Björn Natthiko Lindeblad

[Sam Vara]

Some of you may know, or know of, Björn Lindeblad, who has become something of a minor celebrity since disrobing and leading retreats and appearing on TV in his native Sweden. I knew him as Ajahn Natthiko when he was living at Cittaviveka; his personal kindness to me and his liveliness and wisdom impressed me more than nearly any other monk I have known.

Sadly, he is now very sick with A.L.S. (a type of progressive motor neurone disease) and has messaged friends that he will soon activate his long-term plan to terminate his own life. Sadly for us, that is, as he remains as full of joy and optimism as ever.

Swedish TV have made a (subtitled) documentary about him, including his time studying in the Thai Forest Tradition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jauuMPQ2X8Y

And here is a short film of his 60th birthday celebrations, which includes a moving farewell speech from c. 13.30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB-W5JX_Us4

People like him restore my faith in humanity. An antidote to negativity.

[Dhammanando]

Hi Sam Vara,

Your second link is to the Swedish-only version. Here's the one with English subtitles:

[Sam Vara]

Hi Sam Vara,

Your second link is to the Swedish-only version. Here's the one with English subtitles:

Thanks. I have amended the original.

[SarathW]

I have seen a film some 50 years ago, that people are going to a stadium like Colosim and goodbye to people who end their life. In this film, they are all young and never grow old or sick, but still, they have to leave the world when the time comes.
I never thought I will see similar things in real life. By the way, he would not have taken his own life if he was healthy. I am not sure he was in pain and he did not have enough money to survive with this disease.
Didn't Stephen Hawkings live with this disease and did a lot of great things?
I respect his personal decision but I personally never support euthanasia.
Should we glorify euthanasia?
We used to go to airports and used to goodbye to people who go overseas those days before air travel was rare.
Is this the Buddhist way to end life?

[DNS]

Interesting bio. His book will be coming out in English next month. From wikipedia:

In 2020, he released the book Jag kan ha fel och andra visdomar från mitt liv som buddhistmunk.[4] The English translation of the book is scheduled to be released on February 17, 2022, with the title I May Be Wrong And Other Wisdoms from Life as a Forest Monk.[5]

[Sam Vara]

I've just received the news that Natthiko took his own life, in accordance with his long-term wishes.

"If you're reading this, I'm out of time. It happened in the middle of the day, January 17, in North Halland, and I was surrounded by loved ones. I drank a glass of smoothie with the gangsta preparation, and then fell asleep calmly and calmly. Without fear or doubt. I got what wanted...thank you for the way you fought, dear body. Now the fight is finally over...."

[robertk]

Some of you may know, or know of, Björn Lindeblad, why.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life ... rd-journey
edit : I see that the article was hidden behind the paywall so I added it in full.

I’ll be gone by February’: the extraordinary life of the monk who wanted to end it his way
When I interviewed Swedish author Björn Natthiko Lindeblad about his years as a Buddhist monk I didn’t know he intended to end his own life

By
Mick Brown
5 February 2022 • 5:00am

Björn Natthiko Lindeblad in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, 2007
When it was first being arranged for me to visit Björn Natthiko Lindeblad in Sweden, I was advised to go quickly, before it was too late.

Lindeblad was a successful businessman who at the age of 27 decided that his true vocation in life was to be a Buddhist forest monk. For the next 17 years he lived in monasteries in Thailand, England and Switzerland before disrobing and returning to normal life. Following a period of personal crisis, he embarked on a new life as a meditation teacher and lecturer, becoming a well-known and much-loved figure in Sweden.

Then in 2018 he was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known mostly in this country as motor neurone disease), a rare neurological illness that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, causing the progressive loss of all voluntary muscle control. Sufferers lose their strength and the ability to speak, eat, move, and eventually breathe. There is no cure and no effective treatment to halt or reverse the progression of the disease.

One day in November, I took a flight to Gothenburg. It was a Sunday and trains were scarce. It took almost two hours by rail and taxi to travel the 30 miles to Asa, the quiet coastal town where he lived, in a pleasant painted wood-frame house down a secluded tree-lined road. The house was all blond wood and white walls; his wife Elisabeth is a ceramicist and the shelves and window ledges were lined with her vases, pots and sculptures.

Lindeblad had round-the-clock care. Unable to dress, wash himself or walk, it had taken four hours, and no little effort, to prepare for my arrival. He was sitting in a straight-backed chair, dressed in a grey sweater and black trousers. His hair was brushed forward, which with his perpetually smiling demeanour lent him a deceptively boyish appearance, despite his 60 years and his failing health. His assistant placed a cup of coffee on the table next to him; with some effort he was able to move it closer and drink through a straw. It is a condition that would leave most of us, perhaps, in despair; but it was apparent within a few minutes of talking with him that he was an extremely happy man.


He had published a book in Sweden – his first, and last – which had become a bestseller: I May Be Wrong: And Other Wisdoms From Life as a Forest Monk. It is a book that, improbably, mixes elements of profundity and sweetness in equal measure. I read it, turning down the corners of those pages where I wished to refer back to something, and marking certain passages with a pencil. By the end, almost every page was folded and marked.

Lindeblad grew up in a comfortable, middle-class family in Sweden. His father was an executive in a shipping company, and it seemed Lindeblad would follow him on the business path. In 1985, when he was 23, he graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics, and within two years was to become the youngest ever chief financial officer of a subsidiary of the Swedish corporation Aga. But as he writes in his book: ‘success and happiness are two different things’.

‘I had a materially comfortable life,’ he told me, ‘the pleasantness of seeming successful in the eyes of others and the ego satisfaction of being treated as important when I travelled. I had intelligent, trustworthy people around me, and friends… my life certainly wasn’t meaningless but I wasn’t really seeing any meaningful direction. I’d been successful for a few years and enjoyed the superficial fruits of that; what now?’

He resigned from his job and for a while drifted. ‘Dumped unceremoniously,’ as he put it, ‘on a beach in Thailand by a beautiful girl from Cape Town,’ he enrolled on a month-long meditation course. He quit after four days, but something had taken hold. He immersed himself in learning more about Buddhism, and in particular the forest monk tradition in Thailand – a reformist movement, founded in the late 18th century and designed to restore to monastic life the purities and austerities taught and practised by the Buddha 2,500 years ago.

In the 1960s, as more Westerners came to Thailand in search of peace and to learn meditation, a monastery was established in Esan, the poorest region in the country, where English was the working language. It was here that Lindeblad arrived in January 1992. Given the monastic name Natthiko, meaning ‘one who grows in wisdom’, he embarked on a regime that most people would run a mile to avoid. One meal a day. No possessions. Complete celibacy. Endless hours of meditation.

‘And then I remember, about three or four months into my stay, that little nagging voice that had been whispering to me for years that life is elsewhere, the voice that had made me quite restless and always looking for new highs and new thrills – is there another version of alcohol? Another version of sex? Another version of sport? – that voice had quietened down.’

Lindeblad in the shrine room at Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, Wat Pah Cittaviveka, in West Sussex
Lindeblad in the shrine room at Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, Wat Pah Cittaviveka, in West Sussex
He had always been jealous, he said, of people who knew what they wanted to do in life – to be a fireman or a doctor – and had found a way of fitting into society, something he’d never felt himself.

‘And here I was in an exotic outfit with an archaic old religious tradition that dates back at least 2,500 years, and I feel at home here! I have no problem feeling that I lack meaning in my life. I have no problem with our daily agenda. It suits me just fine to get up at three o’clock in the morning, bow to a Buddha statue, sit still for excessively long periods of time, go out on the alms round at dawn, have only one meal a day, not use money, live without electricity or running water in a little hut. It was all just fine.’

He had imagined, he said, that being a Buddhist monk would be a largely solitary pursuit, where he would not be ‘so much bothered’, as he put it, by others. He laughed. ‘As Sartre said, hell is other people. And then I slowly realised I’ve just checked into the most eccentric group of human beings I’ve ever met in my life.’

There was the German monk who’d spent his younger years sneaking around Berlin stealing stereos from expensive Mercedes cars. The Danish anarchist who had played in a punk band. Two or three recovering heroin addicts.

‘Looking back, I realised I’d always been quite picky about who I hang out with. So that was a very unexpected part of my monastic life; the need to be more generous, accepting and tolerant of other people, to grow a bigger heart and let people be the way they are – and that was very difficult for me.

‘But one of the things that appealed was the egalitarianism; you didn’t need to be intelligent to be a monk. You don’t have to qualify. Our teachers seemed to enjoy sweeping leaves from a path in the forest or cleaning a toilet more than getting up on a high seat and giving a talk to visitors. The important thing is, whatever you’re doing, be mindful. The teachers could be mildly sarcastic about monks and nuns who read too much. Ajahn Chah, who had founded the monastery, when Westerners would come to him and say, there are so many books on Buddhism, which one should I read, and he’d say, the only book that’s important is this one – pointing to his heart.’

Gradually, Lindeblad shed the preoccupation with what others might think of him and the need to win their approval – to stop taking himself seriously. ‘I was asked once, when did you laugh most – the years before being a monk, while a monk, or after? And I knew the answer immediately. When I was a monk, we laughed a lot – at each other, but mostly at ourselves.’

The hardest thing was meditation. For years he struggled to stay awake. (That and missing ice cream and pizza.) In the morning he would join the alms round, passing through the neighbouring village, bowl outstretched, relying on the generosity of others to eat.

‘My teachers always made it clear, we are not begging; we are making ourselves available for alms. And none of those gifts are offered personally, it’s rather, “You represent something that I hold very high.” The alms round is quiet and dignified. You just walk through the village, and graciously accept whatever is given. It never felt like begging.’

For a year – the hardest and yet in many ways most fulfilling year of his life, he said – he lived as a hermit monk in a shack in a forest in north-eastern Thailand, before walking the 300 miles back to his monastery. And then he left. Longing, after living for so long in an exotic country, ‘for something familiar’, he moved to England and Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, Wat Pah Cittaviveka, in West Sussex.

There is a story here. In the late 1970s, three monks were invited to Britain, living in cramped conditions in a small Buddhist centre in north London. One day, walking on Hampstead Heath in a futile search for alms, they were stopped by a jogger, curious about what they were doing. Amazingly, he had recently inherited some woodland in Sussex which he offered to them as custodians. A year later a fund was raised to purchase a dilapidated Victorian manse nearby, which over the years grew into a thriving monastic community. It was where Lindeblad would spend the next seven years.

The adjustment was alarming. ‘You go from being a gift to the gods to being a parasite in one plane trip,’ he laughed.

In Thailand, monks are treated with ‘devastating respect’. On his first day walking with his bowl on the streets of the nearby town of Midhurst, a passing driver leaned out of the window of his white van and shouted, ‘Get a f—king job, mate.’

But it was not always like that. For most local people, the monks had become a familiar sight. ‘One day you might get a kilo of tomatoes and a loaf of bread and nothing else; another day you’d eat fish and chips. You never knew what was coming, but frustrating desire is built into the system, because you almost never got what you wanted.’

One day, he remembered, two kids of 11 or 12 passed him on the street, and said, ‘You do that kung fu shit?’ ‘I thought, oh this is better than being called a parasite…’

In 2006 he moved to another Buddhist centre, in Switzerland. But two years later he made the decision to disrobe. ‘Something inside me whispered, it’s time to move on,’ he writes.

‘It was very inconvenient,’ he told me with a laugh. He was the monk who was supposed to die in his robes, the monk who had never doubted. But at the age of 47 he realised that his life had become ‘too safe, too predictable’.

So what, I asked, did his years as a monk teach him? The sense of ‘progress’ he said, is elusive. ‘I remember as a young starry-eyed monk reading a book by the Dalai Lama, who said never compare yourself to other people, only to yourself, and only every five years. And after five years I was feeling a bit more comfortable in my own skin than I used to be; I seem to be more generous and forgiving to others.


‘And let’s say after 10 years, eureka! Praise the Lord! I was actually able to meditate without falling asleep! People ask me, what on earth kept you going for all that time? I don’t know. I just knew there was something there – a presence, a silence, a stillness, and it’s in us and around us all the time.’

He paused for a moment. ‘I would say the basic cause of human suffering is identifying with our own thinking processes. You get less interested in the content and more in the container. I would say one of the signs of progress is taking consciousness slightly less seriously, less personally, because a lot of it is just conditioning; the jukebox is playing songs but you’re not really in charge of programming.’ He remembered the reply that Ajahn Chah had given when asked what was the biggest obstacle for his Western disciples on the road to enlightenment: ‘Opinions.’ ‘Philosophically, “I may be wrong” is not a very impressive statement, but experientially, taking your own and other’s opinions and emotions more lightly is tremendously liberating.’

Friends (former monks and nuns who had disrobed before him) had warned of the difficulties of adjusting to life outside the monastery, but it affected him much more than he could possibly have imagined.

At the time, he was suffering from ITP, a blood disorder characterised by an abnormal decrease in the number of platelets in the blood, which causes easy bruising, bleeding gums and internal bleeding. And he was overcome by depression.

‘In the monastery I was part of a collective; we helped each other and did things together. Then all of a sudden I was just a middle-aged, sick, poor, confused man, with no sense of context. I didn’t belong to anything any more, and there wasn’t a lot I wanted to belong to.’

Prescribed heavy doses of cortisone, he was unable to sleep, and fell prey to the insomniac’s dark thoughts. ‘I’ll never get a girlfriend; I’ll never have enough money to pay my way; I’m a failure. I’ll end up sad, lonely, depressed, despised by everybody.’ Worst of all, he said, was the knowledge that his life as a monk should have better prepared him to handle this.

‘But I would say anguish has been my most thorough spiritual teacher, because if I’d have believed my thinking process it would have got really dark. I wasn’t suicidal in the classical sense, but there were nights where I would think, if I was to put an end to this how would I go about it? But it never went further than that.’

He had no idea of what to do with his life. He remembered one of his old business-school friends asking, what’s your business plan? ‘And I wanted to give an honest answer; I said, I’m going to walk through the doors that open. He was, of course, utterly unimpressed with my response, but that’s basically what I did.’

In 2010 an acquaintance from Swedish television interviewed him about his life as a monk, and he started teaching meditation classes; then he was invited to give talks to business conferences. ‘I was extremely nervous: 120 private equity bankers from all over the world, with me being the after-dinner entertainment with the brandy and the cigars.’ He laughed. ‘Not my natural environment!’ In 2020 he appeared on the radio show Sommer, Sweden’s equivalent of Desert Island Discs, which led to a national speaking tour. The erstwhile monk had become a celebrity.


He had met his wife Elisabeth in 2010. She was the friend of an old high-school sweetheart of his, who had two children from an earlier marriage. He had been celibate for 17 years. ‘Elisabeth was laughing. She said for the first six months of our relationship I was like a baby monkey round her neck; I wouldn’t let go.’

They lived in an apartment in Gothenburg, then moved to Asa, where in 2015 they married in a ceremony in the garden of their home.

His parents had always been supportive of his decision to become a monk, visiting each year when he was in Thailand. ‘It’s like the boy scouts with morals,’ his father remarked – stepping outside the monastery grounds for a cigarette – on their first visit. But in 2018 his father was dying of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Twenty years earlier he had told Lindeblad that if he were to suffer from a terminal illness he would prefer to die. Now he asked his son to help him go to Switzerland to an assisted dying clinic.

It was something that would have been ‘unthinkable’ for him to do as a monk. Taking any life is forbidden, a precept that he said he had followed for over 30 years, not intentionally killing so much as a mosquito, a gnat or a fly. ‘I’d been trained in a tradition where you do not encourage abortion, you do not encourage suicide, and you must be very careful to speak in ways not to be seen to be supportive.’

But he had no hesitation in following his father’s wishes, ‘because the alternative was horrible’. He paused. ‘He was in so much of a hurry to die. He had lived on his own terms. Every day on the golf course, and at five o’clock a glass with ice and plenty of whisky. He had lived a wonderful life, and he would just not have survived a hospital situation.

‘I had lived under an awful lot of rules for an awful long time. If they worked, surely now I should be able to trust my own judgment and make my own decisions. So my first reaction was, I’m very happy to do everything I can, and I’d really like to avoid you going out into a field and killing yourself with a friend’s shotgun. I had no ideological qualms about that.’

He paused, then asked, ‘When is this article being published?’

Early February, I said.

‘I’ll be gone then,’ he said. He had made the decision to do the same thing as his father, and take his own life. Assisted dying is illegal in Sweden, but a sympathetic doctor was helping him. Only four people knew of his plan. It was essential the secret be kept.

I was stunned. Throughout our conversation he had seemed so serene, so present – so alive – that I had almost forgotten that he was dying of a terminal illness. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘No, of course, how could you? There’s nothing one could say. It’s good for you to know I’m completely at ease with my decision. I have respect for the fact that people close to me are saddened by that. But for three years I’ve known I have an illness which will kill me.

‘For three years the body has been saying, I don’t want to do this any more; I don’t want to breathe, I don’t want to move, I don’t want to eat. Breathing requires volition these days; it’s no longer an automatic process, and I am very wary of the last stages of this illness when I lose the ability to breathe myself, or swallow myself. I don’t want to go on a ventilator. I don’t want resuscitation.

‘I’m not doing it out of despair – although there is some fear about the last stages of ALS, of course. But I don’t believe in life at all costs. I want a life of dignity and some level of enjoyment; and when that’s not there any more I feel it’s every human’s right to check out at their own time.’

If his Buddhist training had given him anything, it was the capacity to face death with equanimity. ‘I don’t like to think of death as the opposite of life,’ he writes in his book. ‘More like the opposite of birth.’

And if at one level it is the end of life, on another ‘it is the beginning of something else’. He smiled. ‘It’s the greatest human adventure.’

For 17 years he had voluntarily given up the things that most people think of as fun – ‘alcohol, money, sex, travel, seeing who you want when you want; eating and drinking what you want when you want and a thousand other things’ – good training for the limitations that sickness now placed on him. In the face of death, life and the simple pleasures of the moment had never been richer or more vivid.

‘Our garden, our cat. Meaningful conversation like this.’ On sunny days, snuggling down in a sleeping bag, being put in a wheelchair and rolled out for a long stroll. Dinner with friends. He laughed. ‘Everybody who knows about my social life says, “You see more people than I do.”

‘In a way,’ he said, ‘aspects of being ill with ALS have been wonderful. I enjoy the effects of impending death on my day-to-day psyche, in terms of appreciation and gratitude. A lot of things I used to get wound up about, I don’t really register any more. In my communications with anyone I don’t risk saying anything I may regret. I hold my anger better because I don’t want any dissonant notes towards the end.

‘The other side, of course, is despair, which suddenly hits you when you don’t expect it – often it’s somebody’s kindness that brings that – friends, doctors, the neurologist who has been treating me. Seeing the beauty in others has been very moving. When I cry it’s often more from being moved than being sad.’

He had not felt one moment of bitterness about his fate, he said. ‘Not for one nanosecond since I got the diagnosis have I felt this is unfair.

‘I notice that on social media people have sometimes been indignant. Why you? But I’ve never had that thought. When I wrote that, somebody wrote back, “Well, why not you? You’re probably better prepared than most people.”’ He laughed. ‘I thought that’s a very nice turnaround.’

He had been planning his own funeral, giving particular thought to the music: a song by Roger Whittaker that he remembered from childhood, New World in the Morning. ‘It has this wonderful lightness, the promise of life; he talks about how people keep planning their life for tomorrow and the song says it’s today or never; tomorrow doesn’t exist.’ And another inspired by Princess Diana’s funeral, which he watched sitting in the monastery in Thailand. ‘Somebody wheeled in a TV – we weren’t even aware she had died. And one of the monks – he was the son of one of Malaysia’s richest men and a Thai beauty queen – saw it was at Westminster Abbey, and he said, I used to be in the choir there. Then Elton John sat down at the piano and played that version of Candle in the Wind and half of us were in tears.’

But then he thought, why wait for a funeral, why not have a party that he could actually attend himself? So a few days after our meeting, some 300 friends would convene in a hall in Gothenburg to belatedly celebrate his 60th birthday, and for him and his friends to say goodbye.

He had lost so much weight due to his illness – he weighed barely 110lb – that most of his clothes no longer fitted him. So he had paid £250 for pair of golden trousers and his assistant was spraying his shoes gold to match. ‘I’m really looking forward to it.’

Lindeblad on stage during his 60th birthday – and farewell – celebrations
Lindeblad on stage during his 60th birthday – and farewell – celebrations
A few days after the party he sent me a film of the occasion. People lined up to pay tribute, and everybody stood to sing All You Need Is Love. Then Lindeblad gave a speech, dressed in his gold trousers and an embroidered orange silk jacket. He looked… other-worldly.

He offered his friends ‘a warm welcome to my funeral’ and thanked them for ‘filling my life’, then, using a phrase inspired by the American spiritual teacher Ram Dass, said, ‘we’re all just following each other home’.

At the end a song was played. An exuberant pop song by Laleh, a Swedish-Iranian popstar, Tack Förlat. The chorus in English goes ‘thanks, goodbye’.

Watching this, I was as moved as I had been on the day I met Lindeblad. We had talked for almost three hours, until I remembered – again – that he was dying, and that for all that time he had sat, immobile, smiling and uncomplaining without once mentioning his own needs. ‘I have nothing to complain about,’ he said, as I was leaving. ‘On the whole, the world has been really good to me.’ He smiled. ‘Really good to me.’

As I was writing this piece I emailed him with a number of questions about dates and places. His replies were necessarily brief, and always punctuated with an emoji of a heart. I hesitated to ask the hardest question, when would he be ending his life?

But he replied, as he always did, promptly. His email simply read: ‘January 17th.’ The emoji was of a broken heart.

Postscript
As he had planned, Björn Natthiko Lindeblad died at his home in Sweden at midday on January 17, seated in a chair facing the sea, surrounded by family and loved ones. The doctor who assisted him, and who has not been named, now risks losing their medical licence. Lindeblad had prepared a press release to be issued on the morning after his death, describing his own passing. ‘I swallowed a glass of smoothie with the most common preparation for such occasions,’ it read, ‘and then fell asleep calmly and quietly. Without fear or hesitation.

‘I am now, a few days before, unreasonably convinced that my first reaction while dying will be relief. Relief that this poor body finally does not have to struggle any longer. So I exit with a feeling of being blessed, and well prepared for the biggest and most unpredictable adventure of all. With only warmth and gratitude, Björn Natthiko Lindeblad.’

I May Be Wrong, by Björn Natthiko Lindeblad (Bloomsbury, £16.99), is published in the UK on February 17. You can order a copy from books.telegraph.co.uk

[Sam Vara]

Many thanks, Robert. That's much appreciated.

[Kusala]