Life and Death — Just another false Dichotomy?
The past year has been a year full of loss for me. And I do not mean to sound like I am fishing for pity or empathy. To me, that is just a fact. The event of loss that created the greatest reaction was the passing on of my father last year in July at the age of 64. Given that I am 27 now, and was 26 at the time of his death, it seems like people find it more unjust or relatable if the person left behind is “young”. In other words, I received a great number of condolences and support, which were warmly received. It is the aftermath that I want to talk about now. The reactions of people when I would tell them that my father passed away.
That is when I noticed how true the perception is, that Death is one of the most harshly pronounced and well-protected taboos that we have in current society. You are not supposed to talk about it. You are supposed to show empathy and regret, but then move on to a different topic. The ubiquitous fear of dying and your life to be finite seems to push people towards avoidance. There is even an entire field of study exploring these phenomena of fear, and their implications, known as “Terror Management”. For the reason stated above, it also leaves people puzzled if you have found a way to cope for yourself. There is just no real place for a conscious reflection of life and death.
My father had always been a man of travel and exploration. He loved nature and was especially fond of birds and bird-watching. One could say he was a hobby ornithologist. Whenever he would travel to a foreign country, it was not his strong suit to contact his family back home, call or write an email. Apart from the occasional postcard, it was more about the adventure, living in the moment and the faith that we would have faith in him. (Please excuse the slight hint of glorification shining through these these words.) He had travelled to Turkey, China, India, New Zealand, Italy, Laos and Thailand, among others. All his travels were driven by the yearning for exploration and immersing himself in nature and the natural world. And combining these two character traits — the travel bug and the love for nature — it should not come as a surprise that I had found it morbidly fitting that he passed one in an environment promoting these characteristics. He died in the water of a lake close to a bird sanctuary in the middle of the German landscape.
With the first characteristic being checked, i.e. the literal immersion in nature, it was not a stretch for me to conceptualise his passing as a continuation of his earthly travels, where he would just explore yet another country and would — yet again — forget to write back notes of his adventures. That was the first step for me to embracing Death as a romantic ally in the journey of Life.
The next thought that helped me greatly to manage the terror of the limitation of Life, was Daniel Vitalis’ (@DVitalis) podcast “Rewild Yourself” (Episode “Conscientious Omnivory”), where he casually drops the gem:
“Life might just be another type of energy.“ ~ Daniel Vitalis
And he did not mean the metaphysical or esoteric energy, but the very concrete, “scientific” energy that is subject to countless studies of physis and chemistry.
The great impression this left on me was more pronounced when it struck me that, with this starting point in mind, the other proven laws around energy could be applicable, and/or insightful for the reflection on Life. Most powerfully so, the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that Energy can never vanish. Mechanical energy can be converted in thermal energy can be converted into electrical energy, but it just never disappears. Maybe the penny dropped for you as well already, but if not, let me try again. If Life is an Energy, and Energy never vanishes, does that not mean that Life never vanishes?
This observation or fragment of thought fell into place even further, when being paired with a sentence of Christopher Ryan in his “Tangentially Speaking”-Podcast (Yes, podcasts are indeed my favourite medium of wisdom intake. More on that here.).
Chris says:
“Death is a drop of water in a rainfall, falling onto an Ocean.” ~ Christopher Ryan
When Life cannot vanish, where does it go? And if it does not vanish, what happens to the Life energy? This thought of Life only changing its shape, but not its form, really left me dumbstruck. If then Death is not the termination of something, but rather just a continuation in something yet unbeknownst to us, is it really still that scary? And what does that mean for the Life energy of my father? Where does he continue how? And isn’t it beautifully ironic that he buried in a so-called “@FriedWald” (loosely translating to “graveforest”. The German word for cemetery being “Friedhof”.), where the remains of the passed are being buried under trees? Will that not increase the likelihood that his “death” is actually the birth of something new?
This is where my understanding of science and spirituality separately starts to leave me and where I cannot make sense anymore of where belief and heresay, and facts and knowledge separate. But I am starting to believe more and more that even this antagonism is maybe something that we should get rid of for the sake of upholding Popperian principles of “killing ideas” and only believing knowledge for as long as it can still be upheld.
It is in the same vein of “What are the unknown unknowns?” that I was left speechless at a Connectedness workshop at an event organised by the French-born, European Youth organisation MakeSense in Berlin, namely the #SenseCampBLN. After a couple of rounds of tuning into the group, synchronising our frequencies and getting closer (Hippie-stuff :P ), which were enjoyable and new, but not necessarily mindblowing, it was really the last segment that left me wondering...
We were asked to stand in front of another person, silent, eyes closed and only feeling, sensing, “sending energy”. One of us was asked to think about a deep conflict, worry or struggle that they were having at that moment of their life. The other one was asked to receive these energies and “listen” and look closely what they could make out of them.
The person standing in front of me was standing flexible in their knees, bent a little, with their torso stiff and tense. It was as if I could feel the contrast between those two body sections. Interestingly enough, this contrast was mimicked by a black, solid rock tied into in a leather band around his neck. The next step was to pick a card that we would feel would represent the answer most that we would have received from the observation of our counterpart. The cards with different, diverse imagery were used in former rounds as well. But this time, to top it all off, the cards would lie face-down. “Right”, I was thinking… “As if there is any way that what I was ‘seeing’ and feeling coincides at all with the imagery on the card”, but I forced myself to give it a go and play along. Accordingly, I also wanted to pick a card that would symbolised in some way the contrast that I had “identified”. So I picked a card that was lying at the corner of the table. To me, it was embodying the contrast because it was being stable and fixed, while at the constant threat of falling down and forced to adjust. And then, what the card showed, and I could not believe it, was… cheesy drumroll, please… *drumroll* …was… a stone beach with black stones and the waves flowing over these stones in the picture. And when I outlined my answer to my counterpart, how he should be embracing the stable and the fluid, the flexible and the sturdy alike, believing that he could withstand the chaos of the external, if he would embrace the resilience of the internal, I could see that I struck the right cord. He said, that he was indeed struggling with a similar conflict for the past time.
It is these experiences that unfold all beliefs in me and make me wonder whether we should not stop taking anything for granted (letting aside that we need some structure in our life to continue existing). If we start believing that there is something beyond the noticeable and the sensible world, if there is knowledge beyond science, how impossible is it to imagine that there is Life within Death?
Obviously, I could continue this rant along the lines of a discussion of different spiritual schools and traditions and their take on the topic of death, with the suffering of Buddhism, the original sin of Christianity, the five pillars of Islam and the reincarnation within Hinduism, but I think I will maybe skip that for another post. What remains to be said is that another workshop of the same event, was also quite meaningful. Japanese Buddhist Eiji Han Shimizu (@latinsamurai, producer of Happy documentary) led us through a Deathbed meditation, through which he taught us to experience and prepare ourselves for our own death, to allow us to await it to come and to then leave with him gracefully. As much as this approach diverges from what I said earlier about (our) Life just continuing in a different shape, remaining in the same form, as much I think that it reinforces the necessity to confront ourselves even with the hard questions. And this is especially so if there is so much that we have yet to explore in our current world and our limited understanding.
And this is not a plea against science or for believing anything, this is rather a plea to open our eyes and allow ourselves to be surprised and overwhelmed, to feel more intentionally and to experience more meaningfully. Be Death as it may, terminal or in-passing, life has a lot to offer while it lasts.
(The title is a reference to one of my favourite videos by the Vlogbrothers, where Hank Green breaks down all conventional knowledge around sex and gender in a dichotomy-shattering way: “Human sexuality is complicated”. Please disregard the fact that from a perspective of Complexity science “complex” would be a more appropriate denominator of human sexuality. That could be another entry. Thanks for reading!)
