Will You Do It

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers, I’d like to ask you this question today, will you do it?

Will you do it?

People say to me “its interesting that you practice meditation frequently, perhaps daily”.

So many people know the benefits of meditation, so many people know how it will keep you calm and allow you that space to make a decision before you react. 

So many people know its a path to enlightenment or deeper spiritual life, deeper understanding and enjoyment of the external world as well but how many do it? How many will sit down and take that 5,10, 20 minutes or an hour every day to show that respect to themselves even though intellectually they know?

I was having this conversation with someone telling me about their fear of death. They said to me “Kurt don’t you fear death?”

I suppose I do perhaps a little bit but generally no, its not something that plagues my mind even with the world as tumultuous it is, even with the question of authoritarianism looming over us in some form.

No it doesn’t really occupy much in my thoughts.  They said “why? How can you not have that fear?” 

I said “Well” I had to think about it for a moment and I recall many years ago I think probably first watching ghost dog that movie with the Soundtrack by the Rza, Forest Whittaker in the titular role and in one point it quotes The Way of the Samurai, well at several points. 

I went on to read the book and it says the samurai should meditate every day on death, different forms of death that may assail him. Drowned by tidal waves, having his entrails pulled out or committing seppuku as a death of honor.

And I took that seriously but as seriously as a samurai but over the next weeks or so I meditated on that and thought about it quite a lot. What is it like to die? How does it feel to experience death, what might happen after?

Similar to the experience I describe with my interview with Prasad and even afterward when I was in the theater, the first play I was ever in was a production of Macbeth.  When we started the casting I had no roles but by the end of the production I had about four roles, or five roles. Amateur theater. 

In the first act I was the Than of Cordor, the first one to die in this play.  Before I would go onstage I would again meditate on what it was like to die, to be decapitated by your king and die with honor.  We can reasonably conclude that these things will reduce and eliminate our fear of death, a kind of exposure therapy. 

Yes its easy to conclude that, will we do it? Will we do the things that make a difference in our lives? 

I have to ask myself this question so often because I am not the most disciplined person. 

But I do do these things because they are important, because we stand so much to gain from introspection, from facing those things that appear ugly to us on the surface. But below the surface we find they are beautiful.

I ask you, challenge you, invite you to ask yourself that question. If you know its good, when you know its good, when you can see its good will you do it?