The Five Remembrances
Heart of Winter Retreat 2023
A talk by Tim Burnett

I was actually kind of amazed that several of our group was drawn here partially because of your existing practice with the Five Remembrances of early Buddhism. And of course it’s wonderful to be here for any reason, never having heard of the 5 remembrances is great too.

These teaching themes I offer in our mindfulness retreats really to me feel more like a kind of flavoring. The main meal and nourishment being taking this time, sacred time we could say, to deeply taste our lives. To immerse in our experience with curiosity and openness and as best we can manage a kind of fundamental fresh-ness.

And offering these teachings is a kind of project I’ve taken up for the mindfulness community. I’ve somehow been blessed to receive training in both Buddhism and contemporary mindfulness with some wonderful teachers. I love the way in mindfulness you really don’t need to believe anything other than a certain core idea that paying attention to what is matters. That’s enough. And yet many people also find it helpful to have some familiarity with the traditions and ways of thinking that contemporary mindfulness practice is drawing on. And no question that Buddhism is an important one.  Or really Buddhisms, there are many different ways Buddhism is practiced and discussed. Often I call the retreat where I share these talks “Roots of Mindfulness” or “Roots of Compassion” depending on the emphasis. You can listen to a few dozen of them on our website later if you get really interested.

So maybe whatever I manage to say this morning about the Five Remembrances will spark some freshness and interest in how you see this life. And there’s nothing here that you have to figure out or “get” in order for this weekend to be helpful to you. The traditional instructions for receiving these kinds of talks is to really just them wash over you. Notice if the mind has that oh-so-familiar desire to grasp onto something that sounds important, or reject something, or be frustrated by not having some feeling of “I get it!”.

And as with the list of poems we share as you noticed I’m recording this and I’ll be posted on our website with the other talks like these.

So we don’t really know what the Buddha said. We don’t. Don’t believe your social media feed too literally when the Buddha quotes come rolling through. We’re not even sure when exactly he lived, but we’re pretty sure he did exist. And of course tremendous numbers of teachings and sayings and stories are now thought to be true, but we can never be totally sure. The same with other great religious figures.

One important set of teachings were written down in 29 B.C. in Sri Lanka about 500 years after the time of the Buddha. These teachings had been preserved orally that whole time. Different monks and nuns would specialize in memorizing and reciting different collections of teachings and eventually a group of them got to together and wrote it all down. It’s some thousands of pages so it’s a quite astounding thing really.

In that collection we find all kinds of things. Teaching stories. Quite specialized meditation instructions. Stories of things going wrong for the early monks and nuns and how the Buddha used issues and mishaps as opportunities for teaching and also for ethical guidelines. And lots of practical everyday reflections. Notably the Buddha taught to both his renunciate disciples who had given up regular life to devote themselves full time to practice and to lay followers who like us had families and jobs and so on.

Today’s topic is in that last category. The teaching is the Upajjhatthana Sutta in the Pali language this collection was written down in which means “teaching on subjects for contemplation” but it’s not presented like the Buddha said, please now memorize these subjects and contemplate them. He just starts talking with us:

“There are these five facts that one should reflect on often, whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained. Which five?

And then he answers his own question:

“‘I am subject to aging, have not gone beyond aging.’ This is the first fact that one should reflect on often whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained.”

Aging is the first remembrance. And like all of them it’s not news. We know we’re aging. I just had my 57th birthday and as I do every year I find that an odd mix of special, surprising, kind of weird, and utterly ordinary. I feel like me. Which seems like I feel like I always do but I do think my feeling of me-ness is always changing. It’s just I’m so in the middle of it I cant really tell.

Since we have a planet that happens to go around the sun every 365 days we think about years and once a year we remind each person on the planet about this truth from Buddha. Hey, it’s a special day it’s been a year since you last paid attention to aging. Or maybe you’ve had some health issues in the meantime or noticed changes in how your mind seems to work and you’ve thought about, maybe complained about, aging a good bit in between.

The invitation here from Buddha is to feel into the way we’re aging all the time. Not once a year. We’re all, what, 16 hours older than when we started our retreat last night. Every minute, every moment is a moment of aging.

The phrase in the traditional wording of “have not gone beyond” is interesting. I think that’s to undermine an assumption we might have that there’s some way to get out of this. And of course there’s much commerce and industry and money around trying to slow down, or hide, aging.

And while we can’t argue with any of these 5 truths we often don’t live as if we really got them. That’s the pivot here. That’s the change point. How would I live, right now, today, if I really understood that I’m aging. Something around prioritizing or living more fully in your values perhaps? What might it be for you?

And the Buddha goes on:

“‘I am subject to illness, have not gone beyond illness’. This is the second fact that one should reflect on often whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained.”

A friend and colleague of mine has been surviving cancer surprisingly well. And then was surprised to wake up one morning unable to read this bedside clock. He could see the red color of the display was there but not make sense of what it said. He’s tried to explain it to me but I don’t quite get it. Not blurry exactly but just not interpretable as shapes and numbers. It turned out he’d had a stroke in the night which has affected the visual cortex in his brain. He stayed pretty cheerful about this at first, “It’ll be a new adventure” he told me in the hospital. And then he had another stroke 3 days later and his vision got even more strange, dim, and incomprehensible. His bright cheerfulness had dimmed a little last I saw him but was still there. Resilience is kind of amazing isn’t it?

We all know that something this could happen tomorrow morning. Goodness knows after millions of deaths from Covid we all know that tiny little biological things called viruses we can’t even see could float into our nostrils at any time and start wreaking havoc on our systems.

We all crave safety, and we should absolutely all do our best to support each other in loving ways to have that safety, and these remembrances remind us that there is no safety.

The deep practice is holding those two facts. They seem to oppose one and other at first. I was safety but there is no safety. Can we find a feeling of safety that isn’t based in the lie of denial or the unreasonable expectation of every finding perfect safety? Can we feel safe within the reality of danger.

In a way it’s amazing our body can ever be alive even for a moment isn’t it? There a lot more ways for us to end up not a alive than anything else. And yet here we are. All of us are so completely and amazingly alive. Alive within a body that will age, will get sick, will die.

The Buddha is a bit relentless here in his compassionate teaching on wisdom, he goes on:

“‘I am subject to death, have not gone beyond death’. This is the third fact that one should reflect on often whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained.”

My Buddhist teacher used to remind us that the first terminal condition we’ll ever face is birth. And it’s our mixed up attitude about death that makes “fatal” sound like a bad thing. Fatal is a good thing actually! Fatal is being alive with all of it’s joys and sorrows and opportunies. If bad things are things we try to avoid there’s only one way to avoid “fatal”: to never be born in the first place. Maybe we all need T-Shirts that say, “Happy to be fatal!”

Fatal comes from fate. What’s our fate? Well none of us knows that’s going to happen to us exactly but we know for sure our fate includes aging, illness, and death.

And we aren’t dead right now. We’re alive. Completely alive. My teacher also used to help train hospice volunteers and he’d remind them that it’s upside down thinking to think they are going to support dying people. We are all dying people, every one of us. The people they were going to support we’re alive. And the work is to sit with them and support them in their aliveness as we all, together, embrace, our dying-ness.

My friend who is now functionally blind will need to be careful with this. He’s lost normal vision for sure. But now he’s being born as a new person. Maybe we’ll be able to stay in touch his spirit of adventure. But it’s not all downhill from here anymore than it ever was for him. He’s completely alive.

Back to Buddha. Okay maybe you’ve at least a little bit more accepted your own nature but at least we can lean on the world around us to be there to support us through this journey. Well, yes, we can – completely – but not in that way perhaps. He went on:

“‘I will grow different, separate from all that is dear & appealing to me’. This is the first fact that one should reflect on often whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained.”

I’ve gone through a bit personal revolution in the last few years. A marriage of nearly 30 years ended a few years ago and now I’m engaged to be married again. Quite astounding. I never could have imagined this when I was navigating whether the marriage was over or not. Never. So there’s something there about all of this too. We think we can imagine what’s coming but really we can’t.

Anyway the point here being we’ve been contemplating the guest list for the wedding. A challenge of getting married in your late 50’s is you know so many people so we’re struggling not to have a huge wedding. A good problem to have I guess.

But reflecting on who to invite has me thinking also of dear friends I’ve fallen out of touch with. I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of finding them all and inviting them to the wedding. My one old friend Andrew keeps coming to mind. We were as tight as could be from teenage years to out early 30’s. Formative years. I tried emailing once but it bounced back. I have a phone number which might still work but I keep not calling. I’ve actually put “call Andrew” on multiple to-do lists and even on my calendar as for a while I was thinking “I just keep forgetting to make time to call.” And also lots of narrative about how resistant I am calling people up in general.

But now I’m seeing that it’s all about not accepting this truth fully. Andrew and I had a wonderful friendship. Then he moved away and we didn’t keep in touch. Sometimes, sure, it’s wonderful to reconnect with old friends. But I think something deep inside me is saying it’s time to accept the 4th contemplation here and I’m resisting. We’re separated him and I. Grown different. Moved apart. And that’s hard.

But I also feel into how the moments I’m pining for something that was are moments I’m not appreciating what is. Not appreciating the wonderful friendships I have now. My amazing fiance’. The beauty of the sun rising over Lookout Mountain to the south of here as I sat in meditation with you this morning.

Accepting more fully that we will separate from everything is also an embracing of what’s right here and now, whatever that my be. Until eventually that’s our last breath.

My Buddhist teacher Norman is also the teacher and friend of a wonderful teacher who works with these things named Frank Ostaseski. Frank has created a few organizations that are all about hospice work, grieving, and helping medical people doing palliative work, and really everyone with the reality of living and dying. Frank has sat with many many people as they breathed their last breath. I’ve had the honor of being in that room a few times myself. The body sure wants to keep breathing until with a sort of gasping final attempt it lets go.

Frank offers us his own list of five for practicing with this. He wrote a book about it all called The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. Here they are:

“1. Don’t wait. 2. Welcome everything, push away nothing. 3. Bring your whole self to the experience. 4. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 5. Cultivate don’t know mind.”

Sure sounds like exactly what we’re doing this weekend doesn’t it?

“1. Don’t wait. 2. Welcome everything, push away nothing. 3. Bring your whole self to the experience. 4. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 5. Cultivate don’t know mind.”

So that Buddha, having given us this intense dose of reality therapy gives one last contemplation that points to a way forward for us in all of this.

“‘I am the owner of actions, heir to actions, born of actions, related through actions, and have actions as my arbitrator. Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir’. This is the first fact that one should reflect on often whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained.”

The wordings’ a little dense there but the idea is clear isn’t it? Pay attention to what you do. That’s the only real influence you have. And in Buddhist understanding thinking is an action too. Like an action of our body a thought we reinforce has  results. Affects us, and affects everyone we encounter. Buddha did teach that we can distinguish between the initial thought that bubbles up and the thoughts we then lay on top of it. And that there’s a choice point there as we all know. This thought appeared, now what?  Do I believe in it, add to it, deny it, ignore it, explore it? Leave it be? An important point of practice.

But even more clear to us all can be the incredible power of our actions of speech and body. I was a little confused by what someone had told me about an interaction she’d had with another friend of mine and went to talk to her. I ended up speaking a way that was accusing and hurtful, I sure didn’t every intend that, and found out that she was horribly upset by this. And then, I choose the action of meeting with her, and exploring what had happened, and seeing what I could learn from it. And apologizing. And healing resulted. Sometimes trouble leads to connection, learning, and growth. Joy even. Actions and results are complex and rich. A study for the rest of our lives.

At first his wording there that we are “heir” to our actions sounds funny but actually I think it’s quite smart isn’t it? The heir inherits something. We inherit what our actions contribute to. And there’s no turning it down. An inheritance you can’t renounce. And then what’s done is done.

And here’s the next action.

Here’s a wording I shared last night from Koun Franz’s wonderful article that was linked into the retreat description on the website:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

And here again are Frank’s smart practices – the five invitations we can start taking up a bit more often:

“1. Don’t wait. 2. Welcome everything, push away nothing. 3. Bring your whole self to the experience. 4. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 5. Cultivate don’t know mind.”

So no conclusions exactly and it’s not exactly like we’ll figure this out in a flash of insight. A little flash is nice sometimes though. But little by little, moment by moment, with so much patience and acceptance to see a little more clearly the ways we live and act and are tangled up by our denial of these facts.

And wonderfully, to see the joy and light that can come when we let go of ignorance and live in harmony with what is. That’s the real meaning of freedom, isn’t it? To live in harmony with how things actually are.