In my exploration of practical philosophy, I've learned that contemplation of death often yields new learnings that we can directly apply to our daily lives.
Probably nineteen out of twenty people I mention this to in person either run away from the topic (sometimes literally physically leaving the room) or scoff and respond with a comment akin to "What the hell, dude. That's morbid."
Death is a great mystery. This great mystery often causes us to feel a myriad of negative emotions which usually result in avoidance, as evidenced above. Some religious and spiritual folk, based on their teachings, don't actually see it as a mystery - they have a belief and understanding of what happens. Yet they typically still react the same when thinking about death - fear, stress, avoidance.
However, some of us, the one in twenty, see things very differently. We examine it a bit closer. Upon examination, we find some interesting things out about ourselves. We make a lot of decisions in our lives based on our fear of thinking about our own eventual death. We one in twenty, instead, live in terms of probability. We think to ourselves, "Living in fear of thinking about death might possibly be holding us back. Removing that fear, and actually contemplating death, just might give me new thoughts that increase my probability of getting more out of life." So we build skills to remove the fear of thinking about death and we open the door to getting more out of life.
Here's one example of how this can help us get more out of life.
If we consider the world's various ways of trying to understand death, a couple themes emerge:
- the body biologically dies - this means it no longer sees, feels, hears, etc
- there is disagreement about what happens to our consciousness (spirit, soul, etc)
#2 there is pretty interesting! When we die, do we die? Does our spirit, soul or consciousness end? Does it go somewhere? Does it just...exist...void of the body and its senses? What happens when we die? What if we don't die when we die?
Since I can't answer those questions, I'll just see if we can improve our probability of being prepared for the unknown.
As probabilistic thinkers, we can quickly come to this conclusion: It makes sense to do things assuming my body will stop sensing and that my consciousness may or may not continue.
From there, we begin picking new skills we want to learn and we figure out how to learn them.
Here are a couple skills I've learned based on this style of thinking. For each, let's look at a) why the skill might be useful in the context of death, b) how we practice the skill and c) the benefits to our daily life. If we hit those three things, it will hand us some very powerful practical philosophy - philosophical thought that helps us in every day life.
Preparing for Unpredictable Change
a) why the skill might be useful
Most of us must admit that we have no idea what it will be like to die. Even many of us who have a belief about what it is like to die (from our religion, spirituality, science, or otherwise) still are unable to completely 100% grasp what it will be like. We must accept that we have no idea what that experience will be like. We can be fairly certain it will be unlike anything else we've every gone through. We can also be fairly certain that we don't have a way to really put ourselves in that exact situation ahead of time to get practice.
What we've just described is unpredictable change. Something will change in our life experience and we have no ability to predict what that change will be like.
This skill will be useful because we will be comfortable dealing with unpredictable change. There will be an increased probability (though not 100% certainty) that we will deal better with the unpredictable change that is "dying". Knowing that we don't know what's "on the other side", we no longer have to fear the process of finding out - we can comfortably walk into the experience when it is time to do so and we can do it with a sense of curiosity.
b) how we practice the skill
We change our relationship with change. We shift our relationship with change from "this is new! this is scary! I don't like this!" to "this is new! this is awesome! I'm so curious what it will be like!" We shift our thoughts about change away from resistance and towards curiosity.
Every time we notice ourselves feeling resistance to change, we pause our mind and we intentionally let go of the resistance and we intentionally build up our curiosity. Moving to a new house? "I wonder how I'll use the different rooms every day." Getting a new job? "I wonder who I'll get along with and who I won't." Receiving a new diagnosis from a doctor? "I wonder what how I will learn to cope with this and still be an awesome influence on my family and friends."
We practice this skill by replacing resistance-based thoughts about change with curiosity-based thoughts about change.
c) the benefits to our daily life
The benefits to our daily life are already apparent. As we encounter change in our lives, we will eventually no longer feel an immediate resistance to it. We will no longer feel fear of it. Instead, we will be curious. We will live more minutes of our lives in a creative state of mind. Because we are living more minutes in a creative state of mind (and fewer in a stress-related state of mind) our body will produce fewer stress-related chemicals. Our mind and our body will be healthier throughout our lives as a direct affect of learning this skill.
Finding Comfort Without Sensory Inputs
a) why the skill might be useful
When we die, we understand that our body will biologically shut down. It will stop seeing, it will stop feeling, it will stop hearing, etc. Let's remind ourselves that sensory deprivation is used as a torture tactic and is generally understood to be a horrible sensation. I can't speak for you, but I don't like the idea of going through a torturous experience as the last few seconds or minutes or hours of my life. I'd much rather be comfortable with a lack of sensory inputs so the last seconds, minutes or hours of my life are comfortable.
b) how we practice the skill
Meditation is a key here. To over-simplify, there are two types of meditation. Passive meditation and active meditation. Active meditation would be like saying affirmations or visualizing during meditation. This is effective in instilling new beliefs so we, for example, have more confidence in ourselves. Passive meditation would be like allowing thoughts to quiet themselves so we essentially don't think at all.
Passive meditation seems like the right tool for the job here, right?
When we practice passive meditation, we learn to sit without thoughts. It takes some time to learn this skill. I'd recommend starting at 2 minutes per day for the first 7 days then ramping up to 5 minutes per day for the next 14 days, then keep going up as long as you want. 20 minutes per day is common for many meditators. To feel the benefits, we need to do it every day and roughly the same time of day for at least a few weeks. Like going to the physical gym, this is going to the mental gym, and it takes a few weeks before we see the benefits. As we get good at meditating, we experience more and more of our meditative time separate from any sensory inputs. We experience periods of time where we don't feel the ground, we don't hear the noise, we don't see anything. And we become very comfortable in this setting.
We practice the skill of being comfortable without sensory inputs by passively meditating.
c) the benefits to our daily life
As we build this skill, we gain increased mastery of our attention. We are able to place our attention where we want it. We are able to allow distractions to dissolve around us. We are suddenly able to read with more focus for longer periods of time. We are able to listen to people in our conversations without being distracted by our thoughts or background noise. We are able to run, jump, stand, walk without our mind noticing pain in our joints or muscles. In our everyday life, our mind naturally focuses on the things we want it to and it naturally ignores the distractions we don't need.
The Big Win
So there we have it! With a little practice, our daily lives get better, we reduce our fear of thinking about death, and we get more out of life! While it doesn't guarantee we will be fully prepared for death itself, it does increase the probability and it also helps us between now and then! By applying practical philosophy like we did in this post, we change the way our minds work and we change the way our brains work. We spend less time being stressed. When we spend less time being stressed, our body is healthier because it doesn't release stress-related chemicals into the body. When we spend less time being stressed, our mind is free to be creative and joyful.
Let's change how we think about death. Let's replace fear with curiosity. Let's replace avoidance (of thinking about it) with examination. Let's use probability thinking to get more out of life!
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Thank you and have an incredible day!