The four reminders are:
1) Life: How incredibly fortunate we are to be alive and to have the time to develop ourselves spiritually.
2) 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.
3) Karma: What comes around goes around - the way we live our life and treat other people affects us.
4) 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.
This talk, this contemplation, is about death. An enormous part of religion is aimed at answering the question “What happens when you die?” Both for the living and the mortally ill, this question has fueled uncountable books, prayers, rituals, and so on.
The fact of the matter, though, is that we don’t know. What we do know, to quote Jim Morrison of The Doors, is “No one gets out alive.”
We also don’t know when we will die. Despite having the greatest health and wellness technology in recorded history, despite human longevity being the greatest it has ever been, we don’t know when or how we will die.
I recently had a heart MRI [story of that experience… that one muscle…]
So this reminder is the other side of the first one - we have an incredibly fortunate situation, and it will absolutely end.
It’s worth contemplating that until we are scared enough to do something about it.
Or as Michelangelo said to one of his students:
‘Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw and do not waste time’