Long Live Death!

Death in the west, like the self, is one of the most maligned concepts if not practices known to man. I have yet to attend a funeral that is celebratory in the fullest sense without tears of misery and wishing that he or she had had a longer life. The truth be told, we just don't know how to die anymore. And if you don't know how to die, chances are you don't know how to live either.

Death has been exiled from us, and we men, like the gullible impressionable zombies that we are, have accepted it. Life is life, we say, life is all about living. Well, it may come as a surprise, but life is about dying too, and not just the local death that is occurring in our bodies at every moment of our lives, but the dying that is not an ending, or a finishing, but just a continuation of the way.

It is our dualistic ways which will, ironically, be the death of us, not death. Life and death, far from being sequestered in their own polar extremities, constantly communicate and engender each other. Without the one, you cannot have the other. Which of course makes all this talk of immortality (by supposedly grown up human beings) all the more absurd for this flagrant misunderstanding of this reality. Life and death are simply constituents of an ever-changing process. In the fabulous Earth's Insights, J. Baird Callicott writes:

The real world is a world of lice as well as butterflies, of horse piss as well as vintage champagne, and to the person who has truly realized this, one is as good as the other... This is difficult to accept... for it demands that one make room not grudgingly or fatalistically, but joyously and with profound gratitude, for the horse urine and lice that do in fact coexist with fine champagne and beautiful butterflies. The [holistic] view sees these as no less real, and no less wonderful, once we have transcended a petty, partial view of existence in which our comfort and unslakable thirst determine what has and has not a right to exist. In the [holistic] universe, which is one organic body of interacting parts, it is an act of self-defeating madness to insist on a never-ending diet of vintage champagne, sunshine and laughter, and to insist vehemently and with no small amount of hubris, that urine, darkness and tears be banished forever.... we cannot have one without the other.

'Simplify your life - Die!' Nietzsche used to proclaim... Naturally, for those unable to think beyond mere superimposed templates and sub-routines, this was taken the wrong way, as philosophers' remarks often are. But what he was actually saying was that by getting rid of all the tosh in your life, all the non-essential saturated fats that do nothing but clog the arteries of your mind, you will see death in a whole different light and learn to love it as you will learn to love life. In Zen, there is little difference between life and death, for they know this essential truth of simplification, and of true life-giving culture. Because we are deluded as to what life (and by extension, culture) actually is - we scurry about clamouring what it's all about - we are similarly deluded as to what death actually is.

Meditation upon death (meditatio mortis) should be a daily occurrence, Plato wrote. The Samurai had a similar saying in their Bushido.

It is more than just vaguely pathetic to witness the clinging nature of men to life when it comes to dying, especially when they appear to have led a long and fruitful life. It is the greed that gets me, the 'I want more LIFE!!' demanding, as if they had never had any in the first place. This is all very well if, as a replicant, you have a paltry four-year life span, but most of us, admittedly, have life spans way longer than that of a skin-job. To be sure, there are truly tragic cases of people dying before they've had a chance to clear away all the clutter and get to the root of it all, but if you're still talking about wanting more life at the age of forty or more, then there's little hope for you. I have one particular sixty-six year old friend who seems to think that if he doesn't 'get' his three score and ten, he's being short-changed; alas! if he could only see the greed behind such a demented statement, he might celebrate the time that he has already had.

The world is topsy-turvy to be sure (hence our need to examine it carefully), and it is something as simple as a 'birthday' (repeated ad nauseum in spite of the fact that you only have one, a second if you're disciplined enough where you awaken to your true essence) that instils within us this greed for life. 

In the final analysis, you have one birth-day and one death-day, both causes for celebration. Wake up to the deeper reality that involves you, simplify your life!, and maybe, just maybe, you will come to see as the Zens see, that there is little difference between life and death, indeed, that life and death are the same.

'To be alive is to embrace a dying life', wrote the Japanese educator Yoshio Toi.

Long live death!