and it seems to me if we want to build a bridge to a rational world that the
better part of humanity can cross we have to deal with this back
now most of us do our best to not to think about death but but there's always
part of our minds that knows this can't go on forever wait with it part of us
always knows that we're just a doctor's visit away or a phone call away from
being starkly reminded with with the fact of our own mortality or of those
closest to us now I'm sure many of you in this room have experienced this in
some form you you must know how uncanny it is to suddenly be thrown out of the
normal course of your life and just be given the full-time job of not dying or
caring for someone who is but the one thing people tend to realize at moments
like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal it's not just
what they not just what they did with their time it's not just that they spent
too much time working or compulsively checking email it's that they they cared
about the wrong things they regret what they cared about
so their attention was bound up in petty concerns a year after year when life was
normal and this is a paradox of course because we all know this epiphany is
coming maybe don't you know this is coming don't you know that there's gonna
come a day when you'll be sick or someone close to you will die and you'll
look bad on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll think
what was I doing
you know this and yet if you're like most people you'll spend most of your
time in life tacitly presuming you'll live forever is like watching a bad
movie for the fourth time or or bickering with your spouse that this
these things only make sense in light of eternity because even if you
live to be a hundred they're just not that many days in life so what is the
point of life is anything sacred the such a question even makes sense and I
think these questions do make sense and there are answers to them but the
answers are not a matter of getting more information the answer is a change in
attitude there are ways of experiencing life as
sacred wood that without believing anything and certainly without believing
anything on insufficient evidence okay there are ways to really live in the
present moment
hey what what's the alternative okay it is always now however much you feel you
may need to plan for the future to anticipate it to mitigate risks the
reality of your life is now now this may sound trite but it's the truth
it's not quite true as a matter of physics in fact there's there is no now
that encompasses the entire universe you can't talk of an event being
simultaneously occurring here and one at the same moment occurring in Andromeda
the truth is now is not even well-defined as a matter of neurology
because we know that inputs to the brain come at different moments and that
consciousnesses is built upon layers of inputs whose timings have to be
different our conscious awareness at the present moment is in some relevant sense
already a memory but as a matter of conscious experience the reality of your
life is always now and I think this is a liberating truth
about the nature of the human mind in fact I think there's probably nothing
more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy
in this world but the past is a memory it's a thought arising in the present
the future is merely anticipated it is another thought arising now okay what we
truly have is this moment
and this
and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth repudiating and
fleeing it overlooking it and and the the horror is that we succeed we manage
to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there
because we are we are continually hoping to become happy in the future and the
future never arrives and even when we think we're in the present moment we are
in very subtle ways always looking over its shoulder anticipating what's coming
next we are always solving a problem and it's
possible to simply drop your problem if only for a moment and enjoy whatever is
true of your life in the present so so so we have a very limited view of what's
going on we're subjectively unaware of most of
what our minds are doing and yet when we think about what what matters what
matters is consciousness and its contents it consciousness is everything
our experience of the world the experience of those we care about is a
matter of consciousness and its contents so so whatever the origins of
consciousness the most important question for us is how can we truly be
fulfilled in life how can we create lives that are truly worth living given
that these lives come to an end
we're all in the business of seeking fulfillment and relief from suffering
this is not to say that we want mere pleasure or the easiest possible life
but much of what we want in life much of what we want to experience
entails struggle and many of us learn to enjoy the struggle itself in some
measure any athlete knows that there's certain kinds of pain that are actually
pleasurable you know if the burn of lifting weights was was actually the
symptom of a disease it would be intolerable but because it's happened in
the context of a strenuous exercise and progress there most people learn to
enjoy it so the conceptual lens through which we view even very intense
sensation largely determines how we feel about it and then this is one of the
many ways in which our thinking about experience changes the character of
experience
so the frame we put around the present moment is important and largely
determines our experience of it
and how we think about death changes depending on whether we're thinking
about dying ourselves or about losing the people we love but whichever side of
the coin we take here death is really an ever-present reality for us and it is so
whether we're thinking about it or not it's always announcing itself in the
background on the news in the stories we hear about the lives of others in our
concerns about our own health in the attention we pay when crossing
the street if you observe yourself closely you'll
see that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die and
has long been noted by philosophers and contemplatively
death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing
but contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use
our attention it's not so much what we pay attention to it's the quality of
attention it's how we feel while doing it
Oh