Ed Gabrielsen

My teacher, Khenchen Konchok Gyaltsen, once gave a short talk on Milarepa that was very powerful. It went something like this: Khenchen said, “The only way to be free from the fear of death is to practice the Dharma. We all know we will die someday. But we don’t know when. We think we are going to live for 100 years. But really, we don’t know that we won’t die tomorrow. The time of death is uncertain.

Milarepa was terrified of this uncertainty. He had committed serious negative karma, and he wanted to purify it before he died. And so, he went to the mountains. Milarepa said, “Fearing death, I escaped to the mountains. There, I meditated unceasingly on the uncertainty of the time of my death. Then, because of this, I captured the unchanging nature of the fortress of the mind. Now, I no longer fear death.”

So many people are afraid of death. What would it be like to overcome this fear? How would life be different if we lived without this fear? Milarepa shows us that it is possible. He overcame the fear of death by realizing emptiness, the spacious, pure openness of reality: the way things are, right now, in our immediate present, before concepts, projections or delusions.

Through practicing the Dharma, the Buddhist teachings and meditation instructions given to him by his teacher, Marpa, Milarepa discovered and lived in the experience of emptiness. He describes this experience as a “fortress.” This is because when he attained this realization, he knew it was the truth. It was unassailable, like a fortress. And when he found this truth, as an experience, not as an idea or theory, but as a living experience, moment by moment, he no longer feared death. The fear of death fell away.

The experience of emptiness is available at every moment. Simply rest in the open spaciousness of the mind before thoughts arise. Before the personality, before emotions, before all the stories about who I am, what I like and don’t like, in other words, in the peace and calm before the construction of ego; rest in the bare fact of being alive. This is our natural state. Awareness. Consciousness. It is the blue sky in which all clouds appear and disappear. It is a stainless ambrosia. It is the fortress of the deathless, unending mind. Like Milarepa, we, too, can discover the fortress and fear death no more.