by 50 Cent
If we were to give ourselves up to these two trains of thought—the pain and the meaninglessness—we would almost be paralyzed into inaction or driven to suicide. But consciously and unconsciously we invented two solutions to this awareness. The most primitive was the creation of the concept of an afterlife that would alleviate our fears and give our actions in the present much meaning. The second solution—the one that has come to dominate our thinking in the present—is to attempt to forget our mortality and bury ourselves in the moment. This means actively repressing any thought of death itself. To aid in this, we distract our minds with routines and banal concerns. Occasionally we are reminded of our fear when someone close to us dies, but generally we have developed the habit of drowning it out with our daily concerns.
The problem, however, is that this repression is not really effective. We generally become conscious of our mortality at the age of four or five. At that moment, such a thought had a profound impact on our psyches. We associated it with feelings of separation from loved ones, with any kind of darkness, chaos, or the unknown. And it troubled us deeply. This fear has sat inside of us ever since. It is impossible to completely eradicate or avoid such an immense thought; it sneaks in through another door, seeps into our behavior in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.
Death represents the ultimate reality—a limit to our days and efforts in a definitive fashion. We have to face it alone and leave behind all that we know and love—a complete separation. It is associated with physical and mental pain. To repress the thought, we must then avoid anything that reminds us of death. We therefore indulge in all kinds of fantasies and illusions, struggling to keep out of our minds any kind of hard and unavoidable reality. We cling to jobs, relationships, and comfortable positions, all to elude the feeling of separation. We grow overly conservative because any kind of risk might entail adversity, failure, or pain. We keep ourselves surrounded by others to drown out the thought of our essential aloneness. We may not be consciously aware of this, but in the end we expend an intense amount of psychic energy in these repressions. The fear of death does not go away; it merely returns in smaller anxieties and habits that limit our enjoyment of life.
There is a third and fearless way, however, to deal with mortality. From the moment we are born, we carry inside ourselves our death. It is not some outside event that ends our days but something within us. We have only so many days to live. This amount of time is something unique to us; it is ours alone, our only true possession. If we run away from this reality by avoiding the thought of death, we are really running away from ourselves. We are denying the one thing that cannot be denied; we are living a lie. The fearless approach requires that you accept the fact that you have only so much time to live, and that life itself inevitably involves levels of pain and separation. By embracing this, you embrace life itself and accept everything about it. Depending on a belief in an afterlife or drowning yourself in the moment to avoid pain is to despise reality, which is to despise life itself.
When you choose to affirm life by confronting your mortality, everything changes. What matters to you now is to live your days well, as fully as possible. You could choose to do this by pursuing endless pleasures, but nothing becomes boring more quickly than having to always search for new distractions. If attaining certain goals becomes your greatest source of pleasure, then your days are filled with purpose and direction, and whenever death comes, you have no regrets. You do not fall into nihilistic thinking about the futility of it all, because that is a supreme waste of the brief time you have been given. You now have a way of measuring what matters in life—compared to the shortness of your days, petty battles and anxieties have no weight. You have a sense of urgency and commitment—what you do you must do well, with all of your energy, not with a mind shooting off in a hundred directions.
To accomplish this is remarkably simple. It is a matter of looking inward and seeing death as something that you carry within. It is a part of you that cannot be repressed. It does not mean that you brood about it, but that you have continual awareness of a reality that you come to embrace. You convert the terrified, denial-type relationship to death into something active and positive—finally released from pettiness, useless anxieties, and fearful, timid responses.
This third, fearless way of approaching death originated in the ancient world, in the philosophy known as Stoicism. The core of Stoicism is learning the art of how to die, which paradoxically teaches you how to live. And perhaps the greatest Stoic writer in the ancient world was Seneca the Younger, born around 4 B.C. As a young man, Seneca was an extremely gifted orator, which led to a promising political career. But as part of a pattern that would continue throughout his life, this gift incurred the envy of those who felt inferior.
In A.D. 41, with trumped-up charges from an envious courtier, Emperor Claudius banished Seneca to the island of Corsica, where he would languish essentially alone for eight long years. Seneca had been familiar with Stoic philosophy, but now on this barely inhabited island he would have to practice it in real life. It was not easy. He found himself indulging in all kinds of fantasies and falling into despair. It was a constant struggle, reflected in his many letters to friends back in Rome. But slowly he conquered all of his fears by first conquering his fear of death.
He practiced all kinds of mental exercises, imagining painful forms of death and possible tragic endings. He would make them familiar and not frightening. He used a sense of shame—to fear his mortality would mean he abhorred nature itself, which decreed the death of all living things, and that would mean he was inferior to the smallest animal that accepted its death without complaint. Slowly he extirpated this fear and felt a sense of liberation. Feeling that he had a mission to communicate this newfound power of his to the world, he wrote at a furious pace.
In A.D. 49 he was finally exonerated, recalled to Rome, and appointed to a high position as praetor and private tutor to the twelve-year-old boy Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (soon to be known as Emperor Nero). During the first five years of Nero’s reign, Seneca was the de facto ruler of the Roman Empire, as the young Emperor gave himself over to the pleasures that were to later dominate his life. Seneca had to constantly struggle to rein in some of Nero’s violent tendencies, but for the most part those years were prosperous and the empire was well governed. Then envy set in again, and Nero’s courtiers began spreading stories that Seneca was enriching himself at the expense of the state. By A.D. 62, Seneca could see the writing on the wall, and he retired from public life to a country house, handing over almost all of his wealth to Nero. In A.D. 65 he was implicated in a plot to kill the emperor, and an officer was sent to, in the Roman style, order Seneca to kill himself.
He calmly asked permission to review his will. This was refused. He turned to his friends who were present and said, “Being forbidden to show gratitude for your services, I leave you my one remaining possession and my best: the pattern of my life.” Now he would be reenacting what he had rehearsed in his mind so many years before. His ensuing suicide was horrifically difficult—he sliced the veins in his arms and ankles, sat in a hot bath to make the blood flow faster, and even drank poison. The death was slow and incredibly painful, but he maintained his calmness to the end, making sure that everyone would see that his death matched his life and his philosophy.
As Seneca understood, to free yourself from fear you must work backward. You start with the thought of your mortality. You accept and embrace this reality. You think ahead to the inevitable moment of your death and determine to face it as bravely as possible. The more you contemplate your mortality, the less you fear it—it becomes a fact you no longer have to repress. By following this path, you know how to die well, and so you can now begin to teach yourself to live well. You will not cling to things unnecessarily. You will be strong and self-reliant, unafraid to be alone. You will have a certain lightness that comes with knowing what matters—you can laugh at what others take so seriously. The pleasures of the moment are hei
ghtened because you know their impermanence and you make the most of them. And when your time to die comes, as it will some day, you will not cringe and cry for more time, because you have lived well and have no regrets.
Keys to Fearlessness
THERE SEEMS TO HOVER SOMEWHERE IN THAT DARK PART OF ALL OUR LIVES…AN OBJECTLESS, TIMELESS, SPACELESS ELEMENT OF PRIMAL FEAR AND DREAD, STEMMING, PERHAPS, FROM OUR BIRTH…A FEAR AND DREAD WHICH EXERCISES AN IMPELLING INFLUENCE UPON OUR LIVES…. AND, ACCOMPANYING THIS FIRST FEAR, IS, FOR THE WANT OF A BETTER NAME, A REFLEX URGE TOWARD ECSTASY, COMPLETE SUBMISSION, AND TRUST.
—Richard Wright
In the past, our relationship to death was much more physical and direct. We would routinely see animals killed before our eyes—for food or sacrifices. During times of plague or natural disasters we would witness countless deaths. Graveyards were not hidden away but would occupy the center of cities or adjoin churches. People would die in their homes, surrounded by friends and families. This nearness of death increased the fear of it but also made it seem more natural, much more a part of life. To mediate this fear, religion would play a powerful and important role.
The dread of death, however, has always remained intense, and with the waning of the power of religion to soothe our anxieties, we found it necessary to create a modern solution to the problem—we have almost completely banished the physical presence of death. We do not see the animals being slaughtered for our food. Cemeteries occupy outlying areas and are not part of our consciousness. In hospitals, the dying are cloistered from sight, everything made as antiseptic as possible. That we are not aware of this phenomenon is a sign of the deep repression that has taken place.
We see countless images of death in movies and in the media, but this has a paradoxical effect. Death is made to seem like something abstract, nothing more than an image on the screen. It becomes something visual and spectacular, not a personal event that awaits us. We may be obsessed with death in the movies we watch, but this only makes it harder to confront our mortality.
Banished from our conscious presence, death haunts our unconscious in the form of fears, but it also reaches our minds in the form of the Sublime. The word “sublime” comes from the Latin, meaning up to the threshold or doorway. It is a thought or experience that takes us to the threshold of death, giving us a physical intimation of this ultimate mystery, something so large and vast it eludes our powers of description. It is a reflection of death in life, but it comes in the form of something that inspires awe. To fear and avoid our mortality is debilitating; to experience it in the Sublime is therapeutic.
Children have this encounter with the Sublime quite often, particularly when confronted with something too vast and incomprehensible for their understanding—darkness, the night sky, the idea of infinity, the sense of time in millions of years, a strange sense of affinity with an animal, etc. We too have these moments in the form of any intense experience that is hard to express in words. It can come to us in moments of extreme exhaustion or exertion, when our bodies are pushed to the limit; in travel to some unusual place; or in absorbing a work of art that is too packed with ideas or images for us to process rationally. The French call an orgasm “le petit mort,” or little death, and the Sublime is a kind of mental orgasm, as the mind becomes flooded with something that is too much or too different. It is the shadow of death overlapping our conscious minds, but inspiring a sense of something vital and even ecstatic.
Understand: to keep death out, we bathe our minds in banality and routines; we create the illusion that it is not around us in any form. This gives us a momentary peace, but we lose all sense of connection to something larger, to life itself. We are not really living until we come to terms with our mortality. Becoming aware of the Sublime around us is a way to convert our fears into something meaningful and active, to counter the repressions of our culture. The Sublime in any form tends to evoke feelings of awe and power. Through awareness of what it is, we can open our minds to the experience and actively search it out. The following are the four sensations of a sublime moment and how to conjure them.
THE SENSE OF REBIRTH
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway felt completely suffocated by all the conformity and banality of life there. It made him feel dead inside. He yearned to explore the wider world, and so in 1917, at the age of eighteen, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, at one of the war fronts. There he felt himself oddly impelled towards death and danger. In one incident he was nearly killed by exploding shrapnel, and the experience forever altered his way of thinking. “I died then…. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.” This feeling remained in the back of his mind for months and years to come, and it was oddly exhilarating. Surviving death in this way made him feel like he was reborn inside. Now he could write of his experiences and make his work vibrate with emotion.
This feeling, however, would fade. He would be forced into some boring journalistic job or the routines of married life. That inner deadness returned and his writing would suffer. He needed to feel that closeness to death in life again. To do so, he would have to expose himself to new dangers. This meant reporting on front-line activity in the Spanish Civil War, and later covering the bloodiest battles in France in World War II—in both cases going beyond reporting and involving himself in combat. He took up bullfighting, deep-sea fishing, and big-game hunting. He would suffer innumerable auto and airplane accidents, but that would only spur his need for more risk. Out of each experience, that sensation of being sparked back to life would return, and he could find his way to yet another novel.
This feeling of having your soul pulled out of your body like a handkerchief is the essence of a sublime sensation. For Hemingway it could be conjured only by something extreme, by a brush with death itself. We, however, can feel the sensation and its reviving benefits in smaller doses. Whenever life feels particularly dull or confining, we can force ourselves to leave familiar ground. This could mean traveling to some particularly exotic location, attempting something physically challenging (a sea voyage or scaling a mountain), or simply embarking on a new venture in which we are not certain we can succeed. In each case we are experiencing a moment of powerlessness in the face of something large and overwhelming. This feeling of control slipping out of our hands, however short and slight, is a brush with death. We may not make it; we have to raise our level of effort. In the process, our minds are exposed to new sensations. When we finish the voyage or task and come to safe ground, we feel as if we are reborn. We felt that slight pull of the handkerchief; we now have a heightened appreciation for life and a desire to live it more fully.
THE SENSE OF EVANESCENCE AND URGENCY
The first half of the fourteenth century in Japan was a time of intense turmoil—palace coups and civil wars turned the country upside down. Those of the educated classes felt particularly disturbed by this chaos. In the midst of all this revolution, a low-ranking palace poet later known as Kenkō decided to take his vows and become a Buddhist monk. But instead of retiring to a monastery, he remained in the capital, Kyoto, and quietly observed life around him as the country seemed to fall apart.
He wrote a series of short pieces that were not published in his lifetime but were later collected and printed under the name Essays in Idleness, the fame of this book increasing with time. Many of his observations centered on death, which was all too present in that period. But his thoughts around death went the opposite direction of brooding and morbidity. He found in them something pleasurable and even ecstatic. For instance, he pondered the evanescence of beautiful things such as cherry blossoms or youth itself. “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” This made him
think of insects that lived for only a day or a week and yet how crowded such time could be. It is the shadow of death that makes everything poignant and meaningful to us.
Kenkō continually found new ways to measure the vastness of time, as it stretches into eternity. A man was buried one day in a cemetery in view of Kenkō’s residence in Kyoto, the grave marker surrounded by grieving members of the family. As the years went by, he wrote, they would come less and less often, their feelings of sorrow slowly fading away. Within a span of time they would all be dead, and with them the memory of the man they had buried. The grave marker would become largely covered by grass. Those who would pass by centuries later would see it as a weird mix of stone and nature. Eventually it would disappear altogether, dissolving into the earth. In the face of this undeniable reality, of this eternal expanse, how can we not feel the preciousness of the present? It is a miracle to be alive even one more day.
There are two kinds of time we can experience—the banal and the sublime variety. Banal time is extremely limited in scope. It consists of the present moment and stretches out to a few weeks ahead of us, occasionally farther. Locked in banal time, we tend to distort events—we see things as being far more important than they are, unaware that in a few weeks or a year, what stirs us all up will not matter. The sublime variety is an intimation of the reality of the utter vastness of time and the constant changes that are going on. It requires that we lift our heads out of the moment and engage in the kinds of meditations that obsessed Kenkō. We imagine the future centuries from now or what was happening in this very spot millions of years ago. We become aware that everything is in a state of flux; nothing is permanent.