Q: How can I deal with the fear of death when thinking about hard decisions?
John: By, in all of your life, intimately and in dearness, carrying your death in your heart. It heals all aversion to death, all fear of death.
Your death is the last and the greatest event of your life. Your death is deeply important. It’s deeply important that you’re available to it. It’s deeply important that you are really there for whenever you die, and regardless of how you die. That brings your death into your heart where there’s a depth of meaning to your death, instead of you being polarized in your thinking and your feeling concerning your death.
When your death is kept very close within and very dear within, your perspective in all of life opens and changes. You won’t have an artificial perspective – one that betrays that you avoid dying, one that betrays an underlying belief that you will always live – living and behaving as though you will never die. When you keep your death as a dearness in your heart, there’s nothing of your living, there’s nothing of your presence in your life that you’ll take for granted.
Live with death as a dearness in your heart, and all of your presence in life will be like nurture. You’ll be then naturally relating to a much deeper quality of life within than just being wrapped-up in a personal perspective, wrapped-up in the circumstances of your life. You’ll be all about what you deeply are in your heart in the midst of all of your life, because it’s clear to you that you’re going to die, and you don’t know when. It could be at any time.
So that shifts your posturing in your life. You won’t be all about your self. You won’t be taking your self seriously, because through death all of that is going to end. What you’ll be taking seriously in all of your life is what you really are in your heart.
For you to be in your last-hour deathbed, for you to be quieted within on your deathbed, what will matter to you is not what you’ve done with your life. What will matter to you is not what you’ve done with your self.
What will really matter to you is what you’ve done with your heart.
