Focus on Life™

Have you ever considered what dying means? Often we are
very shady and quiet about death. It is something we do not
want to consider or think about. It is a taboo. It is something
that only happens to somebody else—not to us. In other
words—we are afraid of it. But why?

What exactly are we afraid of? Something we do not know
anything about? Maybe.

Dying means that we are departed instantly from every-
thing we are attached to and have. We have to give away
everything so familiar and “natural” to us, something and
everything we have taken for granted. Our health, physical
body, friends, family, wealth, possessions, lifestyle, habits, and
so on. This is death. It is detachment.

Clinging and attachment do not have to be physical in
nature. We can have obsessions, desires, needs, and cravings.
Suddenly we cannot satisfy those by physical means anymore.
We are forced to be without them. This is death.

We have to die in order to live. What does that mean? We
think that we are alive and kicking when we are driven by our
lower qualities like desire, lust, obsession, and so on.
Satisfying and fulfilling these consume most of our lives. We
call this living. We are in a never-ending circle where old
needs are fulfilled and instantly new ones arise. How liberat-
ing and happy!

Being truly alive means that we are free to live, not
obsessed or forced continuously to fulfil something. Free to
be.In order to achieve this, we have to set ourselves free from
our attachments and desires. They are strong and we cannot
win them by force. The more we resist them, the larger they
become. We can beat them only by ignoring them, by learn-
ing to live without them, by detaching ourselves from every-
thing in a similar manner—as death will do to us, finally, but
this time we do it voluntarily, gradually.

It is a misunderstanding to believe that detachment will
mean literally dying and living without anything interesting
or fun. On the contrary, how much fun and freedom do you
have when you are obsessed by something? Detachment does
not mean giving up living—only giving away all the attach-
ment and clinging. You can still enjoy the sunrise and have a
delicious meal, but the difference is that those do not bear any
utility value for you anymore—they simply are. There is no
need for anything. One is not lacking anything because need
implicitly declares a lack of something (i.e., the object of the
need).

Clinging and attachment are based on ignorance, and de
facto the only thing to give away is the wrong understanding.
Greater wisdom liberates. Always.

In our language death means the opposite of living. Being
alive is to live, create, explore, and experience. Death is some-
thing where nothing is moving and everything stays still, a
total freeze or a complete stop. It is something where nothing
new is developed nor does anything change; death is simply a
state where nothing is created anymore.

In order to be truly alive, one should be familiar with
death. What does it mean not to be alive? Not to create,
explore, and experience? Stay still, hold back, freeze the situa-
tion, and maintain the status quo? Resist movement or
change?

How can we be sure that we are not already dead? To put it
differently, are we really experiencing, continuously creating
and exploring something new? We are not eager to explore
and break the boundaries. We are not so excited about any-
thing new and unknown happening. We’d rather not rock the
boat and stay still and lie low. We are uncomfortable with
change and prefer the current situation, no matter how bad or
awkward.

Change happens very slowly in the physical world. Drastic
renewal takes decades or generations rather than weeks or
years. Our mind is quick to draw scenarios and imagine
things, but real implementation of visible action takes
decades, if not centuries. We drag our history with us. We are
conservative and changing only with force. Someone who
does something only when under external pressure is not cre-
ating. Where is the freedom and joy of exploration? To put it
in brief—we are dead.

Our life can be compared to a project. Projects have a begin-
ning and an end. Its definition states that it is not perma-
nent—it has a definitive life span. It starts, goes on, and ends.
A project has no purpose itself—it is only the means for
something. It has a purpose and it is used as the vehicle, the
tool, for the objective. Temporal is an interesting term.
Something has an existence in time and, therefore, it has to
have a starting point and moment as well as have an ending
point and time. It is only temporal. Everything that exists in
time has its own tempo, time, and place. Nothing is perma-
nent.

Birth, living, and dying. Often the transition points are
interesting. In those points, something changes from one for-
mulation into another—a real drastic transformation hap-
pens. Still, our own life is mainly characterized by the middle
part—the continuation. We focus almost no attention on the
beginning or the end. For us, the living part is the only real
existence and we ignore the beginning and the end. But how
can we know what to do and where to go and, more impor-
tantly, where to target if we are not aware of all three charac-
teristics—the beginning, the continuation, and the end—of
temporal existence?