Meditation of Death

Refreshing feeling since I have not went for Dharma talk for quite some time. I am always interested in "death" and thus the topic attracts me!

Dr Ng, is the speaker of the evening. He was a practising doctor and his patients are mainly patients who are chronically ill, suffering from dementia or physically impaired. He is definitely very experience in addressing issues about death. We all learnt a great deal on how to prepare death and how to take care of patients that is very ill.

He first led us into meditation starting from doing Metta Meditation and continues into doing the Death Meditation. So its like from " May all be well and happy" into "We shall surely die". haha!! According to Ekottara Agama, mindfulness of death is one of them.

He brought to our attention his survey conducted on his patients on whether they fear and why they fear death. Males and females alike, they all say they are fearless as they have did nothing wrong in life. Seems like across all religion, living a righteous life seems to be the comfort for after life.

He shared that being able to die a good and natural death holds only very little percentage to total deaths. And most people will develop physical impairment and dementia before they die.

We also explored into the belief of rebirth. Rebirth is something that believers of Karma would subscribe to. Yet, Dr Ng showed us a Youtube Video of a child that has clear recollection of death. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EWwzFwUOxA

Dr Ng also stressed to us on the importance of the last thought process before death. This thought is important as it will lead us to either favorable or less favorable channel of rebirth. Below is his analogy on the last thought process.

If we have a cattle pen, the biggest sheep will pass through the gate first. After which the sheeps that stays near the gate will leave first. Then, if the pen has more white sheeps, we are sure the next group of sheeps to escape will be white sheeps. And lastly, if the pen houses only sheeps of very slight variance, then the sheeps that escape first will be quite random.

This is to mean that our last thought process can be nurtured by habits. Habitual tendency will dictate the condition of our last thought process.

He also shared about how actually effects of Karma being non linear. His analogy is how a non smoker still have the risk of developing cancer. But the probability is definitely higher for smoker to develop cancer.