Roshi Joan Halifax is the founding abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe and director of the project, Being With Dying. She's been sitting with dying people since 1970 and says the experience has been a profound gift. Halifax says that she has no idea what happens after we die, and that she's comfortable with that mystery.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On the mystery of death
"It's really an inexplicable process when you see the last breath run out of a body. There's both a finality to that moment and a kind of mystery... I seriously don't know [what happens after death]. And that sense of not knowing is very difficult for some people to live with, but I actually like it. That experience of not knowing is itself liberation. I feel death is a mystery, but I also feel life is a mystery."
Does consciousness continue?
"What the Tibetan Buddhists relate this to, is the process of falling asleep and then awakening with the reality of the dream. And there's some continuity of consciousness from the point of view of what the Tibetan yogis have understood."