Transcending Life and Death Workshop

This is the big one! We have excellent workshops on what dominates your life, how experience is created, even changing your experience of life. But thus far, we haven’t done a workshop on the central and most primal issue of life and death. 

Even without enlightenment, by getting free of our deep and overwhelming assumptions about life and the meaning of life, and confronting the overlooked and resisted realities of death, we can proceed to confront and create a new relationship, understanding, and experience of life and death. 

Observe the fact that when you die, you will die all alone. Why is that? What overlooked experience and assumption does this reveal? One thing it points to is the fact that your entire self-experience is already alone. This fact is known by you but usually felt as a malady that should be overcome. 

Yet there is a struggle between taking care of this individual separate-self and trying to fix this sense of being alone and isolated. How do we attempt to remedy this experience of being alone? The entire domain of our experience that promises the possibility of not being alone is called the social domain. 

Our experience of life and death is founded on the existence of self and other. We might contemplate what a self is or what another is, but this rarely provides us with a deep enough consciousness to transcend life and death. Remember, Gautama Buddha devoted his efforts to transcending life and death, and this was his focus when he attained what came to be called complete enlightenment. 

Yet, we tend to ignore death as a reality for us, and relegate the truth of it to beliefs or fantasies. But neither belief or fantasy will make any difference when we die. 

As Shakespeare so eloquently put it: 

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The matter of death, as well as the truth of being existentially alone—and how it relates to death—is never really confronted. But it is the final and deepest matter of our entire existence. 

How can we transcend both life and death? How can we be complete with the fact of death while alive and so be complete with the life we are living? These questions are addressed in this workshop. If you are one of the few that would dare to take on this most real and overlooked issue, join us in this workshop and tackle it head on. 

Note: The Experiencing the Nature of Being Workshop is requisite before doing this workshop, and we also recommend doing the Transcending Self Workshop at some point prior to tackling this one, and that you follow your TLD immediately with the Insight and Enlightenment Workshop.