Are You Living Or Dying?

An insight into the phenomenon of death

“It is our relationship with death that reveals to us our relationship with life, they have the same root and cannot be separated.”

The modern society we have collectively created invests a large amount of time and effort into hiding death from us in the various different ways it may become experienced as a part of our lives. Death is something that is very rarely discussed, and when it is discussed, is usually done so within the context of it being something negative, morbid, or tragic. Although the causes and reasons behind various different deaths may be something which could have been avoided or represent an untimely or painful event for any individual, the phenomenon of death itself is something which is a most basic fact of life.

Once we gain clear perception of this fact, it is then only natural that we will start to become aware of the fact that it is not possible to have the phenomenon of life without the phenomenon of death. In other words, whether we like to accept it or not, it is only because certain things die that other things continue to live or are birthed. Poetically, we could think of this as being the ‘Circle of Life’, which is something that we are all a part of. We may choose to avert our eyes from this fact, but we then end up constructing an illusory perception of the world around us, which is usually a reaction to the fact that we do not want to realise the reality of our own mortality.

A less emotionally charged way for us to come to see this simple fact is to understand that the phenomenon of death is a particular instance of the principle of change. In other words, it is because everything is constantly changing that we witness and experience death. The principle of change, consistently operating behind the scenes, is often forgotten about because we have not completely internally realised the particular phenomenon which is being observed. Therefore, if we ever do come in contact with death, which for many of us is an internally unrealised external phenomenon, the result is that we end up losing a certain degree of clarity in our conscious perception.