We watch other people die, we understand the arithmetic perfectly, and then we go back to work. Four explanations for why the terror stays quiet, one of them probably wrong, one of them alarming.
I remember confronting this quite early in life as my grandparents began to die, and I suspect some of the mechanisms you describe were operating then — particularly the curious ability to know perfectly well that death applies to me while somehow keeping its personal implications at arm's length.
But my relationship to this has changed considerably over the years, which makes me wonder whether there is another possibility you haven't quite articulated, although perhaps you point towards it when you ask whether living with mortality might be a capacity rather than a denial.
What happens when our relationship to identity itself changes?
From a first-person perspective, everything we ordinarily identify as ourselves — body, thoughts, memories, personality, the story of who I am — arises within awareness and is manifestly impermanent. As that becomes experiential rather than merely conceptual, the eventual disappearance of this particular identity can begin to seem rather less terrifying. That doesn't require the further claim that “I am Awareness” or that something called *me* survives death. I simply don't know.
Which is why I'd also question the statement that death means there is no phenomenal content. We know that we cannot experience our own non-existence, but do we actually know that physical death entails the cessation of experiencing? That seems to me a metaphysical conclusion rather than a phenomenological one.
Practices such as the Headless Way can offer a remarkably direct experience of the apparent nothingness within which everything arises. In that moment, the usual sense of oneself as a bounded entity can become surprisingly difficult to locate. But this is still an experience occurring while embodied, so I would be very wary of extrapolating from it to claims about what happens after physical death. Ramana Maharshi's famous confrontation with his own mortality is a more extreme example of an experience after which fear of death apparently fell away.
So perhaps there is another response to mortality alongside denial and the capacity to carry an unbearable fact: the fact itself may come to look rather different when the identity we fear losing is discovered to be less solid than we assumed.
The one place I would still push is Nagel. If death is bad as deprivation rather than as experience, the solidity of the identity may not enter the argument, since a loosely bounded self is deprived of the same future as a tightly bounded one. Loosening the sense of self clearly does something to the fear. I am less sure it touches the loss.
Thanks. And thank you for your earlier clarification. I think your distinction between the failure of imagination and a fact about the world captures exactly what I was reaching for. I was also struck by your description of this third possibility as not simply changing our relationship to a fixed fact, but potentially revising what we understand the fact to be.
As for Nagel, I haven't come across him — I'm not a philosopher by trade, and I'm wary of constructing a philosophical argument to meet one. What I can do is share what I find when I examine my own experience as closely as I can.
One thing that has changed quite profoundly is my experience of time. It feels less like a succession of fleeting moments and more like what I understand Bergson meant by *durée* — a lived continuity within which everything changes. And I find myself wondering whether that sense of continuity has something to do with the extraordinary apparent stability of awareness itself: everything arising within it changes, while awareness seems strangely untouched by what it contains. That's a question, not a position.
Something similar happens when I contemplate death. I genuinely don't experience terror when I contemplate my own non-being. If anything, sustained contemplation of the sheer incomprehensibility of Nothing — an exercise I can recommend! — leaves me with an unexpected sense of liberation from limits.
None of that tells me what happens when I die, and I don't want to turn the experience into a metaphysical claim. Perhaps you are right that loosening identity changes the fear without changing the loss. I can certainly understand intellectually that this particular life has possible futures which death will foreclose. But my present experience can feel so rich and fulfilling, with a deep sense that nothing is missing — phenomenologically, not conceptually — that I find it difficult to experience an unknown future as something I already possess and will therefore be deprived of.
So experientially, the idea of deprivation doesn't quite land for me as the loss of something that is mine. Perhaps that is the distinction I'm trying to articulate.
I'm not sure I can take it much further than that. I simply try to examine my experience as closely as I can and live from what that examination discloses.
Thank you for this. You have caught the sentence I was least careful with, and you are right about it.
Saying nonexistence has no phenomenal content is a metaphysical claim donned in phenomenological clothes. What I was actually entitled to is the weaker version: I cannot construct the image, because constructing requires a constructor. Whether that failure is a limit of the imagination or a fact about the world is exactly what I do not know, and I wrote it as though I did.
Your third option belongs in the piece, and it is neither of mine. Denial and capacity are both relationships to a fixed fact. Yours revises the fact.
I grew up with many older and infirm relatives. Death was a fact. I worried about them dying, but not about my own death.
My view is this: I will die and there is nothing I can do about it. Much like other things that I cannot stop from happening, I do not think about it until/unless something comes up that I can do something about. To me, worrying about dying is much like worrying about an asteroid strike that destroys all life in the planet.
I will be alive until I am not. Then, there will either be an afterlife (I like to think so), or not and there will no longer be a me to care about it one way or another.
I remember confronting this quite early in life as my grandparents began to die, and I suspect some of the mechanisms you describe were operating then — particularly the curious ability to know perfectly well that death applies to me while somehow keeping its personal implications at arm's length.
But my relationship to this has changed considerably over the years, which makes me wonder whether there is another possibility you haven't quite articulated, although perhaps you point towards it when you ask whether living with mortality might be a capacity rather than a denial.
What happens when our relationship to identity itself changes?
From a first-person perspective, everything we ordinarily identify as ourselves — body, thoughts, memories, personality, the story of who I am — arises within awareness and is manifestly impermanent. As that becomes experiential rather than merely conceptual, the eventual disappearance of this particular identity can begin to seem rather less terrifying. That doesn't require the further claim that “I am Awareness” or that something called *me* survives death. I simply don't know.
Which is why I'd also question the statement that death means there is no phenomenal content. We know that we cannot experience our own non-existence, but do we actually know that physical death entails the cessation of experiencing? That seems to me a metaphysical conclusion rather than a phenomenological one.
Practices such as the Headless Way can offer a remarkably direct experience of the apparent nothingness within which everything arises. In that moment, the usual sense of oneself as a bounded entity can become surprisingly difficult to locate. But this is still an experience occurring while embodied, so I would be very wary of extrapolating from it to claims about what happens after physical death. Ramana Maharshi's famous confrontation with his own mortality is a more extreme example of an experience after which fear of death apparently fell away.
So perhaps there is another response to mortality alongside denial and the capacity to carry an unbearable fact: the fact itself may come to look rather different when the identity we fear losing is discovered to be less solid than we assumed.
The one place I would still push is Nagel. If death is bad as deprivation rather than as experience, the solidity of the identity may not enter the argument, since a loosely bounded self is deprived of the same future as a tightly bounded one. Loosening the sense of self clearly does something to the fear. I am less sure it touches the loss.
Thanks. And thank you for your earlier clarification. I think your distinction between the failure of imagination and a fact about the world captures exactly what I was reaching for. I was also struck by your description of this third possibility as not simply changing our relationship to a fixed fact, but potentially revising what we understand the fact to be.
As for Nagel, I haven't come across him — I'm not a philosopher by trade, and I'm wary of constructing a philosophical argument to meet one. What I can do is share what I find when I examine my own experience as closely as I can.
One thing that has changed quite profoundly is my experience of time. It feels less like a succession of fleeting moments and more like what I understand Bergson meant by *durée* — a lived continuity within which everything changes. And I find myself wondering whether that sense of continuity has something to do with the extraordinary apparent stability of awareness itself: everything arising within it changes, while awareness seems strangely untouched by what it contains. That's a question, not a position.
Something similar happens when I contemplate death. I genuinely don't experience terror when I contemplate my own non-being. If anything, sustained contemplation of the sheer incomprehensibility of Nothing — an exercise I can recommend! — leaves me with an unexpected sense of liberation from limits.
None of that tells me what happens when I die, and I don't want to turn the experience into a metaphysical claim. Perhaps you are right that loosening identity changes the fear without changing the loss. I can certainly understand intellectually that this particular life has possible futures which death will foreclose. But my present experience can feel so rich and fulfilling, with a deep sense that nothing is missing — phenomenologically, not conceptually — that I find it difficult to experience an unknown future as something I already possess and will therefore be deprived of.
So experientially, the idea of deprivation doesn't quite land for me as the loss of something that is mine. Perhaps that is the distinction I'm trying to articulate.
I'm not sure I can take it much further than that. I simply try to examine my experience as closely as I can and live from what that examination discloses.
Thank you for this. You have caught the sentence I was least careful with, and you are right about it.
Saying nonexistence has no phenomenal content is a metaphysical claim donned in phenomenological clothes. What I was actually entitled to is the weaker version: I cannot construct the image, because constructing requires a constructor. Whether that failure is a limit of the imagination or a fact about the world is exactly what I do not know, and I wrote it as though I did.
Your third option belongs in the piece, and it is neither of mine. Denial and capacity are both relationships to a fixed fact. Yours revises the fact.
I grew up with many older and infirm relatives. Death was a fact. I worried about them dying, but not about my own death.
My view is this: I will die and there is nothing I can do about it. Much like other things that I cannot stop from happening, I do not think about it until/unless something comes up that I can do something about. To me, worrying about dying is much like worrying about an asteroid strike that destroys all life in the planet.
I will be alive until I am not. Then, there will either be an afterlife (I like to think so), or not and there will no longer be a me to care about it one way or another.
Good stuff!
Please find two related references on this very important topic
http://beezone.com/latest/death_message.html Death as the Constant Message of Life
http://beezone.com/whats-new