225 - The Audacity to Live

Secular Buddhism - Noah Rasheta

In this episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast, Noah Rasheta explores the profound connection between mortality and living fully, inspired

Key takeaways

• The fact that we are alive at all is an extraordinary event given the vast number of potential lives never born.
• Avoiding thoughts of death leads to living heedlessly; mindfulness of death is essential for truly living.

Main topics

• The meaning of death in relation to how we live
• Buddhist mindfulness practices around mortality

Notable quotes

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

There is nothing ordinary about an ordinary life.

Conclusion

By confronting death with honesty and mindfulness, we awaken to the pr

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The Secular Buddhism Podcast is now on EightfoldPath.com. With transcripts, AI chat, and more. Visit EightfoldPath.com. Speaker 1 (0:20) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 225. I am your host, Noah Reschetta, and today I want to talk about death. And more specifically, I want to talk about what death has to teach us about being alive. I'm calling this episode, The Audacity to Live, and by the end I think you'll see why. About a week ago, one of the greatest mountaineers of our time, Nirmalpurja, the world knew him as Nims, died in an avalanche on a mountain in Pakistan, along with nine other climbers. I first learned about Nims back in 2021, watching his documentary on Netflix called 14 Peaks. He set out to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks in seven months. something the experts considered impossible, and he did it in six. And I remember watching... and being immediately struck by his ability and his audacity to attempt what looked like, to me, superhuman feats. A few years ago, I was on a trek to Everest Base Camp, and near the village of Namche Bazar, I watched his skydiving team land from a jump at an altitude where it seemed crazy for anyone to be skydiving at all. And then after that trek, I visited his store in Kathmandu. He was someone I looked up to. Truly a once-in-a-generation kind of human. Now here's what I've been noticing since the news broke. Some deaths just hit differently. I remember when Steve Irwin died, the crocodile hunter, and people all over the world who had never met him grieved like they had lost a friend. And I'm watching some similar thing happen right now with NIMS, and I've been asking myself, why is that? Why do these particular deaths hit so hard? Well, I think it's because these were people who were so obviously so fully alive that watching them felt like watching what a human life could be. They were deeply passionate about what they did and how they lived. And when someone like that dies, I think a part of what we're feeling isn't just grief for them. It's a quiet, uncomfortable question about us. Am I living my life that fully? And that's the question I want to sit with today. As always, keep in mind you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to become a Buddhist. You can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are. And with that in mind, I want to spend some time exploring what I can only call the audacity to live. What is the difference between going through life simply being alive and living audaciously? And what does Buddhism, specifically the Buddhist relationship with death, have to teach us about that difference? I want to start somewhere that might surprise you, not with a Buddhist teacher but with a biologist. Richard Dawkins opens his book Unweaving the Rainbow with a passage I've never forgotten, and I want to read you the whole thing because I think it deserves to be heard in full. He says, quote, We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton, We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few who won the lottery of birth against all odds. How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state? from which the vast majority have never stirred." Speaker 1 (4:51) I love that passage. Think about that for a minute. The potential people who were never born, who will never see a single day of life, outnumber the grains of sand. And yet, here we are, you and me, and we are going to die. And that actually makes us the lucky ones because it means we got to be here at all. And when I sit with that, something shifts in how I see my own life. Because we spend so much of our time feeling like our lives are ordinary, right? Ordinary job, an ordinary weekday, an ordinary sink full of dishes. But against those odds, the fact that there's anyone standing at that sink at all is staggering. There is nothing ordinary about an ordinary life. And I'm going to repeat that because it's the kind of... message that's at the heart of this whole episode. There is nothing ordinary about an ordinary life. The fact that we get to be alive at all might be the most extraordinary thing that will ever happen to any of us. So here's the thing. If being alive is the winning lottery ticket, why do so many of us live like the ticket is still sitting in a drawer somewhere? We won. And we know we won, and yet we keep waiting for a better time to cash it in. After the busy season at work, or after the kids are older, after things settle down. Why do we do that? I think the Buddhist answer, and it's an answer that Buddhism has been giving for over 2,500 years, is this. Because we've stopped looking at death. I often say that if you don't think about death often, you can't truly live. And I know how that sounds. It might sound dark. It might sound morbid. It sounds like the opposite of an inspiring message. But stay with me because I think this idea is the doorway to everything else in this episode. Of all the mysterious and odd things that we do as humans, avoiding the thought of death might be the most fascinating one to me. Because we know it's coming. We don't know when, we don't know how, and yet we go about our days as if ignoring it long enough might keep it from ever finding us. And the price we pay for that thinking is that we don't truly live. Now, the Buddha had a lot to say about this. And there's one teaching in particular that I want to share, and it comes from early Buddhist texts, and it goes like this. The Buddha asks a group of monks how they practice mindfulness of death. And the first monk says, well, I reflect that I might just have one day and one night left to live, so I practice accordingly. And the Buddha listens, and a second monk says, I reflect that I might just have