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