The other day I visisted Skogskyrkogården (Woodland Cemetery), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is a beautiful place to visit and relax the pace for a while.
I walked around and looked at tombstones, statues of angels, admired an interesting gate, saw Greta Garbo's grave and there is a visitor center with a giftshop, café and an exhibition (not open year round though). You can't help but reflect on life, death and the afterlife or lack of thereof when spending hours at a cemetery.
Resurrection Statue.
Angel of Death by sculptor Carl Milles.
An interesting keyhole.
This gate is intriguing to me, it's located inside the Woodland Chapel which was locked so I took the picture through a small window in the door. The giftshop at the visitor center sells a poster of the gate. There is something about the skulls with the snakes underneath them.
My personal thoughts on death.....Death scares me because it is the unknown. I dread the day somebody I am close to passes away. I do not want to go through that, again. I experienced one huge loss once and I think about that daily and it hurts.
I do not want to be here on Earth again, one life is enough for me. Just like the Buddhist believe, existence is a cycle of life, death, rebirth and suffering and to me being alive is to suffer so I do not want to suffer another lifetime, or even worse over and over again in samsara.
How do I suffer you might ask? I am extremely grateful that I have food, water, shelter, clothes, health, everything that I have but I get sad everyday when I see and read about human behavior. I get sad if I see any kind of bad, from too much litter laying around to a human or an animal that can't defend themselves get mistreated. I do not like feeling that deeply because it affects me. I can feel it in my heart area and stomach. There is too much bad in the world. So if I can just die one day and maybe if I am lucky/blessed get to spend forever together with all the pets I have known and will know and all the other beautiful animals in a nature setting in some sort of a nirvana afterlife then that is a perfect forever ending to me.
Rex on :
This post got me to wondering, is death really the end of all suffering? I haven’t the faintest idea, other than knowing that death brings an end to the materialistic world everyone obsesses over, which is the main driver for so much suffering. Enlightenment is the end of suffering, Buddha said.
We don’t exactly know what the next moment will bring, but if it brings suffering Buddha said it has to be accepted and the pain suffered.
Enlightenment is the end of suffering according to Buddha. One interpretation I have about this, is that we suffer because we desire to a degree that causes guilt and shame (or worse hate and contempt for others) where it smashes the foundation of peace that is being experienced in each moment of life.
Removing this burden of desire can possibly allow for one to not have to wait for peace to occur.
One silver lining I think of “in the now” is the realization that all this materialism is an incomplete view of the universe because it doesn’t encompass everything. And so getting one small step closer to an insight, some kind of enlightenment, and Nirvana all before we die probably has to do with a ‘blowing out’ or ‘quenching’ of the activities of the materialistic worldly mind and it’s suffering.
TATIANA on :
Read about samsara. Although you probably already have.
Yes I agree the materialistic world is the cause for a lot of suffering. This is the world we live in. It is insanity, really.
Rex on :
Samsara is an interesting one, it gets really deep. Only know a little about it, enough to flirt with the ideas of karma and notions of reincarnation in relation to the cycle of life and death.
What seems odd though is when a so-called guru or Vedic teacher talks about someone not learning a lesson well enough so they have to reincarnate and come back through another cycle of life to liberate from it further.
Nobody really knows this is so. Maybe that's false. One lifetime is probably enough suffering, it's sufficient enough in these outlandishly wild times, really. Maybe death is a grand liberation from it all--the materialistic dimensions, attachment, regression, obsession?
It's fun to feed the mind and soul with these philosophies and ancient t teachings, but I try not to get overly serious about them here. Everyone's countdown koo-koo clock goes to zero on a long enough time horizon. This is one certainty I like.
Death is one of life's greatest inventions, better than the invention of all the philosophies & art produced in the world combined because the totality of all that still doesn't come close to explaining deah.
TATIANA Post author on :
"Nobody really knows this is so. Maybe that's false."
Exactly....nobody knows.
"One lifetime is probably enough suffering."
I think so.