Why Death is Not the End

BY SOFO ARCHON

If there’s one thing certain in life, it’s that everyone will die one day.

Yet most of us are afraid to contemplate our own mortality—so much so that even the word death can frighten some people! As a result, we rarely talk or hear about it.

In our culture, we’ve been taught to see death as something terrible—something to avoid or else risk sinking into depression and anxiety. This fear helps explain why we hide away corpses, idolize youth, and confine the elderly to nursing homes.

Our fear of death is also reflected in much of our everyday behavior. For example, many of us strive to accumulate far more financial wealth or material possessions than we truly need in order to feel secure—believing that these things will somehow make our small, temporary selves big and permanent.

Yet no matter how large our bank account is or how much stuff we call mine, we still feel insecure. That’s because our insecurity doesn’t come from not having enough, but from not feeling enough. Having identified ourselves as tiny egos—separate from the rest of existence and dependent on a decaying bag of skin—we naturally assume that death is our end. Is it any wonder, then, that we dread it?

But what if we saw ourselves differently? What if we saw ourselves as an inseparable part of all life? And what if we saw death not as a departure from life, but as a return home that helps perpetuate life?

I’m reminded of an insightful story written by Thích Nhất Hạnh:

“I asked the leaf whether it was afraid to fall, since it was autumn and the other leaves were falling. The leaf told me, “No. During the whole spring and summer I was very alive. I worked hard and helped nourish the tree, and much of me is in the tree. Please do not think that I am just this form, because this leaf form is only a tiny part of me. I am the whole tree. I know that I am already inside the tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. That is why I do not worry. As I drop from the branch and float down to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, ‘I will see you again very soon.’”

Suddenly I had a kind of insight very much like the insight contained in the Heart Sutra. You have to see life. You shouldn’t say, life of the leaf, but life in the leaf, and life in the tree. My life is just Life, and you can see it in me and in the tree. I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I bowed my head, and I knew that we have a lot to learn from the leaf because it was not afraid; it knew that nothing can be born and nothing can die.”

As this story illustrates, death is neither the end of life nor opposed to it. On the contrary, it is an inherent process of life—one that, in fact, makes life possible.

Just as death is inseparable from life, so your self is inseparable from mine and the rest of existence. We are not discrete, isolated egos trapped inside bags of skin, as our culture leads us to believe. Rather, we are unique expressions of universal consciousness, woven together in an interdependent and interexistent web of life.

This might sound abstract or philosophical, but everyone has experienced this sense of expanded, connected self at certain moments—moments of deep gratitude, love, or communal belonging. So I won’t try to prove that we are inseparable. I will only suggest that, by bringing this truth into our awareness, we can remind ourselves that death is not to be feared. For in reality—that is, from the perspective of the connected self—nothing is ever truly born, and nothing ever truly dies.