I love the story of a conversation at an English country house at a dinner party where the
 hostess started up the question of death and asked the various guests what they thought
 was going to happen to them when they die.
 And some thought about reincarnation and others thought about various kinds of different planes
 of being and others thought they were going to be annihilated.
 But none of the guests had answered except Sir Roderick, who was a kind of a military
 type but a very devout pillar of the Church of England.
 He was the church warden, chief of the vestry in the local country parish.
 And the lady said, "Sir Roderick, you haven't said a word.
 What do you think is going to happen to you when you die?"
 "Oh," he said, "I am perfectly certain that I shall go to heaven and enjoy everlasting
 bliss but I wish you wouldn't indulge in such a depressing conversation."
 That's true, isn't it?
 Death in the Western world is a real problem.
 We hush it up.
 We pretend it hasn't happened.
 Our morticians, who are very smart commercial operators, know exactly what's expected of
 them and they make death just awful by pretending it doesn't happen.
 See what happens.
 You go to a hospital and you're at the end.
 You've got terminal cancer.
 And all your friends come around and they wear false smiles and they say, "Cheer up,
 you'll be all right.
 In a few days from now you'll be back home and we'll go out for a picnic again."
 The doctors have their bedside man.
 You see, a doctor is absolutely helpless with a terminal case because he's a doctor by social
 definition a healer.
 And he's not allowed to help you die.
 He's out of role.
 Even though, I mean, he may sneak behind the rules and do it, but he's definitely, he's
 got to heal you, so he's going to keep you indefinitely on the end of tubes and all kinds
 of things.
 While there's a certain grave demeanor to all this and all the nurses are so pleasant
 and so totally distant because they know this is death.
 And they may be frank with you.
 That's why they feel distant.
 It's not that they're not concerned.
 It's not that they are heartless people, but that they just don't know how to be frank.
 Like lots of people when they meet a drunk, they don't know what to do with a drunk.
 Because he's not behaving right.
 So when you're dying, you're not behaving right.
 You're supposed to live.
 See so we don't know what to do with a dying person.
 We don't get around that person and say, listen, now, listen, man, listen, I've got the news
 for you.
 You're going to die.
 And this is going to be great.
 Look, no more responsibilities.
 Don't have to pay those bills anymore.
 Don't have to worry about anything.
 You're going to just die.
 And let's go out with a bang.
 Let's have a party, see.
 We'll put some of that morphine in you so that you won't hurt too much.
 But we're going to prop you up in bed and we're going to bring all our friends around
 and we're going to have champagne.
 And you're going to die at the end of it, see.
 And it's going to be just marvelous.
 It's like being born, see.
 When we had birth problems, see, all women used to think that birth had to be painful.
 It was good for them.
 It was one of the things you had to suffer because you'd been screwing around with people
 and therefore you had to have a child and it's got to hurt.
 And then the doctors got together and they scratched their heads and the man called Grant
 Dick Reed said, no, birth doesn't hurt.
 It's natural.
 All we've got to do is to talk these women into the idea that it doesn't hurt, that all
 these so-called pains are just tensions and that birth is great.
 It's not a disease.
 It's not really something you ought to go to hospital for because you associate hospitals
 with diseases and sickness.
 Birth isn't sickness.
 All right.
 Now let's do some new thinking.
 What about death?
 Is death sickness?
 Or is it a healthy, natural event like being born?
 Of course it is.
 So I mean, a little change in social attitude about this will fortify everybody else.
 I mean, if I'm alone and all my relatives are going, "Mmm," and kind of pretending to
 me it's going to be hard for me, I've got to challenge the whole bunch of them and get
 my dander up and say, "Listen, damn you, I don't want all this thing around here.
 You've got to take a different attitude about my death."
 Well, that's hard.
 But if everybody helps me, and we do, we're all one body, if they all come around and
 say, "Congratulations, you're going to die."
 Liberation.
 Liberation now, you see.
 Because just before you die, I mean, look, I know very well a skillful priest handling
 a person dying can do this for them.
 But he has to talk very, very, very straight.
 And he has to say, "Listen, these doctors, don't you pay any attention to them.
 They're trying to amuse you and deceive you.
 You're going to die.
 This isn't terrible.
 But it's just going to be the end of you as a system of memories."
 And so you've got a great chance right now before it happens to let go of everything.
 Because you know it's going to go, and it is going to help you.
 It's going to help you let go of everything.
 So if you have any possessions left, give them away.
 Give everything away.
 And if you have anything to say that you felt that you ought to say before you die, and
 that you're kind of hanging on to and it's bothering you, say it.
 I mean, I don't mean necessarily a last confession, but say it said that Adlai Stevenson, shortly
 before he died, said that he'd been making a monkey of himself because he didn't agree
 with the government's policy about something or other.
 And he had to get that off his chest because he had a little thought in the back of his
 mind that things were catching up with him.
 You see?
 So the moment comes when this thing called death has to be taken completely.
 Not as some ghastly accident.
 Something that all of our friends are going to stay away because you're awful.
 I mean, sometimes people, when they die, are in a very unpleasant physical condition.
 They don't smell good.
 They don't look good.
 And so on.
 But an enormous amount can be done with scientific methods to make things reasonably tidy from
 a purely sensory point of view.
 But the main thing is the attitude that death is as positive as birth and should be a matter
 for rejoicing, because death is the symbol of the liberation.
 There is a wonderful saying that Ananda Kumaraswamy used to quote, "I pray that death will not
 come and find me still unannihilated."
 In other words, that man dies happy if there is no one to die.
 In other words, if the ego has disappeared before death caught up with it.
 But you see, the knowledge of death helps the ego to disappear, because it tells you
 you can't hang on.
 So what we need, if we're going to have a good religion around, that's one of the places
 where it can start.
 Having-- I don't know what-- nowadays I suppose they'd call it the institution for creative
 dying.
 But something like that.
 And you can have one department where you can have champagne cocktail party to die with,
 another department where you can have glorious religious rituals and priests and things like
 that.
 Another department where you can have psychedelic drugs, another department where you can have
 special kinds of music, anything, you know.
 All these arrangements will be provided for in a hospital for delightful dying.
 But that's the thing, to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.
 Sorry about the questions.
 Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture from the World as Emptiness lecture
 series.
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