#181 Laws of Human Nature: Death Denial
Most of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead, the inevitability of death should be continually on our minds. Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose and urgency to realise our goals. Training ourselves to confront and accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks, separations, and crises in life.
Our thoughts tend to circle around the same anxieties, fantasies, and resentments, like a continuous loop. However, certain events (like visiting places we have never visited before) can trigger a different quality of thinking and feeling. As we are forced to pay attention, everything we see and hear seems a little more vibrant.
If we survive a brush with death it has a paradoxical result of making us feel more awake and alive as it alters our thinking, feeling, and the attention we pay to everything around us.
By denying and repressing the thought of death, we feed our anxieties and become more deathlike from within - separated from other people, our thinking habitual and repetitive, with overall movement and change. On the other hand, the familiarity and closeness with death - connects us more profoundly to the reality and fullness of life.
The following five strategies can help us look at death more closely and deeply:
Make the awareness visceral: Out of fear, we convert death into an abstraction, a thought we can entertain now and then or repress. We must begin by meditating on our death and seeking to convert it into something more real and physical. We can use our imagination by envisioning the day our death arrives, where we might be, how it might come. We must make this as vivid as possible. We can also try to look at the world as if we were seeing things for the last time
Awaken to the shortness of life: As we distance ourselves from death, 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. We must think of our mortality as a kind of continual deadline - and let the awareness of the shortness of life clarify our daily actions. Better to bring awareness that this could be our last project, the last time we could be meeting somebody
See the mortality in everyone: The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him or her alone and is therefore, absolutely and inextricably lost. We want to see that uniqueness of the other person in the present, brining out those qualities we have taken for granted. We want to experience their vulnerability to pain and death, not just or own
Embrace all pain and adversity: Life by its nature involves pain and suffering. We try to avoid painful moments and to muffle their effect by distracting ourselves (taking drugs or engaging in addictive behaviour). Our task is to accept the moments of pain and suffering (and even embrace them), not for the pain but for the opportunities to learn and strengthen ourselves. Being able to accustom ourselves to some degree of physical pain, without immediately reaching for something to dull it, is an important life skill
Open the mind to the sublime: Think of death as a kind of threshold we all must cross. We confront something that is truly unknowable. This confrontation with something we cannot know or verbalise is what we shall call the sublime. Feeling the sublime is the perfect antidote to our complacency and to the petty concerns of daily life that can consume us and leave us feeling empty. In the face of the sublime, we feel a shiver, a foretaste of death itself, something too large for our minds to encompass. And for a moment it shakes us out of our smugness and releases us from the deathlike grip of habit and banality
This post is a summary of information provided in the book - The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene