Intro:
The Four Reminders are Buddhist teachings foundational to all schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and are often found more broadly. They are contemplations - things to think about when meditating and when walking around - that REMIND us of what’s really important in life.
It’s so easy to get distracted, to get absorbed, to get seduced, by normal conventional life. Work, commuting, family hassles, friend drama, political chaos, habitual thought patterns of anger, jealousy, self-criticism. Then you add your mobile phone, infinite TV shows, food from any restaurant on delivery, self check out at every store and all manner of alcohol and pharmaceuticals to dissociate with… It would be very easy to wake up at age 80 or 90 and realize we missed our life completely!
So the Four Reminders are contemplations of appreciation. They are, in order:
- Life: How incredibly fortunate we are to be alive and to have the time to develop ourselves spiritually.
- Death: How this situation will absolutely, positively end. Death comes for all of us. We don’t know when and we don’t know what it will bring.
- Karma: What comes around goes around - the way we live our life and treat other people affects us.
- Desire: Accumulating more things, getting more famous, accomplishing great things all in order to build up your identity, is a huge fucking waste of time. Building up our identity leads nowhere. In fact, doing so distract us from what’s important - using this opportunity to wake up, see clearly, and help others.
Today I want to talk about #1 Life and the preciousness of it.
Life aka Why Meditate With Your Eyes Open
I was a sickly child. I was born with bad kidney/bladder plumbing, so I was frequently sick with infections, fevers and pain. When I was six, my parents found a surgeon in Boston named Hardy Hendron (nickname “Hardly Human” because of his skill) who operated on me to correct this plumbing. Although I missed a summer recovering in the hospital, the surgery worked and the infections stopped.
Around the same time, my friend Alex, also six, got sick and was hospitalized. I don’t know what disease he had, but he did not recover. He died fairly soon after I was released from the hospital. I still remember going to visit him and seeing him for the last time.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I think that experience had a profound impact on me. If it hadn’t been for the lucky combination of so many factors, I could have died like Alex did.
We all have stories like this. Close calls or health scares. So when we stop and think about it, we are lucky to be alive. We are lucky to have these bodies, be in this life. We very well could be… well… whatever happens when we are dead.
But more than that, we are lucky to have the time, resources and motivation to meditate. Many people don’t have those things. They have bodies, but they don’t have the time or energy. They are distracted by all the seductions of modern life, or they are struggling just to get by. Daily life is too hard, too painful, too difficult for them to have the luxury of meditation.
Yes, we all have struggles and challenges. I’m not minimizing the difficulties that we face. Many of them are significant. But at least we have tools to work with them, minds that can grasp the tools, and motivation to use them to alleviate suffering.
We are sooooo fortunate. Not only are we alive, and not only do we have the time, resources and motivation to develop ourselves, but we have teachings on how to do so, and a community of people to do it with.
This is such a fortuitous situation. The first Reminder is an appreciation of that fact. It’s encouragement not to waste it - to take advantage of it as much as we can.
Ok, let’s practice appreciating our fortunate precious human birth. Let’s do it with our eyes open, so we can see and appreciate everything in our world.