The audience will have the opportunity to talk about the great mystery of death and the rescue of the value of life. 

At the Extension Center of the University of La Serena, the conference ''Zen and Death'', directed by Rodrigo Fernández Portaluppi, Shudosan Zen meditation monk, will be held this Monday, May 26, at 17:00 p.m. The conference is part of the ''Opening Horizons'' Cycle of the XXIV School for the Elderly and will address death as the main concern of human beings. This is how his narrator advanced, for whom "talking about death is also talking about life. Why do we love if we are going to die later?" It is a key and basic question: why do I get up in the morning? why do I work? Why do I love the people I love if later when I die I will leave them suffering and in pain? (…). So wondering about death is wondering about life. Why are we living?'' Fernández stated.

Zen is the meditation school of Buddhism and from this perspective there is always a why or why in life. Regarding this point, for the rapporteur, ''the mind is not capable of answering, the mind asks good questions, but the answers are always precarious, in Zen what we always seek is to keep the question open, not an intellectual answer. We seek the answer to be experiential, arising from one's own experience. This allows meditation, opening to the experience of being alive. When you are connected to life completely, you can understand death.''

Finally, Fernández Portaluppi issued an invitation for this free entry activity, organized jointly by the ULS Extension Directorate and the Los Andes Compensation Fund. ''I want to invite you to participate in this conference, death is the most important issue that we have to resolve in our lives paradoxically, so it seems to me that it is an event that could be interesting for many and everyone is invited. Not with easy answers, but basically so that they know an experience of how to understand or participate in life and death,' he commented.

For more information on the activity, go to the ULS Extension Center (Prat 446), call 220-41-71, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on social networks: centroextensionuls (facebook) and @Extension_ULS (Twitter).