no-big-deal dharma

There is only being living itself
through you, as you, and as all that exists.

""This is actually a totally ordinary state. I call it 'no-big-deal dharma' — simply everyday life. It is nothing special. With this kind of open and spacious awareness, we are complete, and this moment is complete. There is nothing special to realize, no transcendent reality to achieve, nothing outside of what is unfolding in any given moment".

— Joan Halifax, Being with Dying

" There’s such a tremendous range within our own cultural experience. So, for example, fundamentalist Christians, though I’m not so familiar with this world, but the notion of heaven, of a sublime afterlife, of going home to God or to Jesus, the raptures, which death will allow is something that is, I think, very promising for Christians. And in the East or in Africa, the veneration of ancestors, the deep respect for the elderly, to understand that, number one, being an old person is not about your parts breaking down in the organ recital that one makes in the difficulties of aging, but it is about, really, the accumulation or the presence of wisdom based on having had a life, and an appreciation for the good deeds one has done in the course of one’s life. So, you know, the relation to aging is quite interesting to explore in other cultures.

And one of the most important things about Buddhist cultures is this view, not that we want to hurry up and die at all — in fact, our lives are an ongoing opportunity for us to realize compassion in the world and to really be a benefit to others — but that how extraordinary at the moment of death we have this opportunity to unify with our basic nature, which is, in a way, what heaven is. So, you know, that kind of shapes people’s relationship to death. And, I mean, Victor Frankl said it very simply: “Death gives life meaning.”

There’s a cliche that says that as people have lived, so they will die. And I think that there’s some truth to this. And when you’re dying, the capacity to control things is a lot less. So, you know, frequently, what one sees is the people who have done a lot of spiritual work and psychological work, they meet their death, potentially, with more equanimity than people who are psychologically pretty crossed up. I think also we’re supremely designed to die...

I live in a monastery, so I didn’t have, you know, as much exposure to the media. But I think that our rights in dying have to be explored in detail. And, you know, it’s almost as if our courts are not the place entirely where the rights of the dying should be defined. And I think a very deep discussion between legal people, pastoral people, anthropologists and the like is warranted in, you know, a further understanding of how to respect the right to die and the rights of dying people. I think it’s important to realize that Terri Schiavo engendered not only a lot of anguish in her family, but also she engendered a lot of compassion. And, you know, it’s one of these moments in public private life where you realize that a kind of archetypal level of inquiry, of question and of drama is unfolding, and that it could actually produce not just a polarized outcome but a very beneficial outcome for all of us.

You know, since we can’t know what’s the best — and I couldn’t say, I was asked by many people — I think that one always looks to mercy in such a situation. Of course, mercy is very dependent on your point of view; what’s merciful is to prolong, what’s merciful is to let go. But I kept trying to look out of Terri Schiavo’s eyes before her coma and after her collapse and what really serves this beautiful person here?"

-- Joan Halifax interviewed by Krista Tippett