Making Sense with Sam Harris - #104 — The Lessons of Death

Episode Date: November 15, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Frank Ostaseski about death and dying—and about how the awareness of death can improve our lives in each moment. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we all think about, while doing our best not to think about it. The topic is death. 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 as has long been noted by philosophers and contemplatives and poets, death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing. Just take a moment to reflect on how you've spent your day so far,

the kinds of things that captured your attention, Just take a moment to reflect on how you've spent your day so far. The kinds of things that captured your attention. The things that you've been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you had with your spouse. Think of the last hour you spent on social media. Over the last few days, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find a new font for my podcast. This has literally absorbed hours of my time. So if you had stopped me at any point in the last 48 hours and asked me what I'm up to,

what really concerns me, what deep problem I'm attempting to solve, the solution to which seems most likely to bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe? The honest answer would have been, I'm looking for a font. Now, I'm not saying that everything we do has to be profound in every moment. I mean, sometimes you just have to find a font. 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. If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font, you might as well enjoy it, because the truth is, none of us know how much

time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present. Or at least it can. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things. I mean, take something like road rage. This is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy. You're behind the wheel of your car, and somebody does something erratic, or they're probably just driving more slowly than you want, and you find yourself getting angry. Now, I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you're being mindful of the shortness of life. If you're aware that you're going to die, and that the other

person is going to die, and that you're both going to lose everyone you love, and you don't know when, you love, and you don't know when, you've got this moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, where it's not dimmed by morphine in the hospital on your last day among the living. And the sun is out, or it's raining. Both are beautiful. And your spouse is alive, and your children are alive, and you're driving. And you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You're just running an errand. And that person in front of you, who you will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but which if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, is just driving slow. This is your life,

the only one you've got, and you will never get this moment back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have. No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them in a way that they feel it and in a way that you feel it and you've missed most of them

and you don't know how many more you're going to get you've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence. So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax. Even in the midst of struggle.

Even while doing hard work, even under uncertainty. You are in a game right now, and you can't see the clock, so you don't know how much time you have left. And yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible. You can even change the rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet.

You can make games that used to be impossible suddenly possible and get others to play them with you. You can literally build a rocket to go to Mars so that you can start a colony there. I actually know people who will spend some part of today doing that. But whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life. And an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world. And there are very few people who are more aware of death and the lessons it has to teach us than my guest today. Today I'm speaking to Frank Ostaseski.

Frank is a Buddhist teacher and a leading voice in end-of-life care. In 1987, he co-founded the Zen Hospice Project, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America. And in 2004, he created the Metta Institute to train healthcare workers in compassionate and mindful end-of-life care. And Frank has been widely featured in the media, on Bill Moyer's television series On Our Own Terms, in the PBS series With Our Eyes Open, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and in many print publications. He's been honored by the Dalai Lama for his work in this area. And he's the author of a new book, The Five Invitations, Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. If you want more information about Frank and his work,

you can find the relevant links on my blog. And I'm sure you'll hear in the next hour of conversation that Frank's is the voice of a man who has taken the time to reflect on the brevity of life. And a wonderful voice it is. So now I bring you Frank Ostaseski. I am here with Frank Ostaseski. Frank, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam, nice to be with you. Thanks for having me. So we know many people in common. We were introduced by our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein, who was a very old friend of mine

and one of my first meditation teachers. Was he a teacher for you as well? He was, as was Jack and Sharon in the early days, and many of the other Asian teachers who came through town as well. So I had an introduction to that world of Theravadan Vipassana practice, but also in Zen practice, when I came to start the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America, actually. Nice. Well, I definitely want to focus our conversation on death and dying, which is really your area of expertise. It's amazing that someone can be an

expert in that, but you are certainly one of them. Just before we begin, tell people what hospice care is. So you could think of hospice care as something on the continuum of healthcare that is usually accessed when people are in the final six months to a year of their life. It's generally oriented toward comfort care, managing symptoms, controlling people's pain, helping people who have chosen not to necessarily pursue more curative therapies. Hospice care might happen in people's home or it might happen in a facility.

And, of course, now we're seeing a kind of blending of hospice care and what is called palliative care or comfort care that's even happening in acute care facilities. So what was different about Zen hospice, we did all the normal things that any other hospice would do, but we tried to add to that mix the component of mindfulness. of mindfulness, we wondered what would it be like, you know, to bring together people who were cultivating what we might call a listening mind or a listening heart through meditation practice, and people who needed to be heard at least once in their life, folks who were dying. And in our case, those folks were people who lived on the streets of San Francisco, at least initially. Now, was this during the AIDS epidemic?

No, the AIDS epidemic was, you know, started around 1980 or so in San Francisco a little bit earlier. And this was in about the mid-80s. Right. So we were caring for both people with AIDS and also people with cancer. Mostly we were tending to people that the system, that kind of fell through the gaps in the system. How did you first get into this? And what was your first encounter with death? At what point in your life did you begin to have a more than average interest in

contemplating death and using it as a lens through which to view your life and view how you could actually be of help to other people? Yeah, great question. Well, I mean, death and I got introduced early on. My mom died when I was about 16, and my dad a few years later. So death came into my life quite early. Buddhist practice, with its emphasis on impermanence, was another kind of path that helped me come toward this work. For a while, I worked in refugee camps in southern Mexico and Central America, where I saw a lot of horrible dying, actually,

and was quite helpless to do anything about that at times. And then when I came back to San Francisco, the AIDS epidemic had just begun. We didn't even know what it was. Stephen Levine, who was a teacher and dear friend, was a big influence, both on my own personal life, but also on the creation of the Zen Hospice Project. Much of what he did and taught influenced how we set up the hospice and how we cared for people. So yeah, I think I was introduced to death really early on. And it wasn't so much that it wasn't just about the study of death. It was about how can we really be of service to people in their most vulnerable moments? And what happens in that exchange, you know? how do we prepare for our dying? It's more about what can we learn from the wisdom of death that can help us live a full, happy, meaningful, rich life. I mean, to imagine, Sam, at the time of our dying, that we will have the physical strength, the emotional stability, the mental clarity to

do the work of a lifetime is a kind of ridiculous gamble. And so I don't suggest that we wait until that time. I suggest that we reflect on these issues and reflect on this fact of our life now. And not so much so that we have a good death. I'm not even sure what that is anymore. But really so that we can really get how absolutely precarious this life is. And when we understand something about that, we come into contact how absolutely precarious this life is. And when we understand something about that, we come into contact with that directly in our bones. I think we also come into contact with just how precious this life is. And then we don't want to waste a moment, you know, and then we want to jump in with both feet. We want to tell the people we love that we

love them. So I think that this is really the great learning that's come to me from being with folks who are dying, which is that it's easy to take life for granted. And when we do, it's easy for us to get caught up in our neurotic concerns. And I think that's the beautiful thing about it. It's a beautiful legacy that I have from people who are dying is it really showed me what matters most. that I have from people who are dying is it really showed me what matters most, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, so everything you just said can be valued in an entirely secular and atheistic context. And most people, given the nature of my audience who are hearing this conversation, will be fairly sure that when they die, that will be the end of conscious existence. And they will be, certainly many of them, reluctant to think about the significance of death in any form of otherworldly context. The idea that one would want to have a good death or be prepared to meet

one's death for reasons that extend beyond the moment of death, because they imagine there's nothing beyond the moment of death. And I must confess, I'm fairly agnostic on that point. I think that obviously there are good reasons to believe that when you're dead, you're dead. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what might happen after death, but I spend a lot of time thinking about death and about the shadow it casts back on the rest of life and the way in which that shadow can clarify life and cause us to prioritize things that we will wish we had prioritized when our lives come to an end, and whether that end comes by surprise or in a way that's more orderly. I'm happy to talk about anything you may or may not believe about the global significance of death, but to focus for a moment on just what can be

learned in the context of this life that doesn't presuppose belief in anything beyond it. What are the things that people are most confused about, most surprised by? What is waiting there to be discovered by someone who really hasn't thought much about death and has avoided thinking about it, frankly? And what is the value of learning those lessons sooner rather than later? Yeah, great question. I mean, I don't know what happens after we die, Sam. I don't know. We'll find out, right? But I think that without a reminder of death, we tend to take our life for granted and we become lost in these endless pursuits of self-gratification, you know? But, you know, as I was mentioning, when we keep it close at hand,

you know, at our fingertips, I think it reminds us not to hold on so tightly. And I think we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously. And I think we let go a little more easily. And what I find is that when there's a reflection on death, we come to understand that we're all in the boat together. And I think this helps us to be kinder and gentler to one another, actually. You know, the habits of our life, they have a powerful momentum, right? They propel us toward, you know, right onto the moment of death. And so the obvious question arises, what habits do I want to create? Not whether or not they'll give me a better afterlife, but here in this life, you know, my thoughts are not harmless.

My thoughts take shape as actions. And, you know, you know the old story, they develop into habits and harden into character. So an unconscious relationship with my thoughts leads me to reactivity. And I want to live a life that's more responsible and more, I want to say clean. That's the best way I would describe it. Yeah. Living with an awareness of death is obviously an ancient spiritual practice. I mean, an admonition that one should do this dates back as far as Socrates and the Buddha and several books in the Old Testament, like Ecclesiastes. And I think all three of those are more or less contemporaneous with one another, but it must go back further than that. And so it's no accident that monks and renunciates and

contemplatives do this very deliberately. They focus on death and they live their lives, they seek to live their lives as though they could end at any moment, and they're trying to prioritize those things that will be the things that make sense in one's last hour of life. Again, this is often framed by a kind of otherworldly belief, but certainly not always. And I remember Stephen Levine, who you just mentioned, at one point decided to live a year consciously doing this, consciously living a year as he would want to live a year if it were going to be his last year. And this struck me as an amazing thing to do. But of course, he had more than one more year to live.

In fact, I think he had at least 20 at that point. He died a couple of years ago. I mean, there's a bit of a paradox here because there are many things, many good things in life, not merely superficial things, that we can only engage, that we can only seek with real energy based on the assumption that we will live a fairly long time. And I mean, something like the decision to have a child or to spend five or more years on your next project. And in most cases, it is a safe assumption that we have at least an average span of time in which to do these things. How do you square that with this imperative that we not take life for granted and that we use the clarifying wisdom of impermanence in each moment insofar as we're able. Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that,

one of the ways we can shift the conversation, even the one that you and I are having, is that it isn't all about preparing for my death. It isn't all about this moment at which I stop breathing, but more about how do I live my life on an ongoing basis? You know, I had a heart attack a few years ago. And one of the things I did after that heart attack is I did some reading about other people who had had heart attacks. And one of the people I met up on was Maslow. You know, Maslow suffered a fatal heart attack at one point in his life. And afterwards, he wrote this beautiful thing. He said, the confrontation with death and the reprieve from it makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful, that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it,

to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. He said, my river has never looked so beautiful. Death and its ever-present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. Now, that's beautiful. It's not just about preparing for this final moment, really, but really looking and seeing how does it, what happens if these, if we stop separating life and death, if we stop pulling them apart, you know, if we saw them as one thing? So for me, one of the things that that does is help me really see the beauty of life. I mean, you know, think about the cherry blossoms that cover the hillsides of Japan every spring, right? Or this place where I teach in northern Idaho, where there are these blue flax flowers that last for a single day.

How come they're so much more beautiful than plastic flowers? You know, I mean, isn't it their brevity? Isn't it the fact that they will end that is part of their beauty? So I think that's true with our human lives as well. It's not like, get ready, death is coming, you know, don't screw it up. It's more like, oh, how do I appreciate this? So for me, being with dying is a lot, you know, has built up in me a tremendous sense of gratitude and appreciation for the fact that I'm alive.

And so it isn't just about, you know, trying to cram for a test, you know, this final test where we think we're going to pass, fail. I don't know what happens after, fail. I don't know what happens after we die. I don't know. We'll find out how it is. But what I do know, and this is interesting, Sam, is that everybody's got a story about what happens after they die. And my experience is that that story shapes the way in which they die, and in some ways, even the way in which they live their life. We could talk about that. And that's, you know, I remember being with the president of the California Atheist Association who came to Zen Hospice to die.

I was really proud that he came there, that he didn't feel anyone was going to push any dogma on him, that we weren't going to try and talk him into some kind of belief system. And then it could go the way he needed it to go. It's not my job to convince him of something otherwise. It's my job to find out what's his vision. How does he need to go through this? Actually, I want to ask you about that because it has struck me more and more that secularists and atheists are really lacking resources to guide them both when they get sick and need to think about their own deaths or confront the deaths of those close to them. It just is a fact that there isn't a strong,

familiar secular tradition around how to perform a funeral, right? I mean, who do you call when someone close to you dies? No matter how atheistic you are, many people are left calling their rabbi or their priest and just asking them to dumb it down because the only people who know how to perform funerals and the only language around these moments in life is just explicitly framed by religion. And it needn't be. I mean, you know, I did hundreds of memorials for people through the AIDS epidemic, you know, and most of them had no, you know, as you say, some of them had an early religious training. And we can talk about how that influences the way in which we die,

by the way. But, you know, so we had to create things. We had to draw, you know, ritual, how, you know, how it is with ritual. Ritual has this way of bringing forward the truth that's already there in the room, in a way. True ritual, different than ceremony, evokes something fundamental in us, we could say. It might draw on an ancient wisdom or some, you know, ancient practice. But really, it's about how do we evoke the truth that's right here, right now? That's often what characterized a lot of the memorial services that I did. But one of the things that I saw with people, whether they had religious training or not, one of the things that really mattered most to them was relationship. What's their relationship with themselves,

with the people that they cared about in their lives, you know, with reality, however we might define that. And so one of the tickets in, if you will, or one of the paths in for people who even had sworn off religion years ago was some sense of interdependence, we might call it, or connection is a better way to say it. That was their religion. I could share hundreds of stories with you about people who had no religious training at all, but loved their time in nature. And so we would work with that, you know, we'd work with that experience as a way of helping them ease into the mystery of what happens in dying. I mean,

into the mystery of what happens in dying. I mean, look, dying is, we know at least this much. We know that dying is much more than a medical event, you know? And so the profundity of what occurs in the dying process is too big to fit into any model, whether that's a medical model or a religious model. It's too big. It shakes us loose of all the ways we've defined ourselves, all the identities we've carried over all these years. They're either stripped away by illness or they're gracefully given up, but they all go. And then who are we? And I think these are questions that people wrestle with in a time as they come closer to the end of their lives. Of course, if they have some religious or spiritual training, it influences that exploration.

But, you know, it comes up for people anyway. Even those people who think dying is a dial tone, you know, where there's nothing that happens. Even them, the reflection on their relationships and how they've conducted those relationships is really important. I mean, this really big question at the end of people's lives is usually something not like, you know, is there life after death? But it's something more like, am I loved? And did I love?

I'm always struck by the asymmetry between dying and having others die. I mean, obviously, I haven't died, so I don't know firsthand what that's like. But having lost people close to me and seeing other people go through this experience, it is different being the one dying. And obviously, the person who dies loses everyone, but he or she also loses the experience of having to live with that experience of loss. And he or she doesn't have to live in a world where everyone is just carrying on as before and where a person's grief becomes a kind of embarrassment or something that other people have to figure out what to do with or navigate around in some way.

Are there two sides of this? figure out what to do with or navigate around in some way. Are there two sides of this? I mean, is the death experience and the bereavement experience importantly different in any way? Yes. I think we could make some distinctions there that would be important. But I mean, remember, as you say, the person who's dying loses everything. And so he or she going through this process is usually going through some kind of... bonus episodes, and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.