Absolutely! Absolutely! Everything you do in your life is going to influence how you die. I think I say something like that during the regular talk in a few days. How you live your life! The more compassionate, the more loving, the more kind you are, it's going to influence every moment that comes next in the future, every moment that comes next. If you want to be happier in the future you've got to make the causes for the happiness to come. If you want to die peacefully, you have to make the causes for the mind to be able to die peacefully.
Now having said that, I will mention that, according to the scriptures, one of the most gifted of the Buddha's disciples, Mogallana died being murdered. Mogallana had psychic abilities almost equal to the Buddha. He was very gifted, he would teach people and they would get enlightened from his teachings. He was very wise, he was gifted. He was one of the two top monks, what the Buddha called his right and left hand disciples, Mogallana was one of them. With all of these psychic abilities he was murdered. How can he be murdered if he can read people's minds, if he can see people coming?
The story was that he was in his hut, and he knew people were coming to murder him. He went up through the roof the first day. The people came in and he was gone, "Hey what happened we thought he was in here!" They came back the next day to murder him, they were sure he was in the room. He knew they were coming and he went up through the roof. He wasn't there when they came in. He did this for three or four days. Why? He actually knew he was going to get murdered so why was he going up to the roof to avoid it and wasting his time if he knew he was going to get murdered? He had Compassion for some of the men coming, he thought some of them might change their mind and not make such bad Kamma. Sure enough, as the story goes, some of them changed their mind, they got scared, because they knew he was in there and he kept disappearing so they knew he had psychic abilities. But the other men were still paid so they were going to do their job. When the time came, Mogallana lost all of the psychic abilities. The men came in, and they murdered him. Before he actually died--they had gone--his abilities came back and he picked his body up, he floated to the Buddha and he said goodbye. OK? Now, we can say he had a painful death. He experienced all the physical pain because he had no ability to avoid the physical pain. But he had no mental pain, he was pure there so he had no mental pain.
Now we're working to stop the mental pain. We might not be able to stop the physical pain, but we're working to stop the mental pain. Now the question people like to ask after I tell that story, is how come if he was such a pure, beautiful human being, why was he murdered? He had past Kamma from past lives that meant he had to be murdered. That was his Kammic result, it was because of something he had done in his past lives. He had been murdered in every single life for 500 lifetimes, because he had murdered his mother and father in the same way. So, his Kammic result was that was how he had to die. We may not be able to avoid the Kammic result of something from the past. Think of Christopher Reeve! We may not be able to avoid that, on the physical level. But it's with the mental level that we've got a chance to avoid that.