Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If youth only knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn. Dear brother, I swear that I shall not lose hope. I will keep my soul pure and my heart open. I will be reborn for the better.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When we unconsciously disconnect ourselves from the awareness of death, we forge a particular relationship to time—one that is rather loose and distended. We come to imagine that we always have more time than is the reality. Our minds drift to the future, where all our hopes and wishes will be fulfilled. If we have a plan or a goal, we find it hard to commit to it with a lot of energy. We’ll get to it tomorrow, we tell ourselves. Perhaps we are tempted in the present to work on another goal or plan—they all seem so inviting and different, so how can we commit fully to one or another? We experience a generalized anxiety, as we sense the need to get things done, but we are always postponing and scattering our forces. Then, if a deadline is forced upon us on a particular project, that dreamlike relationship to time is shattered and for some mysterious reason we find the focus to get done in days what would have taken weeks or months. The change imposed upon us by the deadline has a physical component: our adrenaline is pumping, filling us with energy and concentrating the mind, making it more creative. It is invigorating to feel the total commitment of mind and body to a single purpose, something we rarely experience in the world today, in our distracted state.
Daily Law: We must think of our mortality as a kind of continual deadline, giving a similar effect as described above to all our actions in life.
The Laws of Human Nature, 18: Meditate on Our Common Mortality—The Law of Death Denial
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.