September 01, 2026

The Uncertain Hour

Fearing death, I fled to the mountains — again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death, capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind. Now all fear of death is over and done.

Milarepa was an eleventh-century Tibetan yogi who, after using black magic to kill relatives in revenge, spent the rest of his life in caves atoning through fierce solitary meditation under his guru Marpa. This song comes from those hermit years, when he had nothing left but his own mind and the plain fact that he, like everyone, would die. Rather than pushing the fear of death away, he made it the object of his practice, meditating on how uncertain its hour is until the fear itself dissolved into a recognition of something in mind that does not arise or pass. This is the heart of how the tradition works with impermanence: not by denying that things end, but by looking straight at how little stays fixed, so that the grip of clinging loosens on its own. Suffering, in this view, comes not from change but from the tightness with which we hold what was never going to stay still.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Impermanence →