My Thoughts on Death
“Death is a clearing house for false identities.”
Glenda Green
In life, there is one, undeniable, immutable, and unalterable fact that binds every human being and sentient creature on this planet together; the fact that we all have an expiration date in these physical bodies. Within the religious texts, spiritual teachings, and philosophical structures of virtually every ancient and pre-modern culture this truth resides as a fundamental teaching and is also used to initiate boys into men and girls into women. Archetypically speaking, what defines a boy or adolescent is their innocence and until one has experienced the loss of innocence ie becomes aware of the phenomenon of death they cannot mature and evolve into an integrated adult. Therefore, if one remains clinging onto their innocence and refuses to accept death as a natural cycle of life they will remain a boy or girl in an adults body, which in so many ways, represents the general culture of America.
The goal is not to lose our innocence completely as to become hardened, jaded, and resentful towards life and yet this seems to be part of the initiation process from childhood into adulthood. Only one who has passed through the sequential phases of their own maturation process can make full use of their life because they have experienced both light and dark and are no longer naive to certain realities of this world. The primary reality is that from the moment we are born into this world we begin the biological aging cycle and so far in human history no man or woman has been able to escape this fact. When one comes to terms with their own mortality and can accept death they are able to reclaim whatever innocence was lost in the transition from childhood and find the joy of life once again.
The fear of death is often, if not always, more accurately one’s deepest fear of truly living a life of their own design and execution. It may be hard to understand but in reality most people are far more afraid of what they stand to lose than what they stand to gain, in most cases. We always know what we stand to lose from taking risks in life but we never know what we stand to gain and I would say that is what people are really afraid of. We often cling to the structures, belief systems, ideologies, routines, and cultural stigmas set upon us from a young age and in order to step into a new phase of life it requires the death of old, outdated ideas about how life should be which means to strip away what we have clung onto and embrace the total mystery of life. This requires we take total responsibility for creating our lives and to the degree that we can accept responsibility is the degree we can let go of our adolescence and step into adulthood. The main distinction between a child and an adult is one knows they are going to leave this realm (and can actually feel death’s presence) and the other lives in the realm of pure potential (their own imagination) all the while unaware of what awaits them in the physical realm.
The acknowledgement of death brings about the sobering awareness that we, too, shall transition from our bodies and no longer exist as we have been accustomed to all of our lives. We lose a bit of that pure childhood innocence but what we gain is a type of strength and clarity to choose our direction in life carefully and with great intention. A child does not have to plan their lives with intentionality or care because they are dependent on their caretakers (or social institutions) to do it for them. When our paternal figures we have relied upon and looked up too suddenly or not so suddenly die it causes a spontaneous evolutionary impulse to trigger within us. It is a primal pattern of growth that initiates us into adopting greater responsibility because we discover that no one else will do it for us anymore. This can even be said when our role models or childhood hero’s die. It causes of chain reaction of emotions and potentially an awakening in one because they are posed with a situation they may not have had to encounter before. When someone, such as a great sports figure, actor, performer, or whomever one may consider invulnerable dies it can bring up archetypes within that individual that invites them to become their own hero of their lives thus no longer living vicariously through the life of someone else, which again, is the distinction between adulthood and adolescence ie a child and an adult.
The westernized homogenized social cultures of the world have built their infrastructure in a way that denies the fact of death and refuses to acknowledge it, both in their politics, corporate interests, and in the actions of the citizens themselves. In a western world hyper specialized in technological advancement and the obsession with scientific means of attempting at making life make sense we have lost touch with what makes life work and thus lost a piece of our humanity as well. There is a pervading death phobia, ironically enough, within the very society that could be accurately described as a death culture based on entropic and self destructive tendencies. To deny death assumes one can live forever and thus can live in any manner they choose with little to no regard for consequences because death, in of itself, is the ultimate accountability tracker and without this our culture suffers from a deeply disturbed pathologic loss of moral direction. The denial of death leads to all kinds of psycho-emotional-spiritual afflictions because this most basic fact is stored and tracked in the subconscious mind itself as survival software from our genetic lineage (and potentially from our previous lifetimes). To deny the fact of death is to deny an entire aspect of ourselves and it is also possible that it wreaks havoc on the adult psychology because an adult should (and does) know death is real but is lying to oneself (as if they still tell themselves bed time fairy tales) which only creates more inner conflict between truth and fallacy.
I believe the real reason there is a phobia of death is because we have not been properly instructed on how to live and thus how to feel the full spectrum of life experiences. People tend to open themselves up to immediate pleasures and close themselves of to immediate discomforts and oscillate somewhere in-between that pendulum. It has never been more important in human history for all of us to begin to feel ourselves at our core and allow our unacknowledged feelings to bring forth a healing that in all likelihood for most of us is long overdue. As the old saying goes, in order to heal it you must first feel it. One of the central experiences we all will encounter, one way or another, is the grief of loss. This can be any kind of loss and I have experienced a wide spectrum of this in my own life and it has always felt right, although deeply painful, to thrust myself fully into the experience when it emerged instead of holding back or medicating the pain. People tend to shy away from love, although it’s what they desire most, because somewhere they know grief and love are somehow tied together and if we go deep enough into love we will put ourselves at risk to experience loss.
Grief and love are more like twins, inseparable and intertwined, then are like adversaries of the other. Many want to assume that where there is one the other cannot reside but this is not accurate. Grief is often mistaken as the end of love but in reality grief could be seen as the single greatest sign of love in it’s most raw, vulnerable, and truly honest expression. When someone close to us dies a part of us dies too and through the cracking open of our heart the love is unleashed because what could possibly cause us to feel the depths and edges of our soul other than the touch of love. Stephen Jenkinson beautifully said that grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view. So it stands to reason that the only way to live in such a way that protects one from heartbreak is to live with as little heart as possible.This can only result in becoming a mechanical man or woman constantly attempting to protect oneself from the effects of life. So when we live with our heart we allow our heart to become exposed but without living with an open heart what would the value of living really entail?
Your Death does not mean you harm. It is the most faithful companion you will ever have.
Stephen Jenkinson
