Life and Death

Life and Death.

We tend to think of life and death as opposites. It?s getting hard to draw the line with modern medicine, but in general the difference is clear. I know that I am alive now and I will be dead eventually, but I prefer not to think about that very much. In fact my mind seems to slide off somehow; ?being dead? is almost a contradiction ? ?dead? is ?not being?. Death comes to us all, and yet when it arrives we are not there. Many people say that there is life after death, the body dies but we continue somehow, somewhere. Perhaps they are right, I don?t know, but that is not what I mean by death. When I talk about my death, I mean the end of me; if there is never an end of me, then I am talking about nothing.

Some things are not alive. Talk to a rock, caress it, flatter it, mock it, it does not respond; leave it alone, it does not move; there is no life in it. I tend to think of myself as continuing through time; I stay more or less the same while the world changes around me. But life is always moving, changing, responding, so this image of a fixed ?me? is the image of something dead like the rock that carries on the same no matter what. Life is always new, always renewing itself, and this means that it is always dying. Yesterday?s response will not do for today, things have changed. The old bob needs to die so that a new bob can come into being. If I keep saying the same thing each week, you will all get bored and stop listening, but if I am alive to the difference in you from week to week, from moment to moment, then my thought and my talk will change responsively ? we will respond to each other. It seems that life and death are not separate, but one process which goes on in me all the time, from moment to moment. If I try to postpone my death until some distant tomorrow, I am trying to be a rock, I am trying to be already dead. And this rock of unchanging self becomes a terrible burden to me that I have to protect and carry with me, the source of all my fear. So when someone says ?There is no death.? I reply, ?Please, God, let it not be true!? because without death, there can be no birth; death has to come before birth.