Fears to Be Feared

The Buddha says there are four reasons why we fear death.

One is that we haven’t let go of our passion for sensuality. We’re afraid that at death we’re going to lose our chance to experience sensual pleasures.

Two, we haven’t let go of our passion for the body. We’re afraid of losing the body.

Three, we’ve done some unskillful things in the past, we’ve harmed other people. We’re afraid that, after death, there’ll be punishment.

And then, four, we haven’t seen the true Dhamma. We may not express our fear in those terms, but we have doubts: What happens after death? Is it followed by annihilation? Rebirth? What? We don’t know.

The practice is designed to overcome these four fears, both to put the mind at ease and also because the fears themselves are things to be afraid of—because we can do some really stupid things, both in this lifetime and at the moment of death, because of those fears.

Fortunately, the practice has a variety of ways of dealing with those fears.

As with the fear of losing sensuality: We practice concentration to provide the mind with an alternative source of pleasure. And, as we realize when we get to know it, it’s not just an alternative. It’s better.

You simply breathe in and out in ways that feel refreshing to the body and refreshing to the mind. You can get the mind to settle down with that, and you can spread that refreshment throughout the whole body.

You can just stay there with that sense of ease and well-being, which is very different from the pleasures of sensuality. Those pleasures are like a flickering flame. They’re bright and they’re dark. They’re bright and they’re dark.

Whereas the flame of concentration is there in the name of the four forms of right concentration: the jhānas. The word jhāna is related to a verb jhayati, which means to burn with a steady flame, like the flame of an oil lamp. There’s a steadiness to this pleasure, a reliability.

It makes it a lot easier to let go of sensual pleasures and to not be afraid of the fact that you may be leaving sensual pleasures, because you could be going to one of the higher realms of the devas—the Brahmās—where the pleasure of form is constant, the ease is constant, the refreshment is constant. That’s one way of dealing with these fears.

Then there’s the fear of losing the body. There are two approaches here.

One is to ask yourself: Exactly how valuable is the body? How much do you need it? When you get the mind into concentration, you can get into states that are formless, where you have no need to identify with the body at all. In fact, your sense of the body just disappears, yet the awareness remains.

You can find a state where the mind settles down and everything gets so quiet in the body that the in-and-out breath just stops moving. There’s breath energy filling the body, but the in-and-out breathing stops. It’s not because you suppressed it, not because you intentionally stopped it, but simply because everything in the body is so well-connected. All the breath energy channels are open. Everything is flowing smoothly. So you don’t need the in-and-out breath when you stay there very, very still.

As you’re still like this, you begin to realize that your sense of the shape of the body depends on the movement of the breath energy. When the breath energy’s still but full, the sense of the boundary of the body begins to disappear. The body feels like a mist of little sensation dots.

You focus in on the spaces between the dots. You can see that that sense of space is all connected. It doesn’t stop with the skin of the body. It goes out in all directions. Your perception of that space fills the room and penetrates between the atoms in the walls around the room and goes outside. It penetrates everything.

There’s no sense of the shape of your body at all. You could go back to the perception of the body at any time, but you choose not to. The sense of limitless space is so much more relaxing, so much more peaceful. You learn how to stay with that for a while.

Then you can stay with the perception of what is it that knows the space. It’s just awareness: knowing, knowing, knowing. Again, it has no boundaries, no sense of the shape of the body.

If you can maintain that sense, it helps to loosen up your attachment to the body in one way, but it doesn’t really end passion for the body.

For that, you need another exercise, which is actually contemplating the body itself.

What valuable things do you have in this sack? As Ajaan Lee once put it, you’ve got this sack made out of skin with openings at both ends. In the image in the Canon, you’ve got a burlap bag with openings at both ends, and you open it up and see which kinds of beans and rice and other grains you have in here.

Well, here you’ve got hair of the body, hair of the head, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, bones, bone marrow, tendons. You can visualize peeling off the skin, putting it in a pile, and then taking and removing all the different organs and putting them in separate piles on the floor, asking yourself which one of these things here is all that alluring.

In and of itself, the body doesn’t have much to make you attracted. It’s just part of the mind that wants to be attracted to them, when we put things together. It’ll block out all the unattractive parts of the body, because it wants something to have passion for.

You realize that that’s the problem. The body in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is the desire to be passionate about something.

You can ask yourself, “Well, why do you want to go to all that trouble, to start chasing down that passion that wants to make something valuable out of what doesn’t have that much inherent value for you?”

So these contemplations—one, the ability to get the mind into a formless state, and two, the ability to look at the body in a more objective way— help to loosen up at least some of your passion for the body. You’re not so afraid of leaving the body.

Actually, that’s one thing to be really afraid of when you have to get out of the body, which is that you’ll hang around. Ajaan Fuang, when he was teaching in Bangkok, would have an opportunity to walk around outside on Saturday evenings. People had been coming during the day. When evening fell, hardly anybody came, so he’d get up and walk around the monastery where we were staying.

It was a funeral monastery with lots of little pavilions—he called them “body shops”—where a coffin would be placed, with a platform for monks to sit to chant, and chairs for people to sit and listen.

One evening, he came back from his walk around the monastery and said, “You know, the number of people who die and still hang around their bodies is awfully high. Because they’re so attached to the body, they can’t imagine not having the body as the center of their very being.”

That’s a case where your attachment leads to a fear, and the fear itself can cause you to do some really stupid things.

The same with attachment to sensuality: If you’re afraid of leaving sensual pleasures, then even if the sensual pleasures of animals appear, you’ll go for them at that point because you’re really desperate. So again, the fear is to be feared.

As for the fear of punishment for the things you’ve done, the Buddha says that the proper attitude toward past mistakes is not to anticipate punishment, but to remind yourself, “Okay, that was a mistake. I don’t want to repeat it.” Develop right view around it and then have lots of goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the people you’ve harmed, goodwill for everybody.

You realize that the teachings on karma are complex. Just because you’ve done some unskillful things in this lifetime doesn’t mean you have to suffer in the next lifetime. The fact that you’ve changed your attitude and can maintain right view all the way through death, you can still go to a good place where you can develop more good karma to counteract whatever bad karma you may still have.

Here again, the fear is something to be feared. If you think that because you’ve done something bad, you’re going to have to be punished, there will come, at the point of death, visions of various alternatives where you can go. It’s called kati-nimitta in Pali. There’s kamma-nimitta, where you see what karma you’ve done in the past, and kati-nimitta, where you see where you might be going.

If at that point you focus on the bad things you did in the past, and then there appears an opening to a really bad destination, you might just go slipping into that destination, even though you don’t want to, thinking at your death that that’s something you deserve. Which is why this kind of fear is really to be feared.

You have to really work on developing the right attitude, the right view toward your past mistakes. Just because you’ve done some bad things doesn’t mean you have to suffer. You develop an attitude of goodwill, you develop your virtue, you develop your discernment, you learn how to train the mind so that it’s more resilient to pleasure and pain. That training will weaken the bad effects of past bad karma.

This is where concentration comes in handy. You learn how to deal with pain as you develop your concentration by working through the patterns of tension in the body. When pleasure comes, you learn how to maintain your focus despite the pleasure.

When your mind is resilient both to pleasure and pain, then the results of past bad actions are going to be a lot less, and if you maintain the right view, that lifts you up.

So even though there may be openings to unfortunate destinations, you don’t have to go through them, realizing you have some goodness, you’ve got your right view. That protects you.

The fourth fear, the fear that comes from not knowing the true Dhamma, can be overcome with stream-entry. At that point, the mind steps into the deathless. You’ve dropped your infatuation with fabricated things of all kinds, even the fabrications of concentration and discernment. When the mind is free from fabrication, it experiences a dimension that’s apart from the present moment. It’s outside of space, outside of time. In stepping outside of space and time, you realize that time has been going on for a long, long time. In other words, this is not the first lifetime you’ve ever had.

You realize that there is this deathless dimension. And because it’s outside of space and time, nothing can touch it, nothing can change it.

Coming back from that, your confidence, your conviction in the Buddha has been confirmed. You know what he’s talking about. There is a deathless happiness.

The Dhamma that you practice is what got you there.

Everyone else who’s practiced the Dhamma as you have has gone there as well.

That’s how your conviction in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha is finally confirmed.

With that confirmation, you face death with a lot less fear, because you know that you won’t be going to any lower destinations. There still may be the fear of the pain that comes before death, but the fact of death itself no longer holds any fear.

So it’s through our practice that we can overcome these four forms of fear.

There was a brahman one time who came to see the Buddha. He said, “Everybody is afraid of death. There’s nobody who’s not afraid of death.” The Buddha replied, “Those who have practiced,” in this case he was talking about arahants, “are totally free of any fear from death.”

It’s through the practice of concentration, through developing the right view to the point where they begin to show their true colors, show their true worth, that puts you past any fear of death.

When you live without fear of death, the other fears of life hold a lot less power over you. That’s how the practice of the Dhamma makes you independent, less likely to be pushed around by other people who try to manipulate your fears.

And less likely to fall victim to your own fears. As I said, often these fears are things to be feared in and of themselves, because they can make you do so many stupid things, leading up to death and at death.

But if you’ve weakened your passion for sensuality, you’re not going to be running after just any opportunity to get sensual pleasures, no matter how gross.

If you’ve weakened your passion for the body, you’re not going to latch on to any body that comes, and you’re not going to hang on to this body after you’ve died, hovering around as a ghost, watching the body decay.

Your memories of your past bad actions will hold a lot less fear.

And the fears that come from not knowing the true Dhamma will have no basis anymore.

These are some of the ways in which the practice leads to freedom, so take advantage of it. There’s nothing else on Earth that offers the freedom that the practice offers—and can deliver.