One of the things that helps me is going to the library and looking at professional photography books, like Life magazine, a whole collection of their most famous photos. Invariably over half of the photos have to do with some sort of death. Scenes from some war, scenes from some revolts, scenes from anything that had to do with death. Take those books, open them up, have a good look at each one. Just look at it for a while. Look at the story and try to imagine what's going on. You don't even have to read the caption, you can pretty well invent your own story. It can be helpful sometimes though to read the caption, the stories can be quite amazing, in the sense of what's going on, the bewildered people killing each other, etc. The mob mentality stories, things like that, where people are average people on the street but they really go totally insane. Looking at those sort of photo books, you can spend hours reflecting, getting into it like this. Some of the holocaust photo books are very helpful as well, look and see how it's depicted. Walk through museums of that type, whether it's holocaust or war museums.
Go to historic places. In Thailand we've gone to Kanchanaburi. There's a cemetery close to the bridge on the River Kwai. They have a little museum of these little box bamboo places that the guys had to sleep in, where they could not even sit up straight. So looking at more stories outwardly, then when you're doing your death reflection meditation, you've got more imagery to use, you've got more imagination, you've got more stuff in there that you can reflect upon.
We also advise you to use the systems to get the mind generated. But without having some vivid pictures it's sometimes difficult to imagine when you're sitting in meditation. Try going through the alphabet with occupations with death reflection. Airplanes, banks, cooks, what can we imagine about these different things? You go to a barber, well, how could you possibly die? The guy could miss the razor blade and cut your throat. But there are a lot of other stories that are just bizarre and they're good to think about. For example, a man sitting in a chair in a Barber shop who died because he were shot in the back of the neck with a nail gun. Somebody walked up and shot him in the back? No, the guy's in a barber shop, he's getting his hair done, there's a wall, there's people in the next room building, their nail gun missed the stub, it went through a paper thin wall, went right in the guy's neck, the guy died. Some of these stories are good to read, that one was out of a newspaper.
To really understand, wow, it really is anytime, anywhere, anyplace, anyhow, anybody. Having an awareness of these sorts of stories opens our vision to the fact that: we just don't know. We don't know if we're going to see you tomorrow, we don't know if we're going to walk out this door. What do you think when somebody's late for the talks, somebody's missing a sitting, somebody doesn't come to the meals? How do we know that they're still alive when we can't see them directly? We all assume right now that Rosemary and the other ten people are alive, well, and down in the big hall. And we do hope they are of course, but you just never know.
So get more of the real life stories from photo books, from newspapers, etc., then you've got more to use in your death reflection.