What is Death? Redux

After finishing what is, considering the subject, a very brief discourse (and as yet unpublished) on the nature of death from a metaphysical perspective, it seems to be worthwhile to discuss the nature of death as it is, now, perceived through sensation.

Our society has found many different ways to push death off to the side by diluting the strength and character of our family life, assigning management of its existence to professional institutions who view human beings through a numbing filter of statistics and cost, and emphasizing frivolous, brand-based lifestyles that celebrate youth and health alone. 

This results in a form of mass hypnosis, whereby death becomes a cartoon. Motorcycle gangs and heavy metal fans wear skulls on their shirts; for them, death is a fashion. It makes them cool.

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by this; we've lost respect for almost everything by eroding every institution and tradition we adhere to or come across. Resurrected traditions become cartoons as they are retrieved from the garbage dump, resurrected, and infused with various kinds of snake oil to make them look vigorous. Even those with the best of intentions can't help doing this, because snake oil is everywhere in our culture and it infuses what we do as readily as water seeps through cracks. It takes inner muscle, a determined effort, to cleave to a real tradition; to develop an integrity that isn't contaminated with this result of modern living.

We have taken the face off death; but we need to know it, instead of casting it in the role of the unwanted stranger.

If we were aware of death, through the sensation of our life itself—which is an intimate relationship with our Being, the fact of our existence as it is, which includes our mortality at this instant—we might have a new respect for ourselves and others. And this is desperately needed; a respect that is born from our organic sense of being, not the media and its demands that we do this or that. Respect instilled in us from outward demand is, I suppose, better than nothing; societies have relied on that in one way or another for millennia in order to establish and preserve their cultures. But all along, throughout history, there has been an undercurrent carried by both individuals and religious institutions that demands we discover an inward respect born of a sensation of an authority higher than ourselves. I believe that somewhere deep down inside us we still have the sense that that might help us, if we only listened: that evokes a sacred call to the mystery of what it means to be alive.

Those who read Parabola magazine (see Parabola.org) will find, in this issue, which is about Presence, several articles about addiction and recovery, including one about Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. You may think to yourself that addiction and recovery don't actually have anything to do with cultivating a personal sense of presence; but they have everything to do with it. Speaking personally as a recovering alcoholic, I can affirm that addiction is a very real battle on the gritty, unforgiving turf of one’s existence between life and death. 

Addicts don't have the luxury of sitting in armchairs and philosophizing about getting real. Either they do it, or they die. They have no choice but to learn how to submit to a higher authority than their own; simply put, their own authority is what's killing them. In this, the parallels between the paradigm of addiction and the way our society and our "leaders" behave are disturbing.

The moment when I got sober was the moment one morning when I got up after a binge and looked in the mirror and saw death looking back out of it at me. 

In the end, nothing demands presence like death does. It is the reminder. We only manage to get up every morning and treat others poorly because we’ve forgotten the way in which death looks back out of the mirror at us as we brush our teeth.

There is nothing morbid about this. Death is a reminding factor that can infuse us with a much greater respect for our own life and the lives of others. The value of the present moment, along with its meaning, is much better measured against the yardstick of death that it is against all the other nonsense we make up for ourselves. The presence of death itself, when properly sensed, confers sobriety; not just from substance abuse, but from the abuse of other human beings; the abuse of our philosophies, our institutions, our relationships, and our materials. There are times, watching today’s cultural dialogue and the feeding frenzy of modern media, that it seems nothing can wake us up.

But the presence of death can wake us up… 

if we let it.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.