Friday Reflection meets this week at the usual time of 9:30-11:00 and at a NEW location — the Scituate Public Library.  There is ample parking.  Come in through the front doors and go through the door on the right (without going into the library proper).  We meet in the large meeting room at the end of the hall.

We move on to Chapter Five (When the Appearances of This Life Dissolve:  The Bardo of Dying) in Pema Chodron’s How We Live is How We Die.  I take issue with this chapter!  Perhaps you do, too.  My issues started last week, as I helpfully heard honest testimony that someone’s experience, of a loved one’s death, was markedly different from the experience of Pema’s friend.  My dad’s death, last summer, was also different, neither peaceful nor easy.  I don’t mean not easy for me; I mean not easy for him, or so it appeared.  The “dissolution of the elements” and “natural progression” that Pema describes (in traditional Buddhist language)....I didn’t observe such as I watched my dad’s body shut down.  

Pema notes what“ hospice workers have told her,” and this former hospice worker has the body and human consciousness in many ways.  Yet there’s what we can observe in witnessing the deaths of dear ones.  And there’s what we can observe because we, the observer, are open to seeing things with fresh perspective.  Pema talks about the dissolution of consciousness as like a “glimpsing of the sky,” experiences of clarity that are “wide-open and infinite.” These experiences can come to us in lived, waking life, and not just when we die.  Do you know anything about such experiences?  How might such experiences help us talk about the death of the human body, those precious moments when human consciousness fades out of the body?  

Come sit gently with yourself and others.  Hold these questions with openhearted curiosity.  You do not have to be reading along to join in, though reading along might enhance your experience.