7 LESSONS FOR LIVING AND DYING

I remember many years ago attending a lecture by Elisabeth Kubler Ross at St James's Church in Piccadilly where she related the story of a man who came to her just after retirement, having received a terminal diagnosis with an estimated six weeks to live. He said: "I made a good living, but I never really lived." As you can imagine, I found this sentence etched firmly in my memory and resolved that I would never find myself in this position. At the same lecture, she reminded us that we are all churned in the washing tumbler of life, so the question is whether we come out crushed or polished; maybe crushed first, then polished later? The first two books ask what we can learn about life and living from death and dying and follow on from a book by Bronnie Ware that I reviewed a few years ago and entitled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Just for the record, these are expressed in terms of five sentences beginning with the phrase "I wish I: had had the courage to live a life true to myself; hadn't worked so hard; had the courage to express my feelings; had stayed in touch with my friends; had let myself be happier." These are powerful and practical messages that we can all apply.

Karen Wyatt is a physician, and her book is subtitled 'how to nurture what really matters.' It begins with some ground work around the themes of love and meaning, quoting Rumi's poignant and profound saying: 'Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom.' For the author, our lives are a spiritual journey in a physical realm and as we move along our timeline, we need to engage more deeply with the spiritual realm, as Jung also observed as far back as the 1930s. She introduces two angles that are used in subsequent chapters: the view from the garden in terms of planting and harvesting, and the larger view from the galaxy encompassing life and the planet while acknowledging mystery and the limits of our human understanding. For the author, the dance of life is expressed in four underlying concepts: timing and time, balance of opposites in terms of achieving equanimity, rhythm as the flow of life and energy, and finally grace as generosity of abundance. These are illustrated in the many moving and transformative narratives throughout the book.

The seven lessons act as templates and contexts for living and dying:

• Suffering: embrace your difficulties

• Love: let your heart be broken

• Forgiveness: hold no resentments

• Presence: dwell in the present moment

• Purpose: manifest your highest potential

• Surrender: let go of expectations

• Impermanence: face your fear

This list is indeed a tall existential order when read like this, but these lessons do indeed represent what really matters in life and the greatest humans manifest them to the greatest extent. Suffering is universal and necessary to break down the old and make way for the new, as we are all currently experiencing in different degrees. In each lesson there are fruits to be harvested, and in the case of suffering, for instance, these are humility, patience, resilience and connectedness. In the chapter on love, the banker Henry travels a similar path to Tolstoy's Ivan Illyich when he realises that none of his many possessions can fill the void he feels inside. Lying in a hospital bed and barely able to sip water, he holds the author's hand and says 'The only thing that matters is love, who did I love? How much did I love them? How did I show that I loved them?' This is heartrending in the circumstances and underlines the importance of learning and practising these lessons before one becomes terminally ill.

We all have people to forgive and whose forgiveness we need, and here the ideal is to hold no resentment, as we see in an extraordinary interaction between three brothers and in the courage of an elderly artist. All spiritual teachers emphasise the importance of dwelling in the present moment, of 'being mindful and attentive in the here and now.' Once again, in the chapter on purpose, Rumi expresses this brilliantly: our purpose is 'to manifest the very nature of our spirit, which is touched by the spirit of God.' In the garden of life, this means 'producing the best crop possible, given the limitations of soil, weather and location of the plot of land.' (p. 112) Surrender means letting go of expectations and going with transition and transformation when it comes up. Impermanence is the essence of Buddhism that involves confronting our own mortality and the fears that hold us back, it is 'the doorway through which change arrives - change that brings growth and transformation.'

The last part of the book explains how we can all live these lessons, starting with what the author calls the daily AWE practice: Awake to possibilities, Willing to see the good in everything, fully Engaged with life in every moment. She tells a long story that illustrates all seven lessons and the ways in which they intertwine. She reminds us that the basic tasks of gardening involved planting seeds and pulling weeds, in other words an inner clearance leading ultimately to balance within ourselves, from which point we can make an optimum contribution to our collective challenges. The author also gives some practical guidance and resources and suggestions for a practice schedule. All this makes the book essential reading for our time.

Sue Brayne's main focus is on the path to spiritual well-being, firmly based in her own experience and relating how she has overcome her many personal challenges. These three parts address the fear of living fully, the psychology of dying consciously, and the transpersonal dimension. As we know, death is still a taboo in our society and indeed underlies the panic response to the coronavirus; and there is a correlation between fear of death and fear of living fully, which we are spiritually designed to do. Sue analyses the components of fear and anxiety in terms of guilt and shame, grief, loss, anger and rage, seeing death as both a completion and a transition. She sees life as a succession of experiences where the crucial component is our mind and attitude - these often need to be transformed in the face of what she calls 'soulquakes' at the liminal space between outer and inner.

Like Karen Wyatt, Sue places a great emphasis on forgiveness and on balancing the various aspects of our lives, where she has a useful diagram explaining the four quadrants and needs: physical for security, intellectual for discernment, emotional for self-love, and spiritual for inner peace. Her discussion of the transpersonal draws on Maslow and the development of the spirit as transcending, the soul as attaching, fate as acceptance, destiny as choice and karma as attracting (diagram on p. 194). She sees the universe as being in us, leading to what we call synchronicity and prompting us through intuition. Her experience in hospices has given her a deep understanding of the actual process of dying, which she describes in some detail, ultimately seeing death as the moment when we are united with cosmic Love and where, inspiringly, 'each of us is an ambassador for Universal Love. (p. 233) It was moving to read Peter Fenwick's description/expectation of the dying process based on his extensive research and spiritual practice. Like Karen, Sue feels that we can most effectively serve the collective by getting our own house in order before we join forces to help co-create a new world and one with a higher level of well-being – the book is an important signpost on this path.

The third book under consideration reminds me of some volumes I have in my library where distinguished people - mainly men - from the 1930s and 40s write about what they have learned from life. In this case, the author features the answers given by 40 outstanding people to 10 profound questions about life. These relate to your concept of God, the notion of an afterlife, karma, your moral code, destiny, what life has taught you so far, words of wisdom to pass on, our survival on the planet, who people admire most, and how you find peace within yourself. I had not heard of quite a number of the people interviewed from the author's own background in theatre and acting, and the sheer variety creates part of the interest of the book: the journalists Robert Fisk and Sir David Frost, writers like Paul Coelho and Gore Vidal, and spiritual figures like Dadi Janki, the Dalai Lama, Neale Donald Walsch and Richard Holloway.

Every reader will have their own take on such a book, depending on their outlook and experience. For me, the most impressive and illuminating answers were given by the Iranian Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the mystic Andrew Harvey, but also by Zac Goldsmith in relation to the planet. Nasr and Harvey are well known for their spiritual insight, so what they have to say is correspondingly of greater interest in this respect. For Nasr, 'the supreme goal of life is to know the truth and to live by the truth', and our main danger is that we have 'created a science based on power rather than wisdom.' For Harvey, we need 'an army of nonviolent lovers who come together, beyond dogma and creed, to take humanity and to transform the institutions of the Earth. This is our last and best hope, and that's what I'm dedicating my life to.' For him, 'the secret of life is humility. The humbler you are, the more life can guide you, the more love you can give and the more discernment you can practice without judgement, and not have any fantasies about how effective you are being.' Shimon Peres and Sir Peter Ustinov also have important things to say, but perhaps the penultimate word goes to the Dalai Lama, who reminds us that the human mind is the key factor and that 'when we die nothing can be taken with us but the seeds of our life's work and our spiritual knowledge.'

To finish on a lighter note, I loved the story by Ed Begley Jr and his advice to slow down. He tells the story of a friend who had made elaborate travel arrangements to meet a guru at the Temple of Tranquillity in Indonesia. His travel plans went badly wrong so he missed connections and got delayed, having to make other complicated plans and finally arriving in Indonesia where he hired a car to take him to the temple. He says to the driver, "The Temple of Tranquillity and step on it!" At this point both the driver and his friends start to laugh, and Bailey reflects that we do this even with our highest goals by saying: "I want serenity and I want it now, dammit!" So beyond all these serious considerations, a sense of humour is no less essential in navigating our lives.