The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

A Philosophy of Life Through Death
The problem for us humans is that we are aware of our mortality, but
we are afraid to take this awareness further. It is like we are at the
shore of a vast ocean and stop ourselves from exploring it, even turning
our back to it. The purpose of our consciousness is to always take it as
far as we can. That is the source of our power as a species, what we are
called to do. The philosophy we are adopting depends on our ability to
go in the opposite direction we normally feel toward death—to look at
it more closely and deeply, to leave the shore and explore a different
way of approaching life and death, taking this as far as we can.
The following are five key strategies, with appropriate exercises, to
help us achieve this. It is best to put all five into practice, so that this
philosophy can seep into our daily consciousness and alter our
experience from within.

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Make the awareness visceral.
Out of fear, we convert death into an
abstraction, a thought we can entertain now and then or repress. But
life is not a thought; it is a flesh-and-blood reality, something we feel
from within. There is no such thing as life without death. Our mortality
is just as much a flesh-and-blood reality as life. From the moment we
are born, it is a presence within our bodies, as our cells die and we age.
We need to experience it this way. We should not see this as something
morbid or terrifying. Moving past this block of ours in which death is
an abstraction has an immensely liberating effect, connecting us more
physically to the world around us and heightening our senses.
In December of 1849, the twenty-seven-year-old writer Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, imprisoned for participating in an alleged conspiracy
against the Russian czar, found himself and his fellow prisoners
suddenly transported to a square in St. Petersburg, and told that they
were about to be executed for their crimes. This death sentence was
totally unexpected. Dostoyevsky had only a few minutes to prepare
himself before he faced the firing squad. In those few minutes,
emotions he had never felt before came rushing in. He noticed the rays
of light hitting the dome of a cathedral and saw that all life was as
fleeting as those rays. Everything seemed more vibrant to him. He
noticed the expressions on his fellow prisoners’ faces, and how he
could see the terror behind their brave façades. It was as if their
thoughts and feelings had become transparent.
At the last moment, a representative from the czar rode into the
square, announcing that their sentences had been commuted to several
years’ hard labor in Siberia. Utterly overwhelmed by his psychological
brush with death, Dostoyevsky felt reborn. And the experience
remained embedded in him for the rest of his life, inspiring new depths
of empathy and intensifying his observational powers. This has been
the experience of others who have been exposed to death in a deep and
personal way.
The reason for this effect can be explained as follows: Normally we
go through life in a very distracted, dreamlike state, with our gaze
turned inward. Much of our mental activity revolves around fantasies
and resentments that are completely internal and have little
relationship to reality. The proximity of death suddenly snaps us to
attention as our whole body responds to the threat. We feel the rush of
adrenaline, the blood pumping extra hard to the brain and through the
nervous system. This focuses the mind to a much higher level and we

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notice new details, see people’s faces in a new light, and sense the
impermanence in everything around us, deepening our emotional
responses. This effect can linger for years, even decades.
We cannot reproduce that experience without risking our lives, but
we can gain some of the effect through smaller doses. We must begin
by meditating on our death and seeking to convert it into something
more real and physical. For Japanese samurai warriors, the center of
our most sensitive nerves and our connection to life was in the gut, the
viscera; it was also the center of our connection to death, and they
meditated on this sensation as deeply as possible, to create physical
death awareness. But beyond the gut, we can also feel something
similar in our bones when we are weary. We can often sense its
physicality in those moments before we fall asleep—for a few seconds
we feel ourselves passing from one form of consciousness to another,
and that slip has a deathlike sensation. There is nothing to be afraid of
in this; in fact, in moving in this direction, we make major
advancements in diminishing our chronic anxiety.
We can use our imagination in this as well, by envisioning the day
our death arrives, where we might be, how it might come. We must
make this as vivid as possible. It could be tomorrow. We can also try to
look at the world as if we were seeing things for the last time—the
people around us, the everyday sights and sounds, the hum of the
traffic, the sound of the birds, the view outside our window. Let us
imagine these things still going on without us, then suddenly feel
ourselves brought back to life—those same details will now appear in a
new light, not taken for granted or half perceived. Let the
impermanence of all life forms sink in. The stability and solidity of the
things we see are mere illusions.
We must not be afraid of the pangs of sadness that ensue from this
perception. The tightness of our emotions, usually so wound up around
our own needs and concerns, is now opening up to the world and to the
poignancy of life itself, and we should welcome this. As the fourteenth-
century Japanese writer Kenko noted, “If man were never to fade away
like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over
Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would
lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its
uncertainty.”

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