Endings

Sometimes it surprises me how many of us seem to be working with death, dying, or endings in a more general sense. It is amazing how much these endings are part of what we experience. As we are all human beings, death is part of our lives, in terms of both our own death and the deaths of everyone else around us.

What I see is that many of us are working with the grief that arises from losing somebody or something; the grief of an imminent ending. When you directly experience the death of a partner in a relationship (a husband, a friend, a mother or father, for example), the ending of such a connection goes very deep. You might feel as if one aspect of your life is moving away from you into the unknown. How can we relate to that? How can we relate to the inevitability of ending?

One thing that helps me is understanding the fact that in any ending there is already a beginning. Ending isn’t just ending, stopping, finishing. Ending implies beginning, and beginning leads to ending. When I reflect in this way, I can visualize a spiral that just starts another round on another level.

…It helps if we can accept that there are beginnings and endings. It prepares us for moving on into something new, something different, into something that we don’t know … yet.

And actually we experience this quite a lot in our lives. Often we are just not fully aware of this process. There are those endings that we all know: of a job, a relationship, a situation, the finishing of a project; all endings and beginnings. What ends here begins there, and with something new, something different enters into our lives and we have to say goodbye to what we know, to what is familiar. For example, if we move to a different part of the world, we have to part from our friends and that might not always be so easy.

That is one aspect of it, but there is also something else: we experience the death of the self many times during our practice. We experience the creation of a sense of self and then its falling apart. Creation and falling apart, coming into existence and ceasing to be. If you look at yourself, at what you take as being yourself, is it the same as yesterday, as a week ago? And what about a year ago? How often does it change?

Mine changes quite often, depending on conditions, on the situations I find myself in. Today it has changed at least several hundred times. As there’s a sense of self arising, of being this or that, identifying with this or that, this means several hundred deaths in one day. Being born, moving on and dissolving – it happens constantly. But, while we’re usually aware of the creation and the moving on, we often miss out on the dissolving bit of it because so often it just fades away. We are not aware of this because we are already busy with the next creation that is arising.

Because the energy of the arising is so strong, it catches our attention so much more than the energy of the soft fading away of present experience. I suggest that sometimes we should focus just on the cessation of self, its dissolving. This can help us to see how ephemeral it is, how unsolid. It can help us to weaken our belief in the self, the belief that it is so special, so constant and so real.

This reflection by Ajahn Mettā is from, [Forest Sangha Newsletter, #93, 2014], pp. 30-31.