Meditations on Impermanence

The whole point of meditation on impermanence is to get beyond selfish thinking which most people tend to live in. So, one of the techniques that was used by masters in India and other places teaching their students was to have them sit for up to one month watching a human body on the street or on a battlefield decompose slowly. The reason for doing this is to put down into someone's subconscious the fact that they will die some day and to make them deal with this fact. Often, this causes the enlightenment of a person or helps someone towards this if they don't go insane or crazy from doing this. It all depends upon the person. But, someone balanced enough and strong enough to be capable of enlightenment often can do a quantum jump in consciousness if they are ready for such an experience.

However, most people raised in the U.S., Canada or Europe have been so sheltered from the direct experience of death in their lives that many could not deal with this and it just wouldn't be helpful in regard to enlightenment at all.

One would have had to have grown up seeing death on the streets all their lives and to be a little deadened by this experience to have this be useful in their quest for enlightenment in most cases now.

However, watching an animal decompose that has died by itself in the wilds might be enough separation to be helpful to someone seeking enlightenment in the western world. But, if someone killed or harmed that animal it would defeat the whole purpose of the meditation on death.

When I was about 9 years old my friend and I found a recently dead squirrel in Glendale, California likely in 1957. So, we pulled out our jacknives and cut out all its organs one by one to try as children to understand how mammals were made. So, we saw its heart and liver and lungs and intestines. After we did this we had a much better understanding of what was inside all mammals including us. We also knew enough to wash our hands after doing this. But I wouldn't recommend this to anyone else. We were just curious boys growing up in the 1950s in California.

Since the 1980s I pray for all beings that I see or hear of that have died or are about to die to go to the nearest heaven. Because I have done this over 30 years I find it is extremely powerful and often the spirits of animals or people come to me and thank me for praying for them. Often with dead animals, especially road kill thank me because no one else has prayed for their journey to heaven.

And Once all humans or animals get to the nearest heaven and then to whatever heaven is the right one for them they often pray for me or whoever helped them or prayed for them too. Like I said this is an incredibly powerful thing to do. At least once a day or as much of the time as I can remember to do this I also pray for every living thing that has died that day or since I last made this prayer to go to the nearest heaven.

The Tibetan Lamas have a saying. They say that the difficult times for beings are: "Birth, old Age, Sickness and Death". As an intuitive I have observed this to be true for most all beings but the most exceptional.