Halloween and Death

Tonight, kids are going out with masks to scare people.  On one side, they are celebrating dead people; that means death is scary. We don't know how dead people are acting or thinking, so we are scared of dead people.  We forget that we will join them.  The most interesting part is that we are hiding death by having tension.  We scare people, watch horror movies, go to haunted hayrides. On the other side, we are enjoying being scared.  There are two things behind that.  The first thing is we are fooling ourselves by proving we are not scared.  The second thing is we are enjoying someone else's fear.  We are having pleasure by scaring and being scared.  That is how we forget our sadness about death.  We are trying to forget that by making a joke out of it. None of us are certain about what will happen when we die.  We are afraid that we will have suffering with death.  Most of the time we see people dying of old age in the hospital, hooked up to machines, so we think death is very painful.  At the same time, some people die in a few moments.  One minute they are talking to someone, a few minutes later they are dead.  As living people, death is in our future.  We are all going to die; we cannot avoid that.  Still, we don't like to think about it.  We have attachment to the pleasure of life. Some people are scared of death because they believe in hell.  If somebody really believes in hell, they will live in a proper way.  Then they believe they are going to heaven.  Inside, they may still have doubt about that.  If someone has doubt about their life, they will have doubt about death.  One person came to the Buddha and said, "Some people believe there is no afterlife. If there is nothing after death, what is the meaning of a good life?"  The Buddha answered, "What is the point of a bad life? If there is nothing after death, it is still better to have a proper life, because you won't live forever."  If a person really thinks, "I am going to die," they will not hurt anyone.  Why take revenge on someone, why kill or harm someone if we are going to die? We have to understand why we don't like death.  If you understand that, you can lead your life in a meaningful way.  Whatever happens, it cannot make you sad because you know everything is impermanent.  When you meditate, you see everything pass.  If birth is holy, death is holy too.  If someone is alive, they are between birth and death.  All we can really do is relax in life and do what we can for the world because we are going to die one day, whatever we do. The moment of death is a very beautiful moment.  It is the only moment we can experience that.  It is better to think in a positive way because whatever we think, whether positive or negative, we cannot avoid death.  It might be a good door.