Notes from "Death: The End of Self-Improvement" by Joan Tollifson

Interpretations and highlights

Awakening is a process of subtraction and surrender.
Things only seem separate or simple of permanent when we don’t look too closely.
- Pay more, clearer, longer, attention.
Everything is included.
Qualities, adjectives, adverbs, are just concepts.
Waking up is a falling away of the persistent belief that this isn’t it.
Not “find the answer” or even “find an answer”, but live with answerlessness.

Key points

Ageing and dying, like awakening, is a process of subtraction and surrender.
Things only seem permanent or separate when we don’t look too closely.
There’s no separation between (seeming) opposites. Opposites are different ways of seeing Reality.
Every event, every situation, is simply part of life. Not undignified, humiliating, or any other qualities.
Waking up is a release from the fear, from the obsessive concern with self-improvement and self-preservation. A falling away of the persistent belief that “this isn’t it.”
“Gateless gate” because there’s a real difference between before and after. Even though the gate was imaginary.
Life is playful, purposeless, groundless.
The deepest truth is not to find an answer, but to live with the answer-less-ness.

Gathered notes

Ageing and dying, like awakening, is a process of subtraction, surrender, letting go, unraveling.
The movie of waking life has no more substance or enduring reality than a dream.
A wave is never really permanent, or separate from the ocean.
A person is never really permanent or separate from the world, from Reality.
Things only seem permanent or separate when we don’t look too closely.
Opposites are different ways of seeing Reality. Stillness and movement, immutability and impermanence, mind and matter.
One seamless whole.
There’s no separation between form and emptiness, purity and impurity, sacred and profane, spiritual and material, perfection and imperfection
Every event, every situation, is simply part of life. Not undignified, or humiliating.
Waking up is a release from the fear of disintegration, imperfection, death.
Waking up from the obsessive concern with self-improvement and self-preservation.
Our (imaginary) problems, dilemmas, disappear when we relax into just being this moment.
Gateless gate because there’s a real difference between before and after. Even though the gate was imaginary.
Waking up is the falling away of the persistent belief that “this isn’t it.”
Life is playful, purposeless, groundless.
I find no boundary between consciousness and its contents. Without words and concepts, it is one, seamless, undivided, unbroken whole.
Old age is one long descent into progressively more and more loss of control, loss of independence, loss of mobility, loss of self-image, loss of loved ones, and ultimately, loss of everything.
The universe is one seamless happening.
Nothing, showing up as everything.
Everything is included. Including your urges, impulses, thoughts and actions.
“You are perfect just as you are, and there’s room for improvement.” — Shunryu Suzuki
The wholeness that includes the apparent brokenness.
Awareness is upstream from thought.
“Enlightenment is not dying a good death. Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death” – Katagiri Roshi
The naked actuality of this moment, before we think about it or try to understand or explain it, or get something out of it, or figure out what we think it means.
No question of “What does it mean?” No explanation possible. Just this!
What is this, if you don’t label it or try to explain it? Don’t think, don’t analyse, just feel.
The deepest truth is not to find an answer, but to live with the answer-less-ness.
Willingness to simply be this mass of pain.
“Just being alive is enough” – Suzuki Roshi
Hating the people who have prejudices is rooted in the false idea that we are all freely choosing to be the way we are. We’re not crazy or evil. We’re just conditioned.
In Zen, the transcendent is not beyond the world, but right here in the midst of daily life.
When there is awareness, there is clarity and love. When the thinking mind takes over, there is the conditioned personality.
In direct experience, we can’t find any place where “consciousness” ends and “the content of consciousness” begins.

Raw notes

Ageing and dying, like awakening, are a great stripping process, a process of subtraction.
The fear of dying only exists during waking life, and only as a fearful idea. In deep sleep, the problem—and the one who seems to have it—no longer exist.
The more closely we explore this whole compelling appearance that I call the movie of waking life, the more we find that it has no more substance or enduring reality than a passing dream.
Just as no wave is ever really fixed in any permanent form or separate from the ocean, no person is ever actually a fixed or solid “thing” separate from the totality.
Nothing stands apart from it to “get it” or “lose it,”
Stillness and movement, immutability and impermanence, mind and matter, are simply different ways of seeing and describing this indivisible actuality.
The wholeness we long for is actually all there is.
Pain, whether physical or emotional, becomes more interesting and less frightening,
If you’ve been with people who are dying, you know that there are usually body fluids involved and all sorts of messy things that don’t fit our limited and unreal picture of dignity.
Are all these events undignified? Are they humiliating? Or are they simply part of life?
growing old is one long surrender, letting go into a process of subtraction and unravelling,
by sacred, I mean worthy of devotion, full of wonder, inconceivable and ungraspable.
The ultimate discovery is that there is no actual separation between form and emptiness, purity and impurity, sacred and profane, spiritual and material, perfection and imperfection,
the fully-lived character and the undivided wholeness aren’t ever what we think they are.
This falling apart is a waking up from the obsessive concern with self-improvement and self-preservation, and a release from the fear of disintegration, imperfection and death.
The space inside the bubble is the same as the space outside the bubble, as it always was. The bubble itself was nothing but space bubbling.
The boundaries are imaginary.
The bodymind is nothing but thoroughgoing impermanence. It never really holds still in any fixed form. It only seems to do that if we don’t look too closely.
In a very real sense, nothing had died because no separate, independent thing had ever formed in the first place.
Time itself is a mode of perception, a construct of consciousness.
The gate was imaginary. But at the same time, there is an undeniable difference between knowingly realizing this and being confused and entranced by the story of separation and lack, which is why there is said to be a gateless gate rather than no gate at all.
itself—sensing, feeling, awaring, being—and by spending time in silence and stillness, we may come upon a felt-sense of spacious openness at the very core of our being,
To awaken to this unbroken wholeness is not about picking up an idea or a belief system. It is a felt-reality, an absence of unnecessary self-centered thinking and a present-ness to the actuality of this moment, a letting go.
very simple, very ordinary.
Waking up is the falling away of the persistent belief that “this isn’t it,”
an ever-changing dance of emptiness.
Form and emptiness, relative and absolute, appearance and disappearance, ocean and wave—one seamless whole.
right here, right now—exactly as it is, before we try to understand it, grasp it, control it, or figure it out.
in the immediacy of Here-Now, no such questions arise.
Whenever we relax into simply being this moment, without judging it or trying to improve it, our imaginary dilemmas vanish into thin air.
impermanence sounds scary until we realize how complete impermanence is.
impermanence is so complete that no solid, separate, persisting things ever form in the first place to even be impermanent,
like mist evaporating in the sunlight, smoke curling into the air, waves rolling on the ocean, cloud formations changing shape in the sky, or last night’s dream dissolving in the morning light.
life is more like a dance or a song than a grueling, goal-oriented task.
The beauty of life lies precisely in its playfulness, its purposelessness, its groundlessness.
What we are concerned about—the survival of “me”—is so small. What we truly are is so vast.
There had only ever been this placeless immediacy from which I have never moved and this eternal Now in which, and as which, everything appears and disappears.
Time and space are a kind of mental construct, a mode of perception.
To paraphrase an ancient statement, Here-Now is like a sphere, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference of which is nowhere.
Here-Now is the Ultimate Subject to which the word “I” most deeply refers if we trace it back deeper than name and form.
What is liberating is to recognize this dimension for yourself, here and now. Believing in it as some kind of idea is just more mental baggage
Once we name this omnipresent ground of being, there is always the danger of reifying it and creating a false duality in the mind
The division is purely conceptual, a helpful map to use for a moment on the pathless path, but then equally important to discard. Subject and object are one seamless whole.
the whole universe are appearing in us, not the other way around. As awareness, as presence, we are being and beholding it all.
Some people get caught up in trying to identify as awareness and not as a person. But we are already boundless awareness.
I find no boundary between awareness and what appears within it. Without the words and the concepts, it is one, seamless, undivided, unbroken whole.
If the thought arises that, “I need to stop identifying as me,” to whom does this thought refer?
thoroughgoing impermanence, vanishing as soon as it appears.
Without thought, this moment is without plot or narrative. It has no meaning or purpose.
No concept can ever capture reality, so beware of fixating on one side of any imaginary conceptual divide.
old age is not for sissies. It is one long descent into progressively more and more loss of control, loss of independence, loss of mobility, loss of self-image, loss of loved ones, and ultimately, loss of everything.
Death itself doesn’t frighten me. What frightens me, when I think about it, is the stuff that happens before you die—the pain and suffering, the loss of control.
Death is a long, slow process. Everything unravels.
Dying can be a long and difficult process—at times even terrifying.
this disintegration may well be a long, painful, frightening, lonely and at times humiliating process.
then you notice that this is all thought and imagination, that right now, you are fine. You relax back into the present moment.
I have come to see that there is no end to problems. I’ve also come to recognize that life is inherently unfair.
There is a great deal of violence and inequity in nature
It dawned on me gradually that this phenomenal manifestation can only appear in polarities and contrasts.
although we often think otherwise, all of our uniquely human weather is in some sense every bit as natural as hurricanes, cloudy days, thunderstorms, lightning strikes, erupting volcanoes, catastrophic earthquakes, swirling tornados, fire storms, tsunamis
The whole appearance is empty of inherent, objective, observer-independent reality.
Babies don’t see tables and chairs—they must learn how to draw boundary lines around the various shapes and colors they see, how to put things into abstract categories, and thus, how to “see” such things as tables and chairs and not just ever-changing blobs of color and shape.
The universe is one seamless happening.
It is real in the sense that the experiencing of it, the presence of it, is undeniable. It is unreal in the sense that none of it is happening in the way we think it is, as some sort of coherent, substantial, persisting, observer-independent, objectively-existing actuality. That doesn’t mean that the pain doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t have the solidity we think it does.
I came to see issues such as poverty, war, racism and sexism as symptomatic manifestations of a far deeper problem—the belief that we are each a separate self in a fractured world.
the thought-sense of being an encapsulated separate self gives birth to psychological fear and desire, which is different from the instinctual animal fear and desire that is a functional part of our biology.
polarities are inseparable and only exist relative to each other. Without them, the manifestation could not appear at all.
When we ask, “Who am I?” or “What is this?”, and we look deeper than any superficial answer, any word or concept we’ve learned, we find nothing we can grasp.
Everything is a spontaneous and automatic happening that can never be captured or grasped by words, concepts or formulations.
not the conceptual “things” that these words inevitably suggest, but the bare, undivided, indeterminate, unresolvable actuality itself, the present-ness of it, the immediacy, the no-thing-ness showing up as everything.
You can’t leave your own urges, impulses, thoughts and actions out of the picture—they too are the play of totality.
We can’t land in either the relative or the absolute, or cling to emptiness or form, personal or impersonal. It is all included!
it is the Only Possible at that moment.
Truth is the openness that sticks to no conceptual formulation or explanation of life but rather remains with the freshness and groundlessness of not knowing and non-clinging.
It’s not about some better or different experience, but rather, it’s here in the immediacy of this experience.
Trying to find happiness in a passing form is inevitably disappointing.
To be average or ordinary, to fail and be imperfect, is our worst nightmare.
You are perfect just as you are, and there’s room for improvement. —Shunryu Suzuki
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. —Carl Rogers
what has always emerged front and center at the root of it all is the willingness to be as I am; to be, on the human level, in some sense imperfect, incomplete and unresolved; and to see that this very person, warts and all, is already whole and complete,
as the pathless path unfolds, everything is discovered to be an expression of this radiant presence that we are. Nothing needs to be pushed away or kept out.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa famously said that enlightenment is not final victory, but rather, final defeat.
dance the particular dance that each of us is moved to dance.
The end of self-improvement is the realization of what is always already whole and complete, the wholeness that includes the apparent brokenness.
if we watch closely as choices and decisions unfold, we can see that it is all happening by itself.
It doesn’t mean becoming passive, or picking up the belief that “I” have no free will,
Our urges, interests, actions—and our sense of choice—are all part of how life functions and moves. And we are not separate from, or other than, life itself.
We can’t land on either free will or no free will because both are conceptual abstractions of a living reality that cannot be captured in any conceptual formulation.
It’s very easy to turn what begins as a genuine insight into a limiting or oppressive belief, a new fundamentalist dogma that we then cling to and defend.
There’s no “me” in the picture until a thought arises,
genuine transformation recognizes the inseparability and collaborative necessity of both apparently opposing forces.
Genuine transformation comes from unconditional love.
This isn’t a belief—it’s a faith that emerges from presence.
awareness is upstream from thought. And in many situations, thought is the wrong instrument.
realizing that there is so much here other than thought—as obvious as that seems once it’s obvious—can be surprisingly elusive.
the open secret, hidden in plain sight, the elusive obvious.
We know from our own experience that our most difficult and challenging experiences are often the ones that open us up and teach us the most.
Perfection isn’t a matter of not making any mistakes. It’s about the ability to learn from them, to get up and keep going, to not take mistakes personally or get lost in shame, guilt and self-hatred, to start fresh Here-Now.
Our attention can be on the present moment even as we move toward the goal.
when Katagiri Roshi was dying, he said, “Enlightenment is not dying a good death. Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death.”
It’s about waking up to the naked actuality of this moment, before we think about it or try to understand or explain it, or get something out of it, or figure out what we think it means.
No question of “What does it mean?” No explanation possible. Just this!
adding things to it that don’t exist, such as victims and perpetrators, and what if’s and if only’s.
If we look for the self who is supposedly at the center of all this, we find nothing at all.
The “seer” and the “thing seen” are realized to be ideas; the actuality is undivided seeing.
We begin to notice and appreciate the beauty that is everywhere, even in things we usually think are “ordinary,” “undesirable” or “ugly.” Nothing is seen as a distraction or an obstruction anymore.
That shift from resistance to devotion, from the sense of separation and encapsulation to the recognition of boundlessness, can be challenging when we are caught in an upsetting situation or emotion.
What is this fear or pain or sound or feeling of being criticized if you don’t label it or try to explain it?
When I say explore, I don’t mean to think about or analyze it, but simply to feel it.
counterintuitively, if we don’t move away, if we lean into what bothers us and open to it completely, it often dissolves completely.
the more all this is seen clearly, the less power it has to hypnotize us and run our lives.
To awaken is to catch that “Yes, but…” as it arises, to see that it’s only a thought and not follow it down the rabbit hole.
Byron Katie: “I am a lover of what is, because it hurts when I argue with reality.”
The freedom and relief, the open heart of love, the resurrection after the crucifixion, are the fruit of giving up all hope of improvement and the willingness to simply be this mass of pain.
It’s a kind of surrendering or melting—the very heart of awakening—dissolving that tight self-protective knot.
somewhere in the shadows of my mind, down in the basement in the lizard brain, another set of ideas and images linger like ghosts, ideas that I absorbed by osmosis from the culture in which I grew up,
Our very identity and survival seem to get wrapped up in our particular subjective view of things.
both sides of the gestalt are important in some way. The totality relies on a balance that includes both,
Hating the people who have these prejudices is rooted in the false idea that we are all freely choosing to be the way we are. By hating them and acting out of that hatred, we tend to drive them further and further into those views. When we feel loved, heard and understood, we are far more likely to be willing and able to question our views and see things in a new way,
We’re not crazy or evil. We’re just conditioned.
Suzuki Roshi once said, “Just being alive is enough.”
just these simple moments.
maybe the most important way in which they get better is that we are more at peace with them not being better.
no more purpose than a child’s finger-painting.
Any true meditation practice is humiliating and disappointing because you can no longer believe that you are better,
You know that you’ve played all the parts and you still
the deepest truth is not to find an answer, but to live with the answer-less-ness.
Friends who are doctors or hospice workers have told me that people often die when the family leaves the room.
In Buddhism, emptiness is not the opposite of form or the container of form. Emptiness is form and form is emptiness.
In Zen, the transcendent is not beyond the world, but right here in the midst of daily life.
Without the words, without labels, without the story, what is all of this? Not to answer that with some word or idea, but simply to be open to the wonder of not knowing.
Form is a magnificent expression of emptiness, bursting with love if only we can wake up and realize it.
What I notice again and again is that all of this can be very scary if I think about it, but without thinking, the problems vanish.
The grieving, when it comes, can neither be bypassed nor wallowed in.
“What if none of this ever changes as you want?”
That doesn’t mean not trying to make changes. But at the same time, being at peace with the way it is—imperfect, unresolved, often painful and unjust.
I’d been playing with agreeing with my inner critic, and how liberating that was.
Agreeing with one’s inner critic in this way reveals how absurd and irrelevant those critical voices actually are.
when there is awareness, there is clarity and love, and when the thinking mind takes over, there is the conditioned personality.
no human being is beyond human foibles.
Awakening doesn’t mean pulling away from life—detaching or dissociating—it means loving fully, but not holding on, not clinging.
everything to do with form. It all turns to dust. And that’s not bad news. It’s an invitation to discover what is deeper than form, the presence that is always whole and complete.
The beauty and wonder are in the quality of the seeing, the awareness, the presence, not in the object being seen.
There’s an old Zen koan about two monks, washing their bowls in the creek, who see two birds fighting over a frog, tearing it apart. One monk asks the other, “Why does it have to be like this?” And the other monk replies, “It’s all for your benefit.”
Nature acts without intention. It simply does what it does. But what may be realized is that humans are an expression of nature as well.
(Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen)
But our ideas of how we or the world “should be” are just ideas.
Is it possible to forgive the world for being imperfect and to forgive ourselves for being imperfect as well?
There is truly nothing more magnificent than listening to the sounds of rain.
The whole time I was sick, it felt like being stopped in my tracks at a moment when I needed to stop. There is something oddly refreshing and grounding about being unable to function. It returns one to the essential.
I’m not afraid of dying. It sounds quite relaxing. But I am afraid, if I think about it, of the things that come before death—pain, disability, dementia, and so on.
In the hospital, they rang soft, gentle little tinkling bells whenever a new baby was born.
Some might say humiliating, but I would say it’s more a growth in humility, love and trust in life. I am finding it heart-opening and life-changing.
while all that might sound horrible, it was strangely beautiful, so much human kindness, all of us in this together.
Then something shifted, and there was the realization, this is my morning, this is what’s happening. And suddenly it was no longer a limitation, a disappointment, a drag,
Welcoming. And, of course, sometimes, not welcoming. But then remembering, this too can be welcomed.
As Thich Nhat Hanh so beautifully explains, every apparent form contains the whole universe, which is the Buddhist teaching of emptiness, interdependence or interbeing.
I’ve gotten more interested in the actuality of whatever presents itself in the moment than in those glossy travel brochures in the mind that promise a better somewhere.
Obsessively thinking and worrying about such things is useless suffering, but giving them intelligent thought and preparation is common sense.
As I realize more and more deeply, the greatest gift we can offer to ourselves and the world is to be awake and rooted in love. That doesn’t mean ignoring the darkness or always being in a good mood, but it means seeing the light and the beauty that is here even in the darkness, and not wallowing obsessively and pointlessly in negative spin.
sensations, thoughts, feelings, perceptions—not those words or concepts, but the naked actuality to which they point.
In actual direct experience, we can’t find any place where what we call “consciousness” ends and what we call “the content of consciousness” begins,
These words are sounds we make, sophisticated animal grunts, black squiggles on a page, referring to no actual thing that can ever be found or pinned down—but we think we know what we’re talking about.
Any form that seems to exist, if we look closely at it, either with science or careful open attention, turns out to be nothing solid or persisting or independent from everything it supposedly is not.
not the freedom to do what I want, but the freedom to be as I am, and the freedom for everything to be as it is, which is no way and every way, and never the same way twice. This is the freedom of nothing to grasp.

Notes from Death: The End of Self-Improvement” by Joan Tollifson.

Added 2024-09-26, last updated 2024-10-19.