A few days ago, I found myself reflecting on death. I realized that I’m not afraid of death itself. But I am afraid of dying with a sense of incompleteness — I am afraid of dying without fulfilling my potential.
We hear of old people who die peacefully in their sleep. We all hope — that that’s how we go when our time comes. But I believe that to be graced with a peaceful death, we have to prepare for it our whole lives.
To understand death, we have to first understand life — more to the point, we have to understand what it means to be alive.
We divide the world into the living and the non-living — the organic and the inorganic (or the biological and the physical/chemical). When we speak of the living, we are referring to denizens of the six kingdoms of life — Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaebacteria, and Eubacteria.
You and me — Sapiens — are part of Kingdom Animalia. The six kingdoms are not evolving in isolation — they are co-evolving with each other. What happens with plants and trees influences the animals and fungi, and vice versa.
But if you look closely, you will find that the inorganic world is also involved in this dance of evolution. The geology of Earth is teeming with life and the boundaries between the two are quite blurry. The inorganic world is shaping the evolution of the organic world, and vice versa.
If we look at the inorganic world of buildings, stoves, roads, smartphones, satellites, languages, and software that human beings have created, we find that co-evolution is happening here as well. The tools and technologies that humans have created have shaped us as much as we have shaped them!
“Everything we design is designing us back!” — Jason Silva
Kevin Kelly — a writer, photographer, and conservationist — proposed that all our tools and technologies constitute the Technium — the seventh kingdom of life. In his 2010 book What Technology Wants, he points out that our tools and technologies are evolving in the same way that biological life is evolving. And that in fact, we are co-evolving with the Technium.
The organic and the inorganic are one. The world that we are designing is designing us back. This goes all the way back to the invention of cooking with fire — when we started to use fire to ‘pre-digest’ our food by cooking it in an ‘external stomach’ or vessel, the result was that our jaws and intestines became smaller. We designed the technology of cooking and then it designed us back!
Biological evolution happens when nature selects and propagates genes, and technological evolution happens when culture selects and propagates memes — also known as ‘ideas’. As evolution marches on, the boundaries between biological and technological evolution — between the natural and the artificial — become blurred.
The Earth is just one giant super-organism! Our relationship with the Earth is the same as the relationship of the cells in our body with us. And just as we do not regard the bones in our body as dead, we cannot regard the buildings in which we live as dead!
Our buildings and infrastructure are our exoskeletons. The roads and railways are our collective arteries. The global communication network is our collective nervous system. The Earth is our body and it can fall sick and suffer — just like you and me. Life — and the quality of aliveness — are more widely distributed than we think.
“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” — Alan Watts
So what does it mean for something to be alive? To be alive is to be limited and localized. The one thing that God doesn’t have, which you and I do have are limitations. Aliveness is defined by limitation. In the same way that a whirlpool is a localized and limited expression or pattern that a water body makes, aliveness is a localized and limited expression that the universe makes.
So what happens when we die? What happens when a wave crashes back into the ocean? When a whirlpool loses its shape and merges with the water body? That’s exactly it.
We are already whole and complete. In death, we simply realize this fact. But it’s not necessary to wait for our physical death to discover this truth. We can die in every moment to our expectations and we can be reborn with a sense of appreciation. And in doing so, we can come alive in every way!