Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Jampa Kaldan invites practitioners to contemplate death not as morbid pessimism but as a wake-up call to wasted potential. He opens by citing Jé Tsongkhapa and Pabongka Rinpoche on the preciousness and fragility of human life, then unpacks the eight everyday worldly concerns—gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and obscurity, praise and blame—that unconsciously govern our behaviour and prevent us from living with purpose. Moving to the heart of the teaching, he explores three Buddhist perspectives on death: its inevitability (all beings die), the uncertainty of its timing (we could die tomorrow), and the crucial insight that only the quality of mind at death matters—possessions, relationships, and even the body will fail us. He concludes by introducing the Buddhist path of refuge: reorienting our deepest values from fleeting external things toward the Buddha (our awakened potential), the Dharma (the teachings and insights that transform us), and the Sangha (the community of practitioners). Throughout, Kaldan uses vivid examples—a car accident scenario, a sleeping driver jolted awake—to make abstract concepts visceral and immediate. Pitched at sincere practitioners new to Buddhist thought.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2002 02 04 10 Matters of Life and Death 4-2-02.mp3
UUID: bee9bee4-0e3a-467c-8fc5-b1ce3cdd442b
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Matters of Life and Death (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2002-02-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,862
This tradition of which the Dalai Lama is the head and which Buddha House is indirectly a part of. And Je Tsongkhapa, his picture should be here somewhere. Top, up that one. The top. A little quote from Je Tsongkhapa about death. The human body at peace with itself is more precious than the rarest gem. Cherish your body. It’s yours this one time only. The human form is won with difficulty. It’s easy to lose. All worldly things are brief like lightning in the sky. Life you must know is the tiny splash of a raindrop, a thing of beauty which disappears even as it comes into being.
So why should we bother looking at death? We’re about to look into an area that’s pretty well taboo in our society and why are we doing that? Another quote that I don’t know where it comes from but I like very much goes like this: one of the truly great wonders of the world is that everyone dies and yet everyone acts as if they will live forever. It’s a great wonder of the world that we’re all going to die but we all act as if we’re going to live forever. We habitually and instinctively believe we’re immortal. We can’t help ourselves, so we squander our lives too often, and perhaps we will end up dying filled with regrets and some fear maybe and lack of fulfillment. What was it all for? What did I achieve?
So in looking at death, we can muster the energy needed to help us cut through the everyday mundane concerns that consume our lives. Buddhist texts talk about eight everyday mundane concerns that we tend to build our lives around and it might be useful for us to briefly have a look at what these eight are as a background to going on to look at death. Another quote from a great Tibetan master from the last century, the twentieth century in Tibet called Pabongka Rinpoche. And one of the books on your reading list is a text, is a book written by him, his teachings that he gave.
So these eight mundane concerns. Geshe Potowa who was one of the early teachers from when Buddhism came to Tibet, he said you can’t sew with a two-pointed needle. You can’t sew with a needle with two points. If you don’t think about death, then you won’t ignore the stuff of everyday life. And if you don’t ignore that, then you’ll be influenced by the eight everyday worldly concerns. And they are: being happy if you receive gifts and unhappy if you don’t; being happy if you’re comfortable and unhappy if you’re not; being happy if you’re famous and unhappy if you’re not; and happy if you’re praised and unhappy if criticized. I’m going to go through these again for those of you who want to write them down, so it’s okay.
And then the great master from the first century, Nāgārjuna, these are his words about it. By the eight worldly concerns, we mean the worldly thoughts for receiving gifts or that I didn’t get a gift, or having comfort or about discomfort, or about fame or notoriety, or about praise or criticism. Keep a level head, he says. These are not subjects for your thoughts. Perhaps that’s not very realistic thinking on his part.
So how does this actually work in our lives? Let me go through these eight. How do these work in our lives? So I’m happy when I get things. So I really am elated when I get a pay rise, and I’m unhappy when I miss out. This is the second one so I’m disappointed that you didn’t reply to my email. And the third one I’m happy when I’m comfortable. It’s really great isn’t it when you lie back in the new soft lounge that you’ve just bought. It’s so nice or the water bed you’ve just bought. And I’m unhappy with any discomfort, how annoyed I am if the air conditioner breaks down, although it doesn’t matter this year, but normally. And I’m happy with attention. The fifth one, I’m happy with attention and fame. So how thrilling it is when I get my photo in a magazine. And I’m not happy with obscurity, so I get upset that no one recognizes all the work that I do around here. And I’m happy for praise always and in any form. Thank you very much. How I glow when I get a compliment from the boss. And I’m unhappy with the smallest criticism, so I’m even resentful when you don’t like my haircut.
So these eight concerns unconsciously drive a lot of our behavior every day. We often can build our lives around them. And maybe if we start looking closer there’s not a lot left in our lives if we took away all those eight things and what we do for them. But this isn’t to say that receiving things and being comfortable and being well known and being well thought of are bad things in themselves. This is not the point. These things are not bad. It’s rather that if we build our lives around those motives, seeking happiness in those ways and constantly trying to avoid unhappiness in those ways, that we can end up wasting our lives in quite superficial busyness. And it doesn’t bring us any deep satisfaction or long term happiness. And so we can miss out on the opportunity to grow and mature and to become more skillful and wise and compassionate.
Of course each of us already at times does choose to go against those habitual patterns. We all already do go against them because we choose, I want some longer term goals. I won’t just go with immediate whatever those eight are saying. And some of us do that very well at times. So here we’re really saying, let’s just bring a little closer, more explicitly to our awareness some of these issues and think about the degree to which they might be running things that I’m not even aware of in my life and is that good enough for me and how I’d like to live.
So looking at death is a bit like being shaken awake by your friend. You’re driving along at night, it’s late at night, you’re tired, you’re falling asleep at the wheel of the car, unfortunately your friend’s there sitting next to you and realizes that you’re falling asleep and gives you a hard shake on the shoulder just before you drive off the road. And looking at death is a bit like that. It’s like a hard shake on the shoulder to wake us up from this sort of half sleeping state that we wander through life, missing this amazing opportunity that we have right here and now in what we are.
So this is why we’re going to look at death, which we’ll go on and do now. And Buddhism looks at death, traditionally divides up how we look at death in three ways. And each of those three has an implication for us, something we should do about it. The first way, and we’ll look at each of these in detail. I’ll just quickly go through the three so you see where we’re going. The first way, angle that we’re going to bring to look at death is that it is inevitable that death will happen. Death is inevitable. The implication of that is, so I need to do something about it. Second one, it’s uncertain when it’s going to happen. It’s uncertain. We don’t know when. And the implication of that is, so what am I to do, perhaps I should do it with a little urgency. And thirdly, at death, it’s only at the time of death, it’s only the quality of our mind. It’s only the general state of the lived experience that we’re going through at that time that will be of any use to us as we enter into death. And so the implication of that is, let’s then find out what’s going to be the most effective way for transforming that lived experience so that I can enter my death when it comes to me in peace and in a relaxed way and feeling fulfilled with what I’ve done with my life.
So let’s go through those three one after the other. Firstly, the inevitability of death and a quote from a Buddhist Sūtra. Sūtra is a collection, is one of the teachings of the Buddha. This is a Sūtra called the Great Play Sūtra, and it mentions something called the three realms. Next week, we’re going to be talking about the Buddhist view of cosmology and these different realms, and one way of dividing them up is the three different realms of different types of living beings. Leave that till next week. Just so you know what this is talking about. The three realms are as impermanent as autumn clouds. Beings die and are born. It’s like watching a play. Beings’ lives are as brief as lightning flashes in the sky or they rush on like high mountain waterfalls.
So everyone that has ever lived has in fact died. Think back through history of all the people that have lived back through history, whether they’ve been queens or beggars or saints or sinners or men or women, rich or poor or ugly or beautiful, every one of those people has died. And every one of those people was a thinking, feeling being just like you and me. Every one of them had dreams about what life was going to be for them and hopes. Even all the great spiritual masters died. And more recently, we probably know some people who died in that great long tradition of people dying. We probably know some people. Perhaps someone who is very close to us has died. Perhaps bring, see if you can bring someone to mind that you know who’s died.
And this process of people dying is in fact going to, believe it or not, continue. So if we imagine ourselves in a hundred years time, if we were to put ourselves in a hundred years time, then all of us and everyone alive in the world today will have died except maybe for a newborn baby who was born yesterday and happens to live to a hundred. But for all practical purposes, all of us and everyone in the world today will be dead in a hundred years time. This absolutely without question unless the SBS program’s right and that one or two of us might make it through maybe. And imagine that there are no new births during that time and just bring to mind this awesome visage of a ghost planet. There’s just, you know, all the cities are there, but there’s no humans left anymore because there were no babies and everyone’s died.
And when we look at our own particular life, our own individual life, we see that one way we can look at it is it’s rushing on. It’s moving forward moment by moment to this inevitable time of our own death. And it’s just a matter of time. It’s just a matter of time. One of us sitting here out of our group here tonight, one amongst us is going to be the first one. We don’t know who it is, but one of us here will be the first one of us to die, to be followed by all the rest of us in succession.
A quote from the seventh Dalai Lama from a couple of hundred years ago on that point. After birth, you don’t have the freedom to rest a moment in the race. You run towards Yama, the lord of death. Yama is the traditional, from Indian mythology, the god of death who guards the gate of death and checks out where and holds a mirror up to you, which will become relevant next week when we talk about actions and their results. Holds a mirror up to you, the mirror decides what should happen. You just reflect yourself. Yama, the lord of death. What we call living is but a journey on the highway to death. Unhappy is the mind of the criminal being led to his place of execution.
So thinking like this naturally makes us feel a bit sad. We don’t particularly want to die, and it’s painful to look at it like this. But we can respond to this sadness by actually using its energy and to begin to undertake something meaningful with our lives. And this was the point I think brought home nicely by one of the quotes in the reading from the handout last week by Marcus Aurelius, the stoic philosopher and Roman emperor from the second century. And he concluded his little quote with the words, if then you would avoid discouragement, never become unduly absorbed in things that are not of the first importance.
So that brings us to the second way we look, the second angle we can look at death with and that’s the uncertainty of the time of our death. We’ve looked at its inevitability. It is going to happen. Secondly, let’s look at the uncertainty of that event. We don’t know when we will die. Perhaps it’ll be tomorrow or perhaps it’ll be seventy years time for some of us. Yet we tend to assume, we can’t help but tend to assume in the way we live that it’s going to be a long time for me. Despite the fact that there’s clear evidence that even young people do die. Perhaps there were instances in your life when you actually could have came close to death or you could easily have died if something had only just been a little bit different. Maybe just pause for a minute to think of something like that. Somewhere in your life, just the smallest little shift in circumstances, and yes, I would have died there. Perhaps a severe illness or an accident of some sort.
And not only are those sort of instances there in our past, we’re in fact surrounded by an absolutely overwhelming number of different possible ways that we could die if we start to think about it. We are a very complex functioning organism, and what we are is being carried on by this whole range of physical, chemical, biological, and social causes and conditions. And if any one of those goes wrong, it simply means that this thing we call ourselves doesn’t go on anymore. It stops. Think of sickness and accidents, electrocution, food poisoning, mugging, drowning, terrorist attacks are even known of these days. We’re a very fragile process, we organisms, and they can easily be disrupted. And how extraordinary actually that we can live at all. A lovely quote, another lovely quote from the great first century master Nāgārjuna. He says, Much can harm one’s lifespan. It is even more impermanent than bubbles on the water blown by the wind. How amazing that we wake up breathing after we’ve gone to sleep.
So this makes us feel even more unsettled and sad perhaps. It’s getting worse, isn’t it? But we’re not doing this to scare ourselves. It’s not like going to a horror movie for a thrill or to somehow punish ourselves for being so bad or something. But it’s to realize how amazing that we wake up in the morning after we’ve gone to sleep. That is amazing. What am I going to do about it? So with some urgency I want to seize this opportunity and use it in a worthwhile way.
So that’s the first one. It’s inevitable and it’s uncertain when. And the third one is that only the quality of mind will be of any benefit to me at the time of my death. Now we can spend a vast amount of effort in accumulating money and cars and houses and businesses and reputations and many other things during our lives, and none of those are bad in themselves. But if they are our reason for living, then they will shortchange us at the end.
Let’s do a little thought experiment here. I want you to think of some particular possession that you’ve got that you really like. This is something that’s good, you know. I like this. It makes me feel good that I own this. Think of something, like a bit of clothes or something at home, new stereo set or sorry, that’s a bit old. What’s the latest? Anyway, you know more about that at the moment probably. Something that you really like, you know, a new engagement ring that you just received. I don’t know. And now imagine that tonight after the session, you’re driving home, and it happens that tonight one of your friends is following you home in another car behind the car that you’re in. Okay? So the two of you are going to your place, you’re driving first, and your friend’s in the car behind. And you haven’t forgotten about this thing, right, that you really like. It’s great.
Now you’re involved in a really bad, bad car accident tonight, and the car’s an absolute mess, and you’re even worse, and you’re bleeding to death in the car, and you’re still a little bit conscious, but not just. And your friend screeches to a halt behind you, and she runs over to the car and looks into the wreck and looks at you and puts her hand out to what’s left of you and says, but it’s all okay. You’ve still got that thing. It’ll be okay. Now isn’t that just utterly bizarre? It is so bizarre, that thought. And yet, don’t we often relate to the things that we own as if they are almost that important?
What about our family and friends? So no matter how wonderful and supportive our relationships with them are, when they’re standing around our deathbed, then they’re not going to be of any help to us unfortunately. And what about our bodies, getting really close to home, which we westerners are so in love with? I suppose all human beings are, but we really love them a lot. We’re always cleaning and grooming them and keeping them fit and healthy and jogging them and doing all sorts of things to make sure they’re perfect, well dressed and well presented, all that stuff. So what use is this body going to be at the time of death?
Pabongka Rinpoche has a lovely quote about this again. Quite apart from your wealth, possessions, and relatives, you will also have to leave your body behind. The thing you call my body that was born from the womb with you and that you protected from hunger and cold, that you wouldn’t even prick with a thorn, that you guarded and cherished like a wish-granting gem. This body is so cherished and protected. It will prove pretty deceptive when you most need it.
So perhaps we’re feeling quite upset with such thinking about the people and the things in our lives. And we need to understand that having the things we need, cultivating good relationships, caring for our bodies are all really important and skillful things to do. But if they become the central values in our lives, the things in our life that we take refuge in, the things that we build our lives around, then we will inevitably find ourselves fearful and filled with regret when we die. We just can’t help that.
So that brings us to the fourth part of tonight’s talk, which is about this Buddhist concept of refuge. We’ve looked at death. We’ve looked at why we should consider death. We looked at death being inevitable, uncertain, and that it’s only the development of our mind that’s of any use. Now let’s have a look at this concept of refuge.
So I think the great call of death is to consider what is the best way in which I can prepare for this eventuality and thereby extract the essence from this wonderful opportunity that I have. So it might be an opportunity to either undertake or to renew a commitment to some sort of spiritual path that’s meaningful to me, useful to me in a way that I judge. And in the Buddhist tradition, we begin that process of the spiritual path by realigning our refuge points from the outer superficial having-orientated approach to the inner deeper being approach just like the Buddha did in his life that we saw in the first week. In the Buddhist understanding of spiritual practice, the first step is this reorientation of what our refuge points are, of what the values that we build our life around are.
Now in everyday life, we seek refuge in lots of things. We go for refuge to all sorts of things, hoping that they will both keep us safe in the turmoil of life and also lead us to satisfaction and happiness that we long for. And in this sense, we go for refuge to things like possessions and work and relationships and governments, our good looks, maybe our good looks, maybe the saving of money, maybe science and technology, our employability, buying insurance, having a good doctor and it goes on and on. Now let me say again, all of these may be necessary and of considerable value to us as far as they go. However, they are limited in their capacity to give us the sort of shelter that we deeply desire. They leave us without any overall direction for our deeper fulfillment. But on top of that limitation they can actually in themselves limit our development. A bit like a growing child who doesn’t want to move away from mom’s apron strings. It has to leave mom’s apron strings if it’s going to grow up.
Now this inner set of values in the Buddhist understanding of how we approach this reorientation of our refuge points is expressed in a very simple formula. I go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, and that’s it. These three Sanskrit words, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Buddha, the term referring to the state of awakening. Dharma means all different things in the text, but in this situation it basically means the path or the way. Sangha means spiritual community, practitioners who are trying to walk the spiritual path and practice it. Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. And I’ll talk about each of these in a bit more detail now. Each of those three can be understood at two different levels. An everyday relative level and a deeper ultimate level. So let’s look at each of the three in the way they can be understood at different levels.
What’s the Buddhist understanding of Buddha? At the everyday level, we can think of Buddha as being this great spiritual master who attained enlightenment, who fully understands the nature of reality, who has great compassion and was an extremely skillful teacher. And that such a person, such an amazingly fully developed being is worthy of seeking refuge in because of those extraordinary qualities that might be of use to us. That’s the everyday level. At the deepest level, Buddha is my own potential to grow and to fully awaken to the nature of reality. And this is made possible by my clear light mind, my Buddha-nature as we talked about it last week, which is simply waiting there to be realized. This part, this very subtle level of consciousness that we talked about that can be accessed via the correct meditational trainings, but that is not something new we create in ourselves, but is a deep level of our consciousness that’s there all the time, but we just aren’t aware of it. And so the two levels, the everyday and the deepest level of Buddha.
What about this word Dharma? Dharma. At the everyday level, this refers to the teachings about the spiritual path. Dharma is the teachings about how to practice, you know, how to go about spiritual practice. Then at the deeper level, Dharma refers to the growing inner realizations or insights based on practice and experience that you have for yourself. That there is another way of relating to oneself in the world. And in fact this second one of the refuges, the Dharma refuge, is usually out of the three seen as the ultimate one of the three. It’s sort of the most important of the three because it’s my insights which lead me to the transformation of who I am. And once I have new understanding and insight, we just know from everyday life. Once we have new insight and understanding about something, the power of that speaks for itself. We just know how to deal with the circumstance better now, even just in a very everyday simple thing, because I understand. I get it now, that’s how you do it. That’s a better way to do it. So the Dharma at this deeper level of our own insights.
And Sangha at the everyday level refers to, it usually is referred to the group of those spiritual practitioners who have become ordained as monks and nuns, but it can also refer in a more general sense to the community of practitioners, including laypeople. But then at the deepest level, it’s those practitioners who have actually attained the state of liberation or enlightenment. So it’s the actual practitioners who have gone a long way down the path of practice or even finished it. That is the deepest level of the Sangha refuge.
So these three, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, each of which can be understood at the everyday and the deeper level. And there’s an analogy that’s often used in the texts to illustrate our relationship with these three jewels of refuge. They’re called three jewels or the triple gem or the three precious jewels because they’re so precious, these three jewels. So the analogy that’s used is this. Imagine that we’re a sick person, and in this case, what we’re sick with, what the sickness is, is our dysfunctional repetitive patterns of lived experience that we’re stuck in and we just can’t seem to get out of them at all. Now we’re sick and the Buddha is the doctor who diagnoses our condition and prescribes the treatment and the Dharma is the medicine that we have to take to get better. It’s the teachings we have to put in practice to get new insights so things go differently for us. And the Sangha are the nurses who help us on the road to recovery.
I mean, like all analogies, it’s got its limitations, but it’s a bit of fun. Buddha’s the doctor, the Dharma’s the medicine. And then the teachers always have a bit of a chuckle when they talk about this because they always say, you know, and you get the medicine, you take it home and you put it up on your shelf. You know, isn’t that wonderful medicine? I love it. I prostrate to it. It’s so fantastic, but I’m not going to take it. So it’s all about starting to do things differently, and that’s what we’ll be going on to talk about next week.
Now each of these, so a Buddhist is traditionally defined as someone who has gone for refuge to these three jewels. An easy way of knowing if someone’s a Buddhist or not is simply whatever else they may believe or not, it’s simply someone who says, yeah, okay. That’s good. That’s where I’m going. That’s my direction. Those are the values I want to hold. Buddha. Yeah. Okay. I can relate to that. Sounds like a good goal to have in life. Dharma. Yeah. I want to get these insights for myself and that would, the business of transforming my own lived experience. And Sangha, it’d be great to have some companions to help me do it all. That’s what a Buddhist is.
Each of these three jewels traditionally is represented by a particular symbol. So the Buddha first. What are the symbols of the Buddha jewel? The main ones are the statues. So this statue here of Śākyamūni Buddha, Śākyamūni means the Buddha? Remember Gautama Siddhartha was from the Shakya clan. Śākyamūni means the teacher from the Shakya clan. Śākyamūni Buddha, in this image of him, it is meant to be a symbol of the Buddha jewel. And all these pictures you see around, quite a lot of them are of Buddhas. The one right behind me, these pictures on these cloths surrounded by some fancy cloth, in Tibetan, they’re called thangka. This thangka behind me is just another picture of the Buddha. So this also is a symbol of the Buddha jewel that I can relate to. So one way of seeing this symbol is this is a symbol of my potential. This here is symbolizing what I could be, at one way of looking at it.
And the Dharma, what’s the symbol of the Dharma? That’s usually taken as being like the texts, the actual Buddhist texts and books about Buddhism and stuff like that. These things, these instructions for how to go about spiritual practice are seen as like a symbol for the deeper meaning of the actual insights and realizations that transform one. And the Sangha, what’s the symbol for that? This is symbolized by the robes of the ordained monk and nun. So usually in Buddhist practice, what you’ll see happening around Buddha House and in any Buddhist place, you’ll see that these symbols are treated with great respect.
And you do that not because it’s an idol sitting there and you better be careful or some other funny stuff. It’s because you’ve chosen as a part of your well thought out practice that to outwardly show respect to a symbol of what you’re on about can be really skillful and useful for you because sometimes it’s a bit hard to relate to it all when it’s just inner stuff and thoughts. But if it can be embodied in what might be a, you know, a beautiful serene image like that, and then you develop respect to that. That’s done as a skillful method for well thought out spiritual practice. This is why I prostrated tonight at the beginning of the session for that reason.
Another way of doing that is that we usually do things like avoid pointing our feet at the object that we’ve chosen as a symbol of what’s important to us. And this just comes out of Asian culture, pointing your feet at the objects and Buddhists in the West tended to have picked up and carried on that tradition of avoiding pointing your feet at these objects. And often another way is not just showing respect, but often you’ll see what’s happening. What Buddhists often do is actually make offerings to these symbols. And once again, this has to be honest, what’s happening here? What’s the psychology of this process? This symbol, what’s important to me? I want to be generous to it because it’s so important. I want to show my regard for it by making an offering to these symbols, and that’s what you’ll see being done.
Flowers, if there are any flowers here, which there aren’t tonight, but if flowers are there they’re often done as an offering to the symbol or to the thought of these things that are important to me. That’s the reason we burn incense. I’m offering this incense to this central point that I’m building my life around. These three central things in a symbolic way. Those little bowls sitting on the front of the Buddha there and there’s some glass ones here in front of the pictures of the teachers. They are called offering bowls and they are, also the person who puts them there does a little mental practice. I’m offering, it’s just water in them but the person imagines it’s all sorts of lovely things that are being offered to this symbol.
Another sign of respect for the Dharma is having the teacher seated higher. So you’ll notice this throne, so when one of our teachers, one of our teachers, some of the pictures are here like Ken Rimpoché, my teacher who’s living in Adelaide, or Geshe-la who’s living in the room behind us, they will sit on this higher throne, and even I have been put up too much to make me symbolically a little bit higher. And that’s simply the same thing. It’s just a traditional skillful method for showing respect to what I value as Dharma. There’s teachings coming from here. This is Dharma. This is central to what I’m on about. So I want to visually show some respect for that by raising a little bit. And the respect for Sangha, a traditional showing of respect for the ordained person, for the robes, and of course, courtesy to one’s fellow practitioners can also be a way of showing respect to what it is that you value.
So to summarize the points that we’ve come at tonight. We’ll start at the end. In Buddhist practice we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. We shift our refuge points from those limited outer possessing type things to the inner, to our inner capacity to awaken, to grow up, to be more skillful, to mature, to even one day be enlightened. And we also seek refuge in the pathway by which we might be able to achieve this. And we also seek refuge or build our lives around or value those who can support us in this work. And we can find some motivation for this shift in our refuge points, in our life’s direction, in our priorities when we look clearly at the inevitability of our death and the uncertainty of when this is going to happen and the need for some urgency in our response to that situation and realizing that it’s only the quality of my mind that will be of benefit to me at my death. And thus, I need to be somewhat discriminating about what