The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Open the mind to the Sublime.
Think of death as a kind of threshold we
all must cross. As such, it represents the ultimate mystery. We cannot
possibly find the words or concepts to express what it is. We confront
something that is truly unknowable. No amount of science or
technology or expertise can solve this riddle or verbalize it. We humans
can fool ourselves that we know just about everything, but at this
threshold we are finally left dumb and groping.
This confrontation with something we cannot know or verbalize is
what we shall call the Sublime, whose Latin root means “up to the
threshold.” The Sublime is anything that exceeds our capacity for
words or concepts by being too large, too vast, too dark and
mysterious. And when we face such things, we feel a touch of fear but
also awe and wonder. We are reminded of our smallness, of what is
much vaster and more powerful than our puny will. Feeling the

---

Sublime is the perfect antidote to our complacency and to the petty
concerns of daily life that can consume us and leave us feeling rather
empty.
The model for feeling the Sublime comes in our meditation on
mortality, but we can train our minds to experience it through other
thoughts and actions. For instance, when we look up at the night sky,
we can let our minds try to fathom the infinity of space and the
overwhelming smallness of our planet, lost in all the darkness. We can
encounter the Sublime by thinking about the origin of life on earth,
how many billions of years ago this occurred, perhaps at some
particular moment, and how unlikely it was, considering the thousands
of factors that had to converge for the experiment of life to begin on
this planet. Such vast amounts of time and the actual origin of life
exceed our capacity to conceptualize them, and we are left with a
sensation of the Sublime.
We can take this further: Several million years ago, the human
experiment began as we branched off from our primate ancestors. But
because of our weak physical nature and small numbers, we faced the
continual threat of extinction. If that more-than-likely event had
happened—as it had occurred for so many species, including other
varieties of humans—the world would have taken a much different
turn. In fact, the meeting of our own parents and our birth hung on a
series of chance encounters that were equally unlikely. This causes us
to view our present existence as an individual, something we take for
granted, as a most improbable occurrence, considering all of the
fortuitous elements that had to fall into place.
We can experience the Sublime by contemplating other forms of
life. We have our own belief about what is real based on our nervous
and perceptual systems, but the reality of bats, which perceive through
echolocation, is of a different order. They sense things beyond our
perceptual system. What are the other elements we cannot perceive,
the other realities invisible to us? (The latest discoveries in most
branches of science will have this eye-opening effect, and reading
articles in any popular scientific journal will generally yield a few
sublime thoughts.)
We can also expose ourselves to places on the planet where all our
normal compass points are scrambled—a vastly different culture or
certain landscapes where the human element seems particularly puny,

---

such as the open sea, a vast expanse of snow, a particularly enormous
mountain. Physically confronted with what dwarfs us, we are forced to
reverse our normal perception, in which we are the center and measure
of everything.
In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver, a foretaste of death
itself, something too large for our minds to encompass. And for a
moment it shakes us out of our smugness and releases us from the
deathlike grip of habit and banality.
—
In the end, think of this philosophy in the following terms: Since the
beginning of human consciousness, our awareness of death has
terrified us. This terror has shaped our beliefs, our religions, our
institutions, and so much of our behavior in ways we cannot see or
understand. We humans have become the slaves to our fears and our
evasions.
When we turn this around, becoming more aware of our mortality,
we experience a taste of true freedom. We no longer feel the need to
restrict what we think and do, in order to make life predictable. We can
be more daring without feeling afraid of the consequences. We can cut
loose from all the illusions and addictions that we employ to numb our
anxiety. We can commit fully to our work, to our relationships, to all
our actions. And once we experience some of this freedom, we will
want to explore further and expand our possibilities as far as time will
allow us.
Let us rid death of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us
have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us
picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. . . . It is uncertain where
death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is
premeditation of freedom. . . . He who has learned how to die has unlearned
how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and
constraint.
—Michel de Montaigne

---

F