Death and Babysitters

This is a few excerpts from Pema Chodron's writing. I wrote a lengthy analysis on how this relates to Jesus, and I believe it does on a deeper level than most things I've heard, but I had a great deal of difficulty putting it into clear and meaningful language for you, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions instead:

“Nontheism [as opposed to atheism] is finally realizing that there’s no babysitter that you can count on. You just get a good one and then he or she is gone. Nontheism is realizing that it’s not just babysitters that come and go. The whole of life is like that. This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.

This is where renunciation enters the picture—renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on, are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.

What happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something.

Renunciation is a teaching to inspire us to investigate what’s happening every time we grab something because we can’t stand to face what’s coming.

All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death. Fear of death is always in the background. As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink. Bu it’s very hard—no matter how much we hear about it—to believe in our own death. We don’t go so far as to say, “No way, I’m not going to die,” because of course we know that we are. But it definitely will be later. That’s the biggest hope.

Trungpa Rinposhe once delivered a lecture entitled “Death in Everyday Life.” We are raised in a culture which fears death and hides it from us. Nevertheless, we experience it all the time. We experience it in the form of dissapointment, of things not always working out. We experience it in the form of things always being in a process of change. When the day ends, when the second ends, when we breathe out, that’s death in everyday life.

Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out. As the years go on, we don’t call the babysitter quite so fast.”