Of Living and Dying
"Live in the Now" - that's the lesson of Meditating on Death
“None
of us gets out of life alive” is a quotation that remains in my mind. I even remember the occasion of my first
hearing it way back in the early 1990s.
I was listening to a radio programme by the Irish journalist Colm Keane
on the subject of “Death Row” in some penitentiary in one of the southern
states of the USA. Our intrepid
journalist interviewed a convicted murderer, who was placed behind a protective
glass screen. I remember that this man
showed absolutely no remorse for the murders he had committed and saw life as
being just a sort of game which one played; a game where it did not matter if
one broke the rules as long as one got away with it. In fact, the prison guards called him, “the
animal.” I remember the hair standing
upright on my neck as I listened to this cold, unfeeling, rational, and
obviously very intelligent man, express his thoughts and feelings on the crimes
he had committed and on life in general. However, he expressed in eight short
words the very heart of the human predicament – our temporality or our transitoriness
on this minuscule planet that is a mere dot in the infinity of space. This
state of affairs, when it hits home in the thinking and feeling and
self-conscious human being, is exactly what we mean by the adjectives
“existential” or “existentialist.” In short, our mortality lies at the heart of
what essentially existentialism boils
down to.
Freud
used to say that the real repression in humankind was that of the base sexual
desires that were deeply rooted in the dark pit of the unconscious. However, Jung and others since have pointed
out most wisely that the ultimate or real repression is that of death. In one sense, this repression is a survival
mechanism. After all, the denial of
death allows for egocentric humankind to push forward against all opposition –
coming from either others or nature – to amass property, wealth and
acquisitions of all kinds. One might
say, in quite a convincing sense, that all culture is created in the face of
death – a sort of myth of significance and permanency in the teeth of the very
impermanence and transitoriness of life itself.
Here
is where a philosophy of life comes in on the one hand and where the spiritual
and religious traditions on the other have had some insightful things to
say. Admittedly religions in their more
structural, authoritarian, hierarchical and indeed forbidding senses have been
all too doctrinaire in their tenets and often murdered many who opposed them
throughout the course of history.
However, here I am referring to a more devotional and spiritual model or
aspect of such religions. It is arguable
that when religions lose vital contact with what the philosopher Eric Voegelin,
called their “engendering experience” (or spiritual source or originating
vision) they become monolithic, heartless and forbidding structures capable of
dehumanising others.
The
novelist, literary critic and professor of philosophy Umberto Eco opined that we read literature to learn how to
die. That notion is perhaps a bit
one-sided. I prefer to say that we read
literature in order to learn how to live and die. Living and dying are, in fact, the two sides
of the one coin and are somehow paradoxically inextricably linked. To be a living being is to be a dying being. Essentially, death and dying are consequences
of The Second Law of Thermodynamics
or of the results of what’s called
entropy. A thorough understanding of
this concept is beyond me as I have little background in Physics, but I can
grasp some of its intentions and implications.
To my mind, Walter E. Requadt explains entropy very well for the
ordinary person in the street in his wonderfully thought-provoking and
stimulating blog called “The Happy Iconoclast” by invoking “Murphy’s Law”:
Unless we
constantly insert new energy into a house by maintaining it, painting it,
repairing it, the structure will eventually but inevitably be levelled to the
ground. Its molecules will move from a lower level of randomization, from
structure, to a higher level of randomization, towards unstructured debris.
Entropy is the
reason why paint peels, why hot coffee turns cold. Furthermore, entropy is the
reason why investments have a pre-ordained inclination to go sour -- unless we
enhance success by inserting into the investment system additional energy in
the form of strategy, work, calculated risk or other forms of energy. Entropy
ensures that sugar, which becomes more randomized when it is dissolved in
water, will not reconstitute itself in the crystalline form -- unless we apply
heat energy from outside the system and evaporate the water.
Wherever we
look, whatever we do, we must be acutely aware of the immutable laws of
thermodynamics, especially the easily overlooked Second Law: Entropy. This
fundamental law of physics ranks with other fundamental manifestations of the
universe such as gravity, time and electromagnetism.
Anything that
can go wrong not only will go wrong, it must go wrong, as decreed by the Second
Law of Thermodynamics. (See here: The Happy Iconoclast)
To say that we humans die is to say
that we like the entire flora and fauna of the earth are subject to the
inevitability of the various laws of the universe, and most essentially to the
law of entropy.
Along similar lines, Stephen Hawking
told his biographers (Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science by John Gribbin and Michael White, 1992),
who had once been Ph.D. students under his direction, that he had never
succumbed to anger at life when he was stricken down with motor-neurone disease
because essentially life was just chance anyway, and that it all boiled down to
the randomness of nature – that is, to the chances involved or the probability
of one’s parents meeting and then in the combinations of genes allocated by
nature to your particular embryo. These
were, to say the least, random.
 |
| Professor Stephen Hawking |
While Hawking likes to style himself
an atheist, this stance is quite akin to that of a Buddhist spirituality (which
some say is not religious anyway) that states that all suffering is caused by
our attachment to things animate and inanimate.
All meditation practices and wisdom learnt therefrom and from study, and
indeed from life in general, all help us to break free from such suffering by
learning detachment. In other words, this is the implication of what is known
as the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism that
can be stated in simple terms as:
1. Suffering
exists: dukkha. (Life is unfair essentially, with much chance involved –
Hawking’s position)
2. Suffering
arises from attachment to desires. (Wishing that things were different – that I
shouldn’t get Motor Neurone disease and so on). It is called either samudaya or tanha
in the various traditions and is the vain desire to have and control things.
3. Suffering
ceases when attachment to desire ceases. (When I cease to be attached to
unfulfillable desires or even fulfilled ones). The end to suffering is called nirodha.
It is achieving Nirvana, which is the final liberation from suffering. The mind
experiences complete freedom, liberation and non-attachment. It lets go of any
desire or craving. It is an attaining of dispassion.
4. Freedom
from suffering is possible by practicing the Eightfold Path
It is important to note that in the Eastern
religions, to meditate on dying and death is no mere negative action. Nor is it a particularly morose one. Only at first sight does it appear to be
such. Once one has meditated on either
dying or death one comes from one’s sitting with a renewed commitment to living
life more fully, and more especially living it more fully in the now. To realise that truly life is fleeting and
that we all end up either “six feet under” or being cremated is to deeply
realise that the only answer is to live life more fully, more intensely by
being aware of the sheer importance of living fully in the now. After all, now is all we have. In a sense, neither the past nor the future
exists because the first has ceased to be and the second has not yet come. In a deeper sense, all that exists is the
present moment or the now. In fact,
conscious life is just that – an awareness of the abiding present or the
passing now. (Or, as I look at these previous words anew, why not write "the abiding presence of the passing now"?
Picture of a Poppy I took April 2014
Meditating on dying and
death should never bring us down into the pits of despair because its real
message is to deeply value and live in the enduring present. Obviously, I don’t mean by this combination
of words that everything stays the same or that nothing changes. What I mean is that we only can really live
in the now of time as it moves – that’s what I mean by the enduring present.
We read in the Tao Te Ching:
If you realise that all things change,
There is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
There is nothing you can’t achieve.
Trying to control the future
Is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
Chances are that you’ll cut your hand.
(Tao Te Ching, verse 74, Lao Tzu, translated
by Stephen Mitchell)
In summary, then, we have two choices and the choice recommended by all spiritualities worth their salt is to choose life not death everyday of our lives by practicing living in the now.
