Dying Practice
Preparing for Life and Death in VR
There’s dying and then there’s Dying.
Dying is a fractal concept, happening at different scales all the time. Even sleep is a rehearsal — every transition is a rehearsal. Still we see the so-called End as a mystery, because how can we know? Even though dying is all we have ever known.
I don’t think practice makes perfect but I do think that practice with feedback that is internalized can reduce suffering. We can’t know, that’s true, but we can walk right into that.
Montaigne, the first blogger, wrote in 1580:
Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty
Premeditated death is more than just sitting around thinking about it. Montaigne made sure to feel death in his body, to feel all the sadness when his best friend died, to examine everything about his relationship with death and write about it.
Virtual Worlds let us remake the laws of nature on the fly and take premeditation to a new level.
By creating, selecting and sequencing deathly experiences, people can learn dying more like skills in gym class and less like information in social studies.
Course Title: Dying Practice
The Benefits of Getting Better at Dying
I have been in a committed adult relationship with death for over 10 years. I have studied death from many perspectives and immersed myself in death through teaching, hospice work, and my own cancer and chemotherapy. I know first-hand that the long-term benefit of Dying Practice is less fear in navigating life and less anxiety in every moment.
Dying Practice is for living life lighter.
The Moment of Death is highly rated in most faith traditions — it’s supposed to be really worth hanging around for in a conscious state. That’s my plan. I intend to be as fully present as I can as my body shuts down and the transition to something else or to nothing begins. This, to me, is another potential benefit of Dying Practice. It doesn’t matter that much to me on a daily basis, but I like having the idea of it out there supposedly in the future.
Teaching & Learning Strategy
I think we get better at dying by feeling complete-enough about life right now, and by actively working on the top priorities for feeling even more that way.
What’s enough? is one of the hardest questions in life. When is my work good-enough to be done? When am I secure enough? How much money is enough?
Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 for his Satisficing concept, a decision making strategy based on doing a good-enough consideration. He showed how we implicitly make up acceptable thresholds short of considering everything. As he stated in his Nobel acceptance speech:
decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world. Neither approach, in general, dominates the other, and both have continued to co-exist …
Satisfice is a combination of ‘satisfactory’ and ‘sufficient.’ Both terms are imprecise and involve subjectivity. Life and Death stories in our cultural traditions tend to offer optimum solutions for a simplified world. Heaven and Hell, Do’s and Don’ts.
Dying Practice is a program for finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world. Learning what is complete-enough for you is part of the course.
Course Structure
Complete-enough has layers.
Exposure therapies teach us to start with reduced threat content and dial the level of challenge up carefully and gradually. The four sections of Dying Practice run two weeks each. We visit and build worlds together and on our own.
- Memorialization and other people dying
- Body and Soul, religion and NDEs
- Completion Rituals and saying goodbye
- Instructions and Endings, reflections and next steps
Each Section has two private Class Sessions and a set of suggested activities involving public events in VR. The Class Sessions are for death world hopping conversations, sharing projects and reflecting together.
Course Requirements
Dying Practice is offered as a fully immersive VR experience only. Participants will need a VR Headset and have (free) accounts and avatars set-up in AltspaceVR and Facebook Horizon.
We will provide scheduled on-boarding assistance and platform familiarization about one week prior to the beginning of the Course.
Additional information is available at our Eventbrite page.
