example, Yalom (1980, p. 8) identifies four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.

2. It has been primarily in the past two centuries or so that we have tried to find meaning not in the Wisdom Traditions but in the pursuit of wealth and material




possessions, plastic surgery, a long life. This does not mean that in the previous centuries people were not attracted to the material aspects of life; it is perhaps the dominance of these pursuits, among other things, that made the 20th century the century of war, corruption, violence, anxiety, and loneliness.

3. Along with safety, scope of practice, cultural diversity, access, and collaboration.4. As Sri Ramana Maharshi says,

If you know the present you will know the future. It is strange that people don’t want to know about the present, about whose existence nobody can have any doubt, but are always eager to know about the past or the future, both of which are unknown. What is birth and what is death? And who has birth or death? Why we go to birth and death to understand what you daily experience in sleeping and waking? When you sleep, this body and the world do not exist for you, and these questions do not worry you, and yet you exist, the same you that exists now while waking. It is only when you wake up that you have a body and see the world. If you understand waking and sleep properly you will understand life and death. Only waking and sleeping happen daily, so people don’t notice the wonder of it but only want to know about birth and death. (Mudaliar, 1989, p. 221)

5. Kierkegaard (1999) says, “In a physical sense a road is an external actuality, no matter whether anyone is walking on it or not, no matter how the individual travels on it—the road is the road. But in the spiritual sense, the road comes into existence only when we walk on it. That is, the road is how it is walked” (p. 55).

6. Although we are using the analogy of a journey as an event that starts at one point in time and ends (possibly) at another point and another time, according to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, this cyclic existence is divided into four periods: “1. the period of life; 2. the period of dying; 3. the period of glimpsing the ultimate nature of the mind and its luminous visions; and 4. the bardo, or transitional passage, between the afterdeath state and the next rebirth” (Thondup, 2005, p. xviii).

7. Tillich (1963) says,

Then, there is that ultimate loneliness of having to die. In the anticipation of our death we remain alone. No communication with others can remove it, as no other’s presence in the actual hour of our dying can conceal the fact that it is our death, and our death alone. In the hour of death we are cut off from the whole universe and everything in it. We are deprived of all the things and beings that made us forget our being alone. Who can endure this loneliness? (p. 21)



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8. See Buddha (1989): “These are, O monks, the three root causes for the origina-tion of (unwholesome) actions. What three? Greed (lobha), hatred (dosa), and delusion (moha)” (Anguttara Nikaya, Vol. 3, p. 33).

9. As Roshi Kapleau (1979) says,

First you must decide what it is you want and what you are prepared to work hard for. Ask yourself, “Will I be satisfied with anything short of full awak-ening even if it takes several lifetimes? Do I really yearn to know who I am, why I was born, why I must die, what the meaning of my life is? Or is my aim simply to tone up my body, improve my concentration, or learn to relax?” (Zen: Dawn in the West, p. 15)

10. The Dalai Lama says,

From Buddhist point of view, the actual experience of death is very impor-tant. Although how or where we will be reborn is generally dependent on karmic forces, our state of mind at the time of death can influence the qual-ity of our next rebirth. So at the moment of death, in spite of the great variety of karmas we have accumulated, if we make a special effort to generate a virtuous state of mind, we may strengthen and activate a virtuous karma, and so bring about a happy rebirth. (quoted in Glimpse After Glimpse, Sogyal Rinpoche, 1995, April 15)

11. Depending on the strength of the sankharas, or mental impressions, it is possible, however, that deep-rooted thoughts, especially when the body goes into a shock, can come up that may not be so wholesome.

12. There seems to be a longing to be free from this painful existence. For the Sufis (the mystics of Islam), the separation from the Beloved is the ultimate pain, and until the reunion happens (through fana, or extinction of the individuality or the lower self), the continued existence, baqa, is only a dream (see Nurbakhsh, 1978, 1979).

13. As the 20th-century Japanese Zen Master Yasutani-Roshi says,

Once you realize the world of Ku (shunyata) you will readily comprehend the nature of the phenomenal world and cease clinging to it. What we see is illusory, without substance, like the antics of puppets in a film. Are you afraid to die? You need not be. For whether you are killed or die naturally, death has no more substantiality than the movements of these puppets. Or to put it another way, it is no more real than the cutting of air with a knife, or the




bursting of bubbles, which reappear no matter how often they are broken . . . Having once perceived the world of Buddha-nature, we are indifferent to death since we know we will be reborn through affinity with a father and a mother. We are reborn when our karmic relations impel us to be reborn. We die when our karmic relations decree that we die. And we are killed when our karmic relations lead us to be killed. We are the manifestation of out karmic relations at any given moment, and upon their manifestations we change accordingly. What we call life is no more than a procession of transforma-tion. If we do not change, we are lifeless. We grow and age because we are alive. The evidence of our having lived is the fact that we died. We die because we are alive. Living means birth and death. Creation and destruction signify life . . . When you truly understand this fundamental principle you will not be anxious about your life or your death. You will then attain a stead-fast mind and be happy in your daily life. Even though heaven and earth were turned upside down, you would have no fear. And if an atomic or hydrogen bomb were exploded, you would not quake in terror. So long as you become one with the bomb what would there be to fear? “Impossible!” you say. But whether you wanted to or not, you would perforce become one with it, would you not? By the same token, if you were caught in a holocaust, inevitably you would be burnt. Therefore, become one with fire when there is no escaping it! If you fall into poverty, live that way without grumbling—then your pov-erty will not be a burden to you. Likewise, if you are rich, live with your riches. All this is the functioning of Buddha-nature. In short, Buddha-nature has the quality of infinite adaptability. (Kapleau, 1980, p. 79)

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Bio

Mehrdad Massoudi received a PhD degree in mechanical engineering in 1986 from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a full-time researcher in the Department of Energy and an adjunct professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author or coauthor of more than 100

technical papers and reports. A fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engi-neers, he has coedited three books. His nontechnical writings have been published in Intercultural Education, Journal of Science Education and Technology, Interchange, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and Studies in Interreligious Dialogue. His forthcom-ing book (coauthored with S. Bushrui), The Spiritual Heritage of the Human Race: An Introduction to the World’s Religions, is to be published in 2009.



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