Why your positivity meditation isn’t working and could bring you death.
“Think you’re in heaven but you’re living in hell.”
-Bob Marley
When most people are preaching positivity only in their meditation, I want to bring back the ancient wisdom of meditation on death.
An ancient text, Bushido Shoshinshu, opens with one of the most shocking rules in any culture: “Keep death in mind at all times.”
The most famous line in Hagakure is “The way of the warrior is to be found in dying.”
Many people say, “oh no this will bring what you focus your thoughts on.” While yes I agree, but I also disagree.
If the so-called “law of attraction” were absolute truth, then why is it that most planes don’t crash. Would you agree that the majority of people on a plane have the thought go through their head that the plane could crash, but yet most planes are safe?
The Taoist principle of Yin and Yang reminds us if there is light there must be dark.
Hagakure commands you to imagine and accept the worst in gory detail:
Begin each day pondering death as its climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments. See yourself being pierced by bow and arrow, gun, sword, or spear, or being swept away by a giant wave, vaulting into a fiery inferno, taking a lightning strike, being shaken to death in a great earthquake, falling hundreds of feet from a high clifftop, succumbing to a terminal illness, or just dropping dead unexpectedly. Every morning, be sure to meditate yourself into a trance of death.
Benefits of meditating on death each day:
- Brings you into the present moment
- Pushes you to live out your day as if it were your last
- Wakes you up to reality
- Sensitizes you
- It will force you to ask yourself crucial questions:
- Was I a good person?
- Did I do good to the earth and to others?
- Did I do all I could?
- What can I do today and right now?
- Did I tell my loved ones how much I love them?
While people in modern times seek to desensitize themselves from everything, the Taoists sought sensitization. We insulate ourselves from nature with our concrete houses that have little airflow and controlled air. We have to wear headphones to go outside as we can’t cope with all the sound pollution we created. We have to wear masks to protect us from each other. We have very little connection to nature and seek to remove ourselves from it as much as possible.
We need to wake up because it is getting worse not getting better. Don’t take my word for it, scientists have found more than 28 new viruses in the glaciers and when they melt they could release these into the human race viruses we have never seen before and this is just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended).
Every morning try these death meditations:
Imagine yourself and your loved ones dying of a nasty pandemic disease.
Imagine dying of a natural disaster such as a devastating hurricane.
Imagine drowning to death in a cesspool of chemicals, oil, plastic waste. Why do that? Because that is the reality of what we are doing right now to millions of living beings. If we don’t stop just focusing only on the good, we will never fix what is wrong until it is too late and it will fix us.
So yes, I definitely advocate, teach and encourage you to meditate on peace, on what you are grateful, on healing emotions with the 6 Healing Sounds and 5 Element Qigong, but it will not truly work without its opposite which is to meditate on death to bring you truly into the present moment like a sharp sword, sensitizing yourself to the world.
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Excellent article. Who wrote this?
Look at the bottom, you can see the author is Tevia Feng.
A wonderful path to compassion. It is as if healing emotions come to heal us personally and meditation on death connects us to a cycle related to the whole and to other living beings! As if it creates a movement from the inside out! Wonderful, thank you Tevia!
I love this perspective-
Thank you for that perspective. Very helpful
I find this very interesting and appreciate the discussion.
Wow, very powerful, poignant, well said. I look forward to reviewing this page for the coming days.
This is The Samuray Way to live
I read before this way to meditated and was quit astonish
Thank you for this important teaching.