This website was supposed to be about my insights and experiences but for most part I am writing about the insights of people whose books I have read.
It is not surprising because it is not easy to come up with a life changing or earth-shaking insight on schedule – once or twice every week – for my blog. But this article is about my life and an experience that I hope to have in future. It is to do with my spirituality practice and concerns the fear of death.
I am struggling to quit smoking and I thought that it would motivate me if I told myself that I would save myself from sickness and an early death by quitting. But it had the opposite effect. I felt scared when I thought of these subjects and then started smoking all the more because I was feeling uncomfortable. So now I have decided to take the advice of the French philosopher – Montaigne. Speaking about death, Montaigne writes:
There is no place on earth where death cannot find us – even if we constantly twist our heads about in all directions as in a dubious and suspect land … If there were any ways of sheltering from death’s blows – I am not the man to recoil from it … But it is madness to think that you can succeed …
Men come and go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come – to them, their wives, their children, their friends – catching them unaware and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! …
To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to the common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it, let us have nothing more often in mind than death … We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
These are memorable and eloquent words. But what is the reason why most people are terrified of thinking about death?
It is because contemplating death is a hairline’s breadth away from thinking morbid thoughts. Montaigne was a philosopher and a believer in the afterlife as described in Christian theology. You need to either have a strong faith in the existence of the Soul or Atman to take up such practices or you need to be a thinker or philosopher like Montaigne or Socrates.
I am experimenting with thinking about death for another reason – when I contemplate death it concentrates the mind wonderfully and makes it alert. Contemplating death should be for the purpose of having life more abundantly. As the Chinese sage, Chuang Tzu said:
The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes mere and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.
So, my contemplating death and impermanence is for the purpose of making my mind alert and practicing mindfulness. It is possible that I may grow in present moment awareness to the degree that I will become capable of finally quitting smoking. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
Hope this helps someone. Please explore this blog for more articles on Politics, Spirituality and Self Help. If you liked this article then please share it on Facebook and Twitter and feel free to post your comments or contact me. Link to contact is below.
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