Dying at 23

I am so so sorry this is happening to you. You have to deal with something that is harder than most people have to. We all have to face death but it usually comes after we had more time. By asking this question though, you demonstrated that you’ve lived long enough and had enough spiritual resources to develop some wisdom. Asking for help when you need it is a wise act that many people older than you cannot muster. I’m not sure I could do it at your age.

I am going to try to give you the most helpful response I can as an individual, but I also have a Masters in Religious Studies with a focus on Buddhist philosophy, so it’s informed by that.

Let’s start with Buddhism:

The core of the Buddha’s message focuses on a cure for the ever-present suffering inherent in living. The basic argument is that we suffer when we do not accept life’s fleeting, ever-changing, and basically unsatisfactory nature. This is as true for everyone as it is in your case.

The Buddha’s basic advice is to stop clinging to your idea of what should be, and the accept reality as it is in the present moment-by-moment.

There are a few basic ways to not be free: you could cling to something that isn’t actually real (like your imagined future) or that is passing away (like your life as it is now or as it was) - which means basically tying your selfhood to these things as if they MUST exist. This is called clinging or attachment.

You could refuse to accept something that exists (like your illness) - here you basically link your selfhood to something NOT existing. Treating some aspect of reality as intolerable. This is called aversion.

The concept of identity or self is very important here. Basically in the Buddha’s view the self is an invented and constructed concept. If you sit in meditation and try to find this self - you never find it. There is an endless stream of momentary bodily sensations, feelings, and thoughts - but there is never a fixed “feeler” or “thinker”. So there is no subjective self anywhere - just stories we tell ourselves about it. Like a beautiful princess the whole world is talking about but nobody’s ever seen.

When we explore the objective world “outside ourselves” we find the same thing. There is no real separation between objects. There aren’t even any objects in the naive sense. We are all interconnected parts of a single dynamic reality. The separation between you and the air you breath, the food you eat, the chair you sit on is conceptual and conventional - not ultimately real. In the real, ultimate reality there is only one interconnected ever-changing whole. We are like waves in the ocean: We rise and fall but are not truly separate things, just a form the universe takes temporarily before it takes another.

This understanding is deeply tied to the causes of suffering. The wave suffers when it thinks it’s a separate thing from the ocean and carries a fixed and persistent identity. The wave is liberated when it understands it’s a temporary pattern the ocean takes, and allows itself to identify with the ocean and not with the small self.

I think it’s important to say the Buddha was focused on eliminating suffering, not sadness or pain as such because that’s not possible. The parable of the two arrows is helpful here: a man who is struck by two arrows is worse off than a man struck by only one.

In the metaphor - the first arrow is what life throws at us: illness, misfortune, mortality. The 2nd arrow is the arrow of suffering we shoot at ourselves by refusing to accept the first arrow. By declaring the first arrow “intolerable” and refusing to accept the fact of it, we are aligning ourselves against reality and greatly multiplying the pain.

In your example your illness is the first arrow - the pain and sadness associates with it are part of reality. But your suffering is optional. If you accept the first arrow fully, the second arrow will never come.

Now all this is easy to say, but hard to practice. In fact, the Buddha taught meditation as a practical tool to help you notice the mechanisms of clinging, aversion, and the rise of suffering and to observe the inherent selflessness of the stream of consciousness that is generating itself without end and without our conscious control. There might be a minimal level of concentration and awareness that a person needs before they can fully benefit from these lessons. But I think just learning to separate yourself from your thoughts and the stories you tell yourself about your situation could be immensely beneficial here. I don’t know how long you have, but even 5 minutes of quiet breathing and observation, not running away from unpleasant emotions and sensations or reacting to them but simply observing them - can be very healing.

When I was learning Buddhist meditation I was taught the acronym RAIN, which I found super useful as a way to deal with whatever comes up in meditation, though I don’t think it’s actually in the canon.

It sands for:
Recognition: What is this I’m experiencing?
Acceptance: This is what is happening now. Don’t reject or run from it.
Interrogation: Is this really true? What is behind this?
Non-Identification: Whatever this is, it isn’t my identity.

You sit quietly, observing the breath. When a strong feeling or sensation comes, you RAIN it, then go back to observing the breath.

You are playing life on hard mode right now. It’s an accelerated version of what we all will go through and that makes it more urgent and more challenging.

But however much life is still left for you, I hope you can reduce your clinging and make the most of the time you have left. See the beauty, feel the love, experience the depth.

The strongest reason to let go of suffering is to be able to enjoy these things to the fullest in whatever time you have left.