The Inevitable Ecstasy, Part 7: Must Life Go On and On?

Now, there really isn’t anything radically wrong with being sick or with dying. Who said you’re supposed to survive? Who gave you the idea that it’s a gas to go on and on and on? And we can’t say that it’s a good thing for everything to go on living from the very simple demonstration that, if we enable everyone to go on living, we overcrowd ourselves. That we are like an unpruned tree. And so, therefore, one person who dies—in a way—is honorable, because he is making room for others. And the panic that all life, everywhere, must be saved—although each one of us, individually, will naturally appreciate it when anybody saves our life—if we apply that case, you see, all around, we can see that it is not workable.

We can also look further into it, and see that if our death could be indefinitely postponed we would not actually go on postponing it indefinitely. Because after a certain point we would realize that that isn’t the way in which we wanted to survive. Why else would we have children? Because children arrange for us to survive in another way. By, as it were, passing on a torch so that you don’t have to carry it all the time. There comes a point where you can give it up and say, Now you work.

It’s a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals, than it is with always the same individual. Because as each new individual approaches life, life is renewed. And one remembers how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child. Because they see them all as marvelous, because they see them all in a way that is not related to survival and profit. When we get to thinking of everything in terms of survival and profit value—as we do—then the shapes of the scratches on the floor cease to have magic. And most things, in fact, cease to have magic. So therefore, in the course of nature, once we have ceased to see magic in the world anymore, we’re no longer fulfilling nature’s game of being aware of itself. There’s no point in it anymore, and so we die. And so something else comes to birth, which gets an entirely new view. And so, nature’s self-awareness is a game worth the candle.

It is not, therefore, natural for us to wish to prolong life indefinitely. But we live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us, in every conceivable way, that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture, in particular, suffers. And we notice it, firstly, in the way in which death is swept under the carpet. This is one of the major problems in hospital work.

When a family conspires with a doctor to keep from grandmother the knowledge that she is dying. Grandmother suspects that she is dying, but probably doesn’t really want to know for sure, and her family talk with her in such a way as to say, Well, you’ll probably be getting alright in a few weeks. Wouldn’t it be nice to do this, that, and the other? Because they have this funny feeling that it’s important to build up courage and hope. And so they become liars. And a mutual mistrust develops, because once you are playing the game on that level, you tend to play the mistrust on other levels.

And so the person is left to die alone, suddenly, unprepared, and doped up to the point where death hardly happens. And there is no derivation from it—of the peculiar spiritual experience that can come with death.