The following material has been taken from the book entitled The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski.

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Reflecting on death can have a profound and positive impact not just on how we die, but on how we live.

Without a reminder of death, we tend to take life for granted, often becoming lost in endless pursuits of self-gratification. 

When we keep death at our fingertips, it reminds us not to hold on to life too tightly. Maybe we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously. We let go a little more easily. 

When we recognize that death comes to everyone, we appreciate that we are all in the same boat, together. This helps us to become a bit kinder and gentler with one another. 

We can harness the awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we are alive, to encourage self-exploration, to clarify our values, to find meaning, and to generate positive action. 

It is the impermanence of life that gives us perspective. As we come in contact with life’s precarious nature, we also come to appreciate its preciousness. Then we don’t want to waste a minute. We want to enter our lives fully and use them in a responsible way. Death is a good companion on the road to living well and dying without regret.

Lessons from death are available to all those who choose to move toward it. I have witnessed a heart-opening occurring in not only people near death, but also their caregivers. They found a depth of love within themselves that they didn’t know they had access to. They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them, regardless of the suffering they encountered. 

If that possibility exists at the time of dying, it exists here and now. Our potential includes: the innate capacity for love, trust, forgiveness, and peace that lives in each of us. 

This book is about reminding us what we already know, something the great religions try to exemplify, but which often gets lost in translation. Death is much more than a medical event. It is a time of growth, a process of transformation. 

Death opens us to the deepest dimensions of our humanity. Death awakens presence, an intimacy with ourselves and all that is alive. 

The great spiritual and religious traditions have any number of names for the unnamable: the Absolute, God, Buddha Nature, True Self. All these names are too small. In fact, all names are too small. They are fingers pointing at the moon. 

I invite you to translate the terms I use in whatever way helps you connect with what you know and trust most in your heart of hearts. 

I will use the simple term Being to point at that which is deeper and more expansive than our personalities. 

At the heart of all spiritual teachings is the understanding that this Being is our most fundamental and benevolent nature. 

Our normal sense of self, our usual way of experiencing life, is learned. The conditioning that occurs as we grow and develop can obscure our innate goodness. 

Being has certain attributes or essential qualities that live as potentials within each of us. These qualities help us to mature, to become more functional and productive. They fill out our humanity and add a richness, beauty, and capacity to our lives. 

These pure qualities include love, compassion, strength, peace, clarity, contentment, humility, and equanimity, to name a few. 

Through practices such as contemplation and meditation, we can quiet our minds, hearts, and bodies, and as a result, our ability to sense our experience becomes subtler and more penetrating. 

In the discovered stillness, we are able to perceive the presence of these innate qualities. They are more than emotional states, though we may feel them at first as emotions. 

It might be more helpful to think of them as our inner guidance system, which can lead us to a greater sense of well-being. These aspects of our essential nature are as inseparable from Being as wetness is from water. 

Said another way, we already have everything we need for this journey. It all exists within us. We don’t need to be someone special to access our innate qualities and utilize them in the service of greater freedom and transformation.

The five invitations are my attempt to honor the lessons I have learned sitting bedside with so many dying patients:

1. Don’t wait. 

2. Welcome everything, push away nothing. 

3. Bring your whole self to the experience. 

4. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 

5. Cultivate don’t know mind.

They are five mutually supportive principles, permeated with love. They have served me as reliable guides for coping with death. 

And, as it turns out, they are equally relevant guides to living a life of integrity. They can be applied just as aptly to people dealing with all sorts of transitions and crises—from a move to a new city, to the forming or releasing of an intimate relationship, to getting used to living without your children at home. 

I think of these as five bottomless practices that can be continually explored and deepened. They have little value as theories. To be understood, they have to be lived into and realized through action. An invitation is a request to participate in or attend a particular event. The event is your life, and these five points are an invitation for you to be fully present for every aspect of it.

1. Don’t Wait

When people are dying, it is easy for them to recognize that every minute, every breath counts. 

But the truth is, death is always with us, integral to life itself. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing is permanent. This idea can both frighten and inspire us. Yet if we listen closely, the message we hear is: Don’t wait. 

Embracing the truth that all things inevitably must end encourages us not to wait in order to begin living each moment in a manner that is deeply engaged. 

We stop wasting our lives on meaningless activities. We learn to not hold our opinions, our desires, and even our own identities so tightly. 

Instead of pinning our hopes on a better future, we focus on the present and being grateful for what we have in front of us right now. We say “I love you” more often because we realize the importance of human connection. We become kinder, more compassionate, and more forgiving. 

Don’t wait is a pathway to fulfillment and an antidote to regret.

2. Welcome Everything; Push Away Nothing

In welcoming everything, we don’t have to like what is arising. It’s actually not our job to approve or disapprove. The word welcomeconfronts us; it asks us to temporarily suspend our usual rush to judgment and to simply be open to what is happening. Our task is to give our careful attention to what is showing up at our front door. To receive it in the spirit of hospitality.

We like the familiar; we like certainty. We love to have our preferences met. In fact, most of us have been taught that getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t is the way to assure our happiness. 

Inevitably, though, there are unexpected experiences in our lives—an unanticipated move, a job loss, a family member’s illness, the death of a beloved pet—that we want to push away with all our might. 

When faced with the uncertain, our first reaction is often resistance. We attempt to evict these difficult parts of our lives as if they were unwanted houseguests. In such moments, welcoming seems impossible or even unwise. 

When I say that we should be receptive to whatever presents itself to us, do I mean that we should let life walk all over us? Not at all. 

When we are open and receptive, we have options. We are free to discover, to investigate, and to learn how to respond skillfully to anything we encounter. 

We can’t be free if we are rejecting any part of our lives. With welcoming comes an ability to meet and work with both pleasant and unpleasant circumstances. 

Gradually, with practice, we discover that our well-being is not solely dependent on what’s happening in our external reality; it comes from within. 

In order to experience true freedom, we need to be able to welcome everything just as it is. 

At the deepest level, this invitation, like life itself, asks us to cultivate a kind of fearless receptivity. 

Welcome everything, push away nothing cannot be done solely as an act of will. To welcome everything is an act of love.

3. Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience

We all like to look good. We long to be seen as capable, strong, intelligent, sensitive, spiritual, or at least well adjusted. We project a positive self-image. 

Few of us want to be known for our helplessness, fear, anger, or ignorance, or want others to know that sometimes we are more of a mess than we’d like to admit. 

Yet more than once I have found an “undesirable” aspect of myself, one about which I previously had felt ashamed and kept tucked away, to be the very quality that allowed me to meet another person’s suffering with compassion instead of fear or pity. My own experience of abuse allowed me to empathize with both the abused and the abuser, to help each find forgiveness for their anger and open toward their fear.

It is not our expertise, but rather the wisdom gained from our own suffering, vulnerability, and healing that enables us to be of real assistance to others. 

It is the exploration of our inner lives that facilitates us in forming an empathetic bridge from our experience to theirs. 

To be whole, we need to include, accept, and connect all parts of ourselves. We need acceptance of our conflicting qualities and the seeming incongruity of our inner and outer worlds. Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means no part left out.

4. Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things

We often think of rest as something that will come to us when everything else in our lives is complete: at the end of the day, when we take a bath; once we go on holiday or get through all our to-do lists. We imagine that we can only find rest by changing our circumstances. 

The Fourth Invitation teaches us that we can find a place of rest within us, without having to alter the conditions of our lives.

This place of rest is always available to us. We need only turn toward it. It is experienced when we bring our full attention, without distraction, to this moment, to this activity. With sincere practice, after some time, we can come to know this spaciousness as a regular part of our lives. It manifests as an aspect of us that is never sick, is not born, and does not die.

5. Cultivate Don’t Know Mind

As we go about our day-to-day lives, we rely on our knowledge. We have confidence in our ability to think through problems, to figure things out. We are educated; we have training in specific subjects that permits us to do our jobs well. We accumulate information through experience, learning as we go. All this is helpful and necessary in moving through our lives smoothly. 

Ignorance is usually thought of as the absence of information, being unaware. Sadly, it is more than just “not knowing.” It means that we know something, but it is the wrong thing. Ignorance is misperception. 

Don’t know mind represents something else entirely. It is beyond knowing and not knowing. It is off the charts of our conventional ideas about knowledge and ignorance. It is the “beginner’s mind” Zen master Suzuki Roshi spoke of when he famously said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” 

Don’t know mind is not limited by agendas, roles, and expectations. It is free to discover. 

When we are filled with knowing, when our minds are made up, it narrows our vision, obscures our ability to see the whole picture, and limits our capacity to act. We only see what our knowing allows us to see. 

The wise person is both compassionate and humble and knows that she does not know. This moment right here before us, this problem we are tackling, this person who is dying, this task we are completing, this relationship we are building, this pain and beauty we are facing—we have never experienced it before. 

When we enter a situation with don’t know mind, we have a pure willingness to do so, without attachment to a particular view or outcome. 

We don’t throw our knowledge away—it is always there in the background, ready to come to our aid should we need it—but we let go of fixed ideas. We let go of control. 

Don’t know mind is an invitation to enter life with fresh eyes, to empty our minds and open our hearts.

Source: Based on Ostaseski, Frank. The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. Foreword by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. Published by Macmillan, 2017. 

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Frank Ostaseski — Background

Frank Ostaseski is an internationally respected Buddhist teacher and visionary cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, and founder of the Metta Institute. He has lectured at Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic, leading corporations like Google and Apple Inc., and teaches at major spiritual centers around the globe. He has accompanied over 1000 people through the dying process and trained thousands of healthcare clinicians and family caregivers around the world. His groundbreaking work has been featured on the Bill Moyers PBS series On Our Own Terms, highlighted on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and honored by H.H. the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. Frank was empowered as a Dharma Holder (hoshi) by Upaya’s Abbot Roshi Joan Halifax. 

More info: www.mettainstitute.org

Source: https://www.upaya.org/people/bio/frank-ostaseski

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About the Book: The Five Invitations

“As a physician and a neurosurgeon, I have learned that those who have truly lived are those who understand death as an integral part of life.” James R. Doty M.D. Professor of Neurosurgery, Stanford University

Frank Ostaseski has helped thousands of people face death. His book, The Five Invitations, based on his 35 years as a Buddhist end-of-life carer, is an exhilarating reflection on what the dying can teach us about coping with change and leading a life of purpose. 

Ostaseski’s invitations are practices designed to help us better care for the dying and to see us through the passage of grief. But they can also be applied to all of life’s transitions, from moving house and changing jobs, to the forming or breaking of intimate relationships. He shows us how we can harness the awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we are still alive, to encourage self-exploration to find meaning, to aspire and to act. 

Powerful, eloquent and compassionate,The Five Invitations is an uplifting meditation on living a life of purpose.

Source: amazon.com.au

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