We humans tend to see things in isolation. We see ourselves and others as individuals, not realizing how our very existence, our consciousness, our brains, and our physiology, depend on all those in the past before us, stretching far back in time. When we look at other animals, we imagine an unbridgeable gulf between us and them. The threads that connect all lifeforms are simply not visible to us and so not a part of our daily consciousness. You must train yourself to think and feel differently, always seeking to pick out the hidden threads. Imagine that there is a Whole that every event and phenomenon is a part of—the Whole that is your psychology and all your unconscious motivations stretching back to early childhood; the Whole that is you and all the various influences in your life, including parents, friends, society, and the cultural zeitgeist; the Whole that is you and all the past generations of humans that have shaped the world you now live in; and finally the Whole that is you and all the life-forms that have led to the evolution of humans and that live within you.
Daily Law: When you look at the world, stop fixating on all the separate forms you see and view it as all one—one throbbing, pulsating web stretching from 4 billion years ago to the present, with you as a tiny but necessary speck on a single thread.
Law of the Sublime, 2: Awaken to the Strangeness of Being Alive—The Biological Sublime
You determine the quality of your mind by the nature of your daily thoughts.
If they circle around the same obsessions and dramas, you create an arid and monotonous mental landscape, and this secretly makes you miserable.
Instead, you must seek to radiate your mind outward, to unleash your imagination and intensify your experience of life. And the furthest you can expand the mind is by connecting it to the Cosmic Sublime. Consider the limitlessness of space and time, the unspeakably awesome chain of events triggered by the Big Bang. Return to the very origins of our planet by visiting certain primeval landscapes. Think of the infinite nature of the human brain as a mirror of the infinite cosmos. Meditate on our common mortality. You are in fact surrounded every day by endless marvels, and to the degree you let them into your daily consciousness, you expand your mind and reinvigorate its immense powers. The month of December will help you expand your mind to its furthest reaches: the Cosmic Sublime Death—it’s our greatest fear. But this fear has effects we are not even aware of. It infects our mental life in general. It secretly instills a fear of life. Much of the latent, chronic anxiety that plagues most of us is rooted in the inability to confront our mortality.
We live in a culture that takes death denial to the extreme, banishing the presence of death as much as is possible.
If you go back hundreds of years, you could not have failed to see people die in front of you. You might see it on the streets or in your home. Most people had to kill their own food. You saw animals being slaughtered in front of your eyes.
Death had a presence. It was constantly there. And so people were thinking about it all the time. And they had religion to help soothe the idea of their mortality.
We now live in a world where it’s the complete opposite. We have to repress the very thought of it. We can’t see it anywhere. It’s put into hospitals where it’s sanitized, where it happens behind closed doors. Nobody ever talks about it. Nobody tells you this is probably the most important life skill that you could have—to know how to deal with that fear of mortality. Nobody teaches that. Your parents don’t talk about it. Your girlfriend or boyfriend— they don’t talk about it. Nobody. It’s a dirty little secret. But it’s the only reality we have. We’re all going to die.
So if you’re in denial of it, if you’re repressing it—which most people are —it comes out in secret ways. It makes you anxious in your daily life because you’re not dealing with the one most important thing. You don’t realize it, but it’s infecting you in your day-to-day decisions, how you interact with people. It is very simple: you need to confront this fear and find ways to transform it into vitality and power.
Think of it this way—you could die tomorrow. You have no control over this. You could be young, you could be twenty-four years old—people die young all the time. Understand what that means—it means your time is limited. You don’t have these vast decades of life in front of you. You have dreams and aspirations and things you want to accomplish—knowing the shortness and precariousness of life gives you a sense of urgency. It makes you also appreciate everything around you that you see. It makes life more vivid and intense by understanding that any day now, it could be ripped away from you.
I personally had this brought home to me like a slap in the face. Two months after I finished The Laws of Human Nature, I suffered a stroke. It was a rather severe stroke in which I was very fortunate to survive and not have permanent brain damage. It was just a matter of minutes and then it was over.
I was in a coma, and upon waking from that the whole left side of my body was basically paralyzed. Movement slowly came back. But I had to confront this reality just after I wrote the chapter on meditating on our common mortality. And what I wrote about in the book is true.
Now, I look around me at all I see, I look at all that I have—and the experience makes everything more intense. The colors are more intense. The sounds are more intense. The feeling of being connected to other people is more intense because now I’m aware not just of my own mortality but that of the people I’m with. My girlfriend, she could be gone tomorrow. My mother and sister, they could be gone tomorrow. My friends, they could be gone tomorrow. I have to appreciate them on a higher level. I have to understand that everybody has this in them. And knowing that other people are also facing it is a way for me to connect to them, a way to deepen my empathy on a very primal human level.
The essential power that confronting your mortality will give you—I call it the Sublime. Because it also opens up this idea of how amazing the world is that we live in, and how much we take for granted because we think that we’re going to live forever. It’s an incredibly important concept to me and it’s also very personal in the sense that I came this close to dying myself.
I compare it to standing at the shore of some vast ocean. The fear of that dark ocean makes you turn away and retreat. I want you to get into your little boat and I want you to go into that ocean and explore it.