How to Learn to Let Go Before It's Too Late | Pema Chödrön

Do you have an intuition or a sense of what the whole entire shebang is up to here? What the whole universe is up to? I have no idea. I have no idea. Now you mentioned, Anupama, that all of us will have this opportunity for merging at the time of our death. Yes. And you also said that a way we can touch that while we're alive is looking and feeling the infinity of the sky, daylight sky, night sky. How else can we practice and prepare? What can we do to prepare ourselves in the midst of our daily life for that moment at the time of our death so that we don't miss it? Well, one way, first of all, is to prepare yourself for the fear experience, you know, fear of the unknown, like total panic. I don't know how much you've been with dying people, but people can die when they just relax and let go and they can die very afraid and like screaming as if they're about to be thrown into a dark pit, you know. And so that's one way, right, to work with that which obscures. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah. And the other way is to, well, one of the things that I teach is called the pause practice. And I teach it a lot, so I've gotten a lot of feedback about it and so forth. But basically, like, let's just use an example. You're out for a walk by yourself, and generally speaking, we go for a walk by ourselves and we're having an internal conversation, right? So then you intentionally, some people do it with something on their watch or something makes a little sound, and Thich Nhat Hanh used to do it with a mindfulness bell. You just pause, and there's like maybe a couple of breaths or just a moment of just looking out. And then you just go on with your walk, and then you again realize you're just, you're not really there, and then you intentionally pause. And these pauses, initially, they can be really short and like that, you know, maybe a little longer than that. But you want it short enough that the mind doesn't start talking, commentating. But then as people do it a lot throughout their day, then they find that it can be, they can extend that thought. And it's like, some people describe it as like silence, a kind of silence. Some people, even though there's noises going on, other people describe it as emerging. Other people describe it as just a deeply relaxing, intimate with sounds and sights. But it's like a kind of obvious is you're walking along and you pause and you say, oh, I didn't even notice that the wind was blowing the grass. I didn't even notice how beautiful the clouds are today. You know, it's like coming into the moment. That's training for death and life, of course. Okay, I have a big question for you, which is, you know, I'm getting a feeling in our conversation about this sort of individual arc. And of course, the individual is moving out of the cocoon into this infinite space. But do you have an intuition or a sense of what the whole entire shebang is up to here? What the whole universe is up to? All of space, what's it up to? And what's it up to us through us as humans? What's going on at that level? I have no idea. I'm assuming your question probably comes from talking to a lot of people about that topic. Well, I'm interested. Is the universe evolving, growing in love in some way? Our activity is part of that. Is there some grander sense of purpose or directionality? Kind of anything like that on a larger scale. So maybe, I don't know if you'll agree with this, but that all sounds so conceptual. It's pretty dreamy out there. I'm pretty out there. Human minds trying to explain or glamorize or whatever. It's like trying to make a meaning out of it or make it fit into some kind of scheme or something like that. And I think that's kind of so human. It's so not infinite. I don't know how to put it. But it seems to me that it's trying to get comfort again by something to hold on to. That's kind of how it strikes me. Now, of course, someone might have the actual experience of this. But then I would say that all that you're describing there, with them trying to put something indescribable to describe something indescribable. And coming up with their own ideas of what it all means and how it's all happening. I find it kind of counter-awakening in a kind of way. Like getting stuck at a kind of higher level of realization or something, but still stuck because you're holding on to some kind of image of how things are. So to me, it's better to just say, wow, it is a real mystery. And it's completely unconditioned and not graspable. And you can't pin it down. And we don't know what's happening. I go that direction. More and more in the groundless direction. But that's not to say, if you said, what's the use of a human life in terms of all this, I would say that would be to, one person at a time, overcome the illusion of separateness. And let your heart grow bigger and bigger for people and with people. For all of us, the capacity to love and care, have tenderness, live in a way that we bring those capacities out. This I would definitely say. And I would say I spend my life doing that, actually. That's kind of like my job description, you might say, in the sense of what I really care about.