Inviting the Wisdom of Death into Life

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The(se five invitations are my attempt to honor the lessons I have learned sitting bedside with so many dying patients. They are five mutually supportive principles, permeated with love.

Don't wait.

Welcome everything, push away nothing.

Bring your whole self to the experience.

Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

Cultivate don't know mind.

—Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

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question

 

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Earth dissolves into water. Water dissolves into fire. Fire dissolves into air. Air dissolves into space. Space dissolves into consciousness.

Dying, in many cases, does not happen all of a sudden. It is a gradual process of withdrawing from life in form. When I speak of the four elements dissolving, I am not speaking exactly of physical form. Rather, I am pointing to the ineffable but observable animating qualities that are so apparently missing when we are left only with the heaviness of the corpse after death. There is something beyond the four elements—the spirit, soul, or animating presence. Our instruments and devices can certainly measure the physical disintegration, but the inner dissolution that happens simultaneously is subtle and still.

They are all dissolving—the elements and their associated states, and as a result, the self is dissolving, as well. This is happening all the time, we just see it at the surface at the time of dying.

Now who are you?


—Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

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Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, everything changes, nothing perishes ―Ovid

 

Woman Encircled by the Flight of a Bird, 1941, Joan Miro

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So often in life, we move beyond what we imagined we were capable of, and breaking through that boundary propels us toward transformation. Someone once said, "Death comes not to you, but to someone else whom the gods make ready." This sentiment feels true to me. The person I am today, living in this story, is not exactly the same person as the one who will die. Life and death will change me. I will be different in some very fundamental ways. For something new to emerge within us, we must be open to change.

...Dont wait. Everything we need is right in front of us. Impermanence is the doorway to possibility. Embracing it is where true freedom lies.


—Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

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If we learn to let go into uncertainty, to trust that our basic nature and that of the world are not different, then the fact that things are not solid and fixed becomes, rather than a threat, a liberating opportunity.


—Carol Hyman
Living and Dying: A Buddhist Perspective

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No permanence is ours; we are a wave 

That flows to fit whatever form it finds: 

Through day or night, cathedral or the cave 

We pass forever, craving form that binds.

—Hermann Hesse

from “Lament” in The Glass Bead Game

Clara and Richard Winston

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