| From the book: Stress and the Care of the Self Mandala Key Exercise The Roots of the Tree (finding your purpose and passion) The Fruit of the Tree (Changing your life) The Layers of Marriage The Marriage Survey Newsletters |
 How to Live Without Losing Your Life |
Other Writings The Balance between Love and Money Understanding the Universal Unconscious The Crisis of Privacy Faith and Voting Is Death a Choice or Fate? Happy People Raising the Minimum Wage |
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Is Death a Choice or a Fate?As
we choose the quality and possibilities that we allow in our lives, so
do we choose the quality and even the possibility of our death. That
death is a guaranteed end to the process of entropy that we are all
born into makes it no more a fate than the ability to live. After all,
we are all born with the capacity to live but so few of us learn how.
In our modern world, the struggle is to decide whether or not you will
choose death and all it implies, or pass from this life in ignorance of
what may be our finest moment much the same way that people choose to
live out their lives as if they were not here at all.The body and the soul have become separated in our minds. As we have developed as industrialized nations, the separation has become a necessity to allow for the development of "disposable" lives. In which our existence is not for the perfection and fulfillment of our selves, but a means to an end for someone else. If body and soul are separate, then we may always believe that the next thing, the other thing will be that which gives us meaning and validity. It leaves open the justification for remaining in patterns in which we exist without value. It leaves us waiting for life to begin. Modernity demands that we do not choose death and cling to the assumption that, in all things, there is something outside of us that will change the course of nature. It demands that till the last breath, we need to believe that we will rebound and go on living. It presents Death as a battle to be overcome, a sickness to be cured and in doing so, negates the process of nature. Death as the enemy, takes with it the ability to live life to its fullest because underneath the desire to live lies fear. What we are inside, emotionally, mentally, physically affects the health and longevity of our physical bodies. Industrialization and commercialization, when it participates in this belief, would have us think that the influential connection originates in the physical. The stream of product designed to elevate and perfect our bodies with the promise that it will change our inner lives, is endless. We are barraged with messages that the body comes first. The body is the biological vessel that carries our soul. It is, as any quadriplegic will tell you, a luxury but not a necessity to living a full life. The soul, the inner existence that we are all born with, is what provides us with meaning. It expresses itself as a sense of self-esteem, self-worth, a feeling of potential and the capacity for achievement. The soul developed acknowledges the temporary nature of life, that all things come to pass and come to an end, including ourselves. Yet, in doing so, this passage is a part of an infinite process of life. The soul developed strives, as in all things, to bring to this moment a sense of perfection and placement. We are, at the end, the sum total of all we have lived and believed. We have the capacity within us to choose to "live our deaths", to be knowledgeable and to greet the natural passing of life with a sense of wonder and a feeling of completion. Death becomes, by choice, a part of living. To live with a knowledge of your own death is to live with a sense that what you do, who you are, what you seek is important. Important because forever does not exist and your life is a fragile part of a cycle, fragile but necessary and with purpose, whether or not we come to an understanding of that purpose. To live in ignorance or denial of death is to have welcomed it long before it has become the inevitable end to the cycle of life. |
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