I've been thinking a lot about death lately. A nice way to start off a blog post, right? Well I think so. There's so much that can be said about death, and if everyone took a moment to stop and think about their own eventual, inevitable death, I bet that they'd have a lot to add to the conversation. Someone once called death "the great equalizer", and I think that is a pretty damn good way of looking at it, at least with what limited vision we do have from this side of the abyss. Death, as it sits waiting in the corners of everyone's lives to embrace each of us completely, is really the one thing that we - as humans, animals, beings - can honestly say binds us all. Every man, woman, child, girl, boy, republican, democrat, homosexual, heterosexual, Christian, Muslim, Jew, businessman, hobo, good person, or bad person all eventually fall to the ground, lifeless, no trace left. It is the great darkness, so to speak. We watch our peers, our friends, our family, total strangers dropping dead with no explanation, other than "that's the way it has to be".
My interest in the subject lies in the fact that it really is the great question, the philosopher's conundrum, the Mystery. It grips us all at moments when we are alone, and truly alone, when there is nothing within nor without us that can be relied upon, and our own subjectivity drops with a depth unfathomable into unreachable places. Everywhere we look, we only see ourselves, our birth and death and the meaning in between. Maybe some of us haven't felt this way, but regardless, death is what makes us all human, and it will happen to you too!
What a sincere and honest contemplation of death really gives us, I feel, is a good long look at our Self, and by Self I do not mean the Me that likes to play guitar and enjoys reading and sitting in meditation from time to time and loves his coffee in the morning and doesn't like seafood. This is not the Self to which I am referring. No, good readers, what I am referring to is that which doesn't change. Well this may seem odd to some of us, because if we look real real hard, what we see is that we are constantly changing. The me who sits here now writing this is in no way the 9-year-old me that once loved football and wanted to be in the army. In fact, that isn't a me at all anymore, and is more of a him. The point is that the self that we present to the world and to our selves (yes, a contradiction, called self-reflexivity or self-reference), is not really the Self. If indeed we have a Self in the way that most everyone thinks - that is, a single unchanging essence that makes me me - then how can it change? If my most basic and fundamental self-ness were to change, how could I really be the same person? And there is no denying the fact that I am in some way the same person that left my mother's womb 21 years ago.
When we really think about our deaths, what we are contemplating is our selves, or our Self, the part of us which, by definition, does not change. But is there any part of us which does not change? Now of course there have been many answers to that question, but two that interest me are as follows - one, by the Hindus, and two, by the Buddhists. They both have very different answers to this question, but both of their answers, in my opinion, get at the same thing. For one, the Hindus believe there is indeed something that does not change in us. They called it the Atman, or the most basic and fundamental Self in each of us. According to the Hindus, the Atman is inconceivable, untouchable, unchanging, invisible, and as big as the universe itself. This Atman, or Self, at its core, is indistinguishable from the being of God itself. When we die, this Atman lives on, and if one lives a life in awareness of the holy nature of Atman, he is merged with the fabric of God and the Universe, for the Self and God were never separate. This idea of a Self that is beyond conception and knowing is very much like "the eye that sees but cannot see itself", a phrase that expresses what is known as the anti-reflexivity principle. The Self is like an eye that sees all things but itself.
Now, the Buddhists went about this in a very different way. The Buddhists claim that there is no thing anywhere that is unchanging. That goes for any conception of a Self that is above and beyond change. The Self and the world are made up of totally dependent and constantly changing phenomena that have no real essences. When you die, you merely die, every part and parcel of "you" and a new "you" is reborn, a you that has nothing to do with the present "you" and shouldn't even be rightly called "you". There is no Self, and any conception of one is just that - a conception, based on unsubstantiated fantasies.
However, understanding how these two seemingly opposing ways of reconciling the problem of Self are really one and the same could give us a more clear picture of what death means to the Self, whatever that is. I would argue that, where the Hindus offer a concept of the Self that is above concepts and which is fundamentally YOU, the Buddhists sought merely to make that concept no longer a concept, but a reality. To realize Atman, according to the Hindus, is to realize the fundamental unity of Self and God, relative and absolute. The Buddhists, by cutting out the concept of Atman and asserting the emptiness of everything, really just united You with your Self again. If You are your Self, why is it that you speak and think about yourself as if it is something that you can know or think about. How can you think about you? Likewise, how can an eye see itself? Well, what the Buddhists really did was show us that the eye is always seeing itself by just being an eye. Likewise, we are always united with our most fundamental Self by just being. There is no need to conceptualize. And the fact that we think we can conceptualize accurately about ourselves is a laugh! It's like how we look up into a clear night sky and see the Milky Way streaking brilliantly across the black. Well, we shouldn't really point to it and say that we see the Milky Way, because we are the Milky Way. We are in it! We could just as well point at the ground and say "There's the Milky Way!". And so, our Self is what we always are, no trying or searching or thinking necessary. We see all things, and by just seeing, we are always seeing ourselves.
So what happens when I die? What will really happen on that fateful day when I finally realize that it's my time? Maybe I won't be so lucky as to die naturally. But even so, I must die on some day, whether it be tomorrow or 60 years from now. Either way, it will happen in the blink of an eye. What will happen to my Self? Here's what I say: Nothing. Nothing happens. Ram Dass says "Dying is like taking off a tight shoe". As simple as that. Nothing fancy. Meister Eckhart, in some much more beautiful way, said the following: "The only part of you that goes to Hell is the part of you that you cannot let go". If we let go of our ideas about ourselves, then there can be no part of us that will suffer when we die. Death will be like passing through a doorway. So simple, and so fast.
But hey, maybe I'm all wrong. We'll see when the Reaper comes!
