Is meditation upon death every single moment a good method to cultivate attention and awareness? I’ve come across this young 23 year old Italian man who killed himself and wrote a philosophical work in the 19th century, it’s basically upon how men live as if they are sedated and don’t face their mortality with seriousness and urgency and this German philosopher Heidegger says modern technology only ramps up this anesthestic state of living, Seneca the wise stoic wrote a work advising to live everyday as if it’s the last and depicting examples of slumberous life of many in Rome 🫤 [conti]

Sri Aurobindo also in the opening canto of Savitri also depicts the daily life of men with their blind quest and living with an unforeseeing instant’s urge and ends the canto with Savitri facing the challenge of Satyavan’s fate and death. Even the most deluded man will lose all his sedation and slumber if his house is on fire .So is it a good method to live with this awareness of death every moment and also any precautions to take?

Meditation upon death is advised by certain mystics including the Buddhist path. Basically it is a meditation on the transience of life, on the impermanence of everything here. If carried to the extreme it can lead to vairagya, detachment and in rare and ready individuals to the nirvanic state. If one is seeking that one can try it but more likely than not it will lead the person towards cynicism, pessimism and a kind of depression. A better way, more positive so to say, even for nirvana, is to meditate upon the One Permanent within transient things. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo do not advice this kind of meditation. They advice instead to meditate upon the Divine Mother with the goal of flooding the transient with the Permanent as we find also adviced in the Isha Upanishad. 

Affectionately,

Alok Da