Interesting with such prediction. I still believe in unpredictable death as a lay person which our karma that determine our future. Of course our karma dictates from our doing.
One thing at least from this prediction it still tell us that we will die and that is the most important to note and to prepare ourselves.
In Buddhist terms, death is a natural event. The Buddha encouraged us to observe, to contemplate. Funerals in northeast Thailand were very meaningful because they actually contemplated what happened. We could see the body, and it wasn't made up to look beautiful. They didn't put lipstick and powder on it. It was just a dead human body, and they meditated on that. We made conscious the reality: the death of the body is like this. This was not depressing or traumatic for me. When Ajahn Chah held these funerals, no one faint. I found it a very powerful experience.
I had never had such opportunities in the United States to really bring death and loss into consciousness and to really look at a dead human corpse. We live in a society that wants to deny and cover it up. It's not polite to even say the word death in public. We use euphemisms that make it less stark, less shocking. But awareness includes the whole process—from birth to death, from the peak moments of life to the worst, the climb up and the slide down. By reflecting and observing, we free ourselves from the fears, the reactions and the projections that we create around the flow of our lives, around our own bodies, around the loss of our loved ones.
When my own father died, I was with the feeling of loss and grief. It can be witnessed. I wasn't afraid or trying to ignore my feelings. They interested me. To have this ability to really accept my feelings, I had to train myself, because my conditioning was the reverse. On a cultural level, I'd been conditioned to suppress feelings, to deny or ignore them. It has taken intentional, deliberate effort to look, observe and allow feelings of loss or grief into consciousness. This doesn't mean a grasping of feelings or wallowing in emotions. It's seeing things in terms of Dharma. It is what it is.
