Recollection of death - a guided meditation by Ven. Anālayo

[pegembara]

Ven. Vijithananda argues that death meditation is a form of Samatha practice even though it may help Vipassna in a later stage.
Death is a future event. We do not know how it is going to happen. It is not practical to contemplate on what is not happen.
If you are walking contemplate walking not death.
However, you can contemplate on someone else really died. But it is not you.
Vipassana is body contemplation take your body as the object and contemplate what is happening right now.
With that experience, you can contemplate death when that happens.
However, he encourages direct Vipassana practice.
If you are sick contemplate your sickness right now in your body.
Contemplate on the pain you experience and your mental states right now.

Really?

The Blessed One said, "Mindfulness of death, when developed & pursued, is of great fruit & great benefit. It gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its final end. Therefore you should develop mindfulness of death."

"But whoever develops mindfulness of death, thinking, 'O, that I might live for the interval that it takes to swallow having chewed up one morsel of food... for the interval that it takes to breathe out after breathing in, or to breathe in after breathing out, that I might attend to the Blessed One's instructions. I would have accomplished a great deal' — they are said to dwell heedfully. They develop mindfulness of death acutely for the sake of ending the effluents.

"Therefore you should train yourselves: 'We will dwell heedfully. We will develop mindfulness of death acutely for the sake of ending the effluents.' That is how you should train yourselves."

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitak ... .than.html

[SarathW]

Really?

Buddha's advice is for the monks or for the laypeople who are living like monks.
Death meditation may not be suitable for people with depression or people with suicidal thoughts.

[Nicolas]

[...]

And yet:

A woman or a man, a householder or one gone forth, should often reflect thus: ‘I am subject to death; I am not exempt from death.’

[SarathW]

We don't have to contemplate it.
We see people die everywhere.
As I said before, we even kill and eat the dead body!
Are soldiers contemplate death?
Then what do they do?
Don't we feel good when our enemy is dead?

[pegembara]

Really?

Death meditation may not be suitable for people with depression or people with suicidal thoughts.

True that.

Vibhava tanha is craving for non- existence. The underlying delusion is that of the existence of a self that suffers. Ever wonder why people who truly overcome the depths of depression/suicidal thoughts tend to become "enlightened" eg. Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie. Could it be that they have also broken through the delusion of self?

One night in 1977, at the age of 29, after having suffered from depression for most of his life. Tolle says he experienced an “inner transformation.” That night he awakened from his sleep. Suffering from unbearable dread and thoughts of suicide. Eckhart Tolle experienced a life-changing epiphany.

Recounting the experience to Oprah on Super Soul Sunday, he says,

I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved.

The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self.

https://iamfearlesssoul.com/eckhart-tolle-suicide/

[SarathW]

Could it be that they have also broken through the delusion of self?

No. In my opinion.
They only have broken through the delusion of taking the body as the self.
What Buddha taught was the broken though all five aggregate including the body.