The Death of Death
It’s All How You Look At It
Death wasn’t always Death. We made it into the big deal it is today.
We see Death as an ultrapowerful force, like Zeus or one of the real active Gods of Greek mythology. But the actual God of Death in Greek mythology is a B-Lister named Thanatos, who you’ve probably never heard of. He’s the twin brother of Hypnos, Good of Sleep. Yawn. Twin brother.
Sleep and Death aren’t all that different, or they weren’t seen that way a long time ago.
Thanatos wasn’t a major factor shaping events in the human world like a Zeus or an Apollo. He was a functionary, like a gig economy dude who’d come to pick you up when it was your time to cross the River.
Death wasn’t such a big deal — the big deal came after that. Maybe eternal torment, maybe eternal pleasure. Hades wasn’t the God of Death. He was the God of The Dead and the King of the Underworld, which were much classier titles a couple thousand years ago.
The Greeks had dozens of Gods and Goddesses who represented different aspects of being dead — from Achlys, symbolizing the mists of death, to Charon, who ferried the bodies over the River Styx — there were even individual Gods for each of the seven rivers inside the Underworld.
Death was just one of the crowd.
Now it’s not.
Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer-Prize winning book called, “Denial of Death,” in which he claims Death is the ultimate driving force behind everything.
All our ambitions are Immortality Projects.
We’re hooked on self-esteem as palliative compensation for unwanted mortality salience.
Awareness of Death is at the heart of human exceptionalism.
Poor us. We’re so smart. We totally get it and every other life form is clueless.
What exactly is this crucial insight we have gained that nothing else has?
It’s that Death is the biggest deal ever because it is, with certainty, the end of You.
Nothing else turned out to be absolute and eternal — not Hades, not the Mists of Death or Charon the Ferryman.
Thanatos is all that’s left.
Every other God started dying when a bunch of brainy Europeans started hanging out in a new kind of drug den, back in the 1600s, called a coffeehouse. They drank way too much of the stuff and gabbed all the time, eventually convincing themselves that their coffee buzz thoughts were the true goal and meaning of life.
I drink coffee and think, therefore I am, said one of them. Later it was shortened to the much tighter, I think therefore I am. Same point.
The whole coffee scene got called The Enlightenment by later pundits, but at the time guys just dug getting high on new shit that didn’t make you stupid and lethargic like homemade booze.
Diderot knocked out a whole Encyclopedia behind caffeine — this kind of performance enhancing drug was easily the best thing before sliced bread.
Everything from A to Z is quite an accomplishment, but as Oxford Coffee Club member Isaac Newton was proving — that which goes up must come down.
Becker says Death Anxiety is the crash after the unsustainable high of human exceptionalism; well, not in those words.
We can kill off Charon and the rest of them, except Thanatos, last God standing. The one Absolute Entity, in a world governed by probabilities, Thanatos is the only one holding the Queen of Spades. The meek really did inherit the earth.
I had the idea a while back of getting to know Thanatos personally, maybe having, you know, a relationship.
I think it’s going pretty well, not going to speak for Thanatos.
It was awkward at first because I didn’t know what our common ground would be, but after I spent a little time, it was amazing, I started seeing Thanatos everywhere.
Fallen over flowers and dead bees in my lamp. I also saw Thanatos in a pile of papers from an old project I was totally into once. A picture over on a back shelf of someone I once knew differently.
I wouldn’t exactly say Thanatos is my friend and it’s not about liking or not-liking so much as seeing the true value of Thanatos in my life. Our time together has helped knock Death off any kind of pedestal for me because death is right here all the time.
I drink a lot of coffee too — cold brewed so I can drink more without upsetting my gut biome. I know that Enlightenment Buzz and I know how it drives mental energy in waves through the thought streams. I know how it feels to be way up and outside the flow of living and dying everything else has to do.
I know it’s just a made-up story but it’s such a high and it feels so good.
At a certain age, we begin to see our birthday as meaningful, mostly because other people teach us about it.
We are also taught to feel that our deathday will be the saddest and most difficult day of all and from other people’s point of view it might be.
I am looking forward to my deathday in the same way I looked forward to junior high, and my first day at my first job driving for Town Taxi in Boston, or the time I had to make a big speech in front of a thousand people the next morning at a conference. They were all the end of an old me and the beginning of something unknown.
The enlightened scientists who believe they have successfully controlled all unknowns to study one thing at a time have found no evidence of life after Thanatos. Enlightened non-scientists ask, what about matter and energy not being destroyed, or however that Law goes?
We get the Death part wrong because we get the Life part wrong first, feeling like our caffeinated thought stream is a permanent feature of a free-standing life form. I think therefore I am is such obvious bullshit, any bright college sophomore in a Philosophy class could knock it to pieces.
Why does a thought necessitate an I, used as a noun, as the subject of a sentence, like, ‘I think therefore I am.’? Why doesn’t the on-going stream of thoughts suggest an I that is more like a verb, more like something impermanent, a series of events. Linked events, certainly, but not just linked to one thread — linked to everything else that was part of the circumstances of that thought.
I guess some people just don’t want to think of themselves as a series of events deeply connected to the entire human race and everything else. You’d have to deny DNA any role in who you are and what you do, but, again, drink enough coffee and you can get pretty high on your self.
Smart people repeat the Everything is Change mantra over and over without feeling fully part of the Everything remaking Everything else every instant, including us.
If you don’t already have a visual image you like to use for the quantum substrate of being-and-nonbeing and continuous flux, I’d recommend using a big pot of chili, simmering away with little bubbles appearing and popping and disappearing. When you’re imagining that, you’re looking at it from the outside, like you’re not part of the chili.
Now make it a whole swimming pool of chili, still simmering and bubbling.
Now get into it. All the way, go underchili. Open your eyes. Can’t see very far. Limited perspective.
Ok, time to get out. Rinse off. Take a nice deep breath. Much more comfortable now, right? That’s how being one with everything feels to someone hooked on being special in their own separate world. Like drowning a tub of hot chili.
My visual image for the bottom quantum flux state is the world I live in. Seeing it as a 4D field where everything is colliding and making things different at every time scale with me right in there.
I like it the way I liked a few teams I’ve been on where the spirit of helping each other out is strong. Where people feel good no matter who does well, which naturally makes it about the team not the individuals, without conscious decisions. No one felt anything was being lost — we could let ourselves flow more than ever.
Remembering that feeling, staying in that state of awareness despite ample provocations, is the death of Death.
In VR, I lead meditations and host unusual events with EvolVR.org, and I’m now offering a Course completely in VR called, Dying Practice
Where my body lives, I make ice cream and take out the trash.
