For Mama Unger, who I’m not looking forward to missing, and all my new nieces and nephews, as I work to support their phase changes
And to Critter, for eating spring rolls with me while we chat and laugh about death
I do not fear my death because I do not fear spring rolls.
As discussed in the previous part, I fear the death of people I love, and I lose no respect for you if you’re afraid of that. I lose no respect for you if you’re afraid of your own death either, in part because you’re leaving your society when you die, which is a mind-bending and pretty awful thing, and in part because your fear of death is the king of fears – fear of a true unknown. Death is so rarely talked about for what it is that, instead, as we discussed, we lean into discussions of life, and loss, or bedtime stories to fill a gap that for many of us simply can’t be filled by stories. I know that for many, including me, stories that don’t fit the facts or provide me with something observable only make fear of the unknown worse. I know that, for many of the formerly religious, this void is palpable and distressing in particular.
My hope, here, is to discuss what death is and isn’t without metaphor or fiction. In the process, I hope to show you why your own death is no scarier than spring rolls. If you are terrified of spring rolls, I apologize for the trigger, and offer you cupcakes instead.
As a disclaimer, I don’t believe most of what I am going to argue goes against, or attempts to diminish, the beliefs of any religion, and I will return to this overtly near the end, to explain why I think that. The main place that I might go against your beliefs is a hurdle we’ll have to cross, whether faithful or faithless, to talk about Death, so let’s talk about the soul first. I ask the religious to, in order to make it through until the end without rage toward me, as the end may contain balm for that rage, remember the mystery of your god(s).
I don’t believe in a “soul.” Specifically, I don’t see or experience anything that tells me one exists that can’t be explained by something else more obvious. As an example, I have, like I think most people, the sensation that “I” live right between and behind my eyes – a strange little pilot in a meat machine. I feel furthest away from my feet and hands, though more foreign to me still is the skin on the middle of my back, and further still my inferior vena cava, for which I have no sensation or relationship whatsoever.
This seems reasonable to me without the idea of a metaphysical, unobservable pilot because there’s a meaty pilot in the same spot. Our brains sit directly behind our eyes with the rational bit up front, and many of us intake a monumental bit of input from our eyes, fully forward-facing. That “I” identify myself with this omnipresent phenomenon and put it in the location of the self-aware organ is logical in an easy, childlike way. That my hands and feet, so far from the pilot and sent out on these dangerous missions, that I can see with my eyes as they go, feel somewhat “exterior” to the brain which I cannot see, but is the self-aware bit, is unsurprising. That my back skin and vena cava, which I can only really get to know through trauma, feel estranged or absent isn’t magical.
So, I personally can’t rightly believe in a soul—no compelling data—and I’m skeptical that the idea of consciousness teaches us very much about what we actually are, except amazing storytellers.
But I also believe the idea of soul is irrelevant to the discussion of Death, except that our cultures force the connection, and is more likely to add fear to the tale, usually in an effort to gain something from the living, than to add clarity. We attribute something we desire heavily as an antidote to our fear—immortality —to that soul so we don’t have to sit with the ideas of oblivion and unwanted change and, as is very human, our story gets away from us and becomes terrifying again. Our immortal soul has to go somewhere and do something—doing nothing would be a languishing horror as well as unimaginable; humans are always doing—and so we send it to places of pleasure and pain to endure or delight for eternity. In this we do two things which I think are fairly sad:
- We hide ourselves away from the inevitable, insisting that death and its unknowns are a continuation of what we do know, stubborn children who don’t want to grow up or go to bed
- We miss the facts of immortality in favor of the stories
It seems to me that we do this because stories about nothing, or even about what we haven’t observed, are hard to write.
As an example, my current therapy homework, in an effort to help me find ways to break anxious rumination, is to write down a list of all the activities I haven’t done. This task isn’t impossible, and with the internet made much easier, but it’s infinitely harder than listing the activities that I have done. I’d hazard to say it’s the case that I have to list the ones I have done in order to list those I haven’t. I’d wager you’d find the same difficulty as well.
It’s similar to asking a child what they want to be when they grow up; they pull from a finite list of the jobs they’ve been told about or observed and their answers lack specificity. Plentiful are the future doctors, few the future rhinologists; plentiful are the future athletes and dancers, few are the future program managers of the marketing departments that name the next specialized shoe. Sometimes, as in the latter example, the world outside of easy imagination is more expansive and diverse than what we can conceptualize. This makes our world smaller than it has to be. The same is true for my list – I’ve done significantly fewer activities than I haven’t done and that will always be true, but the longer list is still more elusive to me. Maybe something on the list breaks the spell of my rumination.
We write stories, quite naturally, about what we have seen, observed, lived and loved. Gods pulled chariots to move the sun in cultures that had chariots; afterlives across nearly every culture that has a heaven-analog involve feasting, music, peace, love, reunion, and hobbies because those things are awesome. Being lonely and burned or beaten sucks to our nerves and our hormones and our brains, and so our souls must be condemned to those sucky things forever unless we’ve done what we must to avoid the horror show or get an invitation to a better party. We haven’t observed “nothing”, except in that gap space when a loved one dies and goes from “here” to “not here” some uncanny and mysterious how, as their animation departs, though their body and brain are still observable to us.
To explain that gap, we build an example of what we’ve seen and we send the idea of them there. We need an immortal bit to do so and so we create one—the soul—and we look for data to support it. We find this data at that strange sensation, right behind our eyes.
Death is not the tale of souls, though it is the tale of selves. Death does involve afterlife, feasting, reunion, Nirvana; heaven, hell, hades, Valhalla, reincarnation to chase enlightenment are myths, even if the religious are correct.
~~~~~~~~~
I’ve said some version of “’nothing’ doesn’t exist” a dozen or more times now. It’s a hard concept to grasp because we’re taught it so young, and it’s reinforced so often. We’re also taught the game of opposites well before we’re taught its limitations, and we’re very rarely taught spectrums until we specialize professionally and find them there.
By the opposite phenomenon, I mean not everything has only one opposite. The opposite of “Mommy,” we are taught, is “Daddy,” but this is an illusion. It’s also “brother”, “not-Mommy,” “stranger,” “myself,” “all of the expanding universe that isn’t Mommy.” It’s also none of those, but that’s complicated. So, we easily say the opposite of “some thing” and get to “no thing” and find ourselves linguistically trapped. Philosophers tossed that out some time ago and went with “not being” so they had something definable to play with. They failed, as many have pointed out, as “not being” is a misunderstanding of time and a failure to employ principles of object permanence.
In our earliest maths, we are taught 1+1=2. This is often done with props. I have an apple on the left and one on the right somewhat further away and to illustrate the addition, the teacher moves the apple on the right closer to the left and we now have two apples. Or the teacher has one behind their back and I have the one, so they produce the other and hand it to me, and now I have two. We do the same with subtraction, 1-1=0. You have the apple; I take it from you; you’ve gone from the possession of an apple to 0 apples. Logic is satisfied, and we move on to multiplication and division.
But what utter bullshit to teach a child without offering qualification, and what a tricksy way to do it to an impressionable mind! You’d never fall for it as an adult, right? “You have a $100 note; I take it from you and put in behind my back and now you have how many dollars? That’s correct; you have $0” Thanks for the example, now please give me back my money. “I can’t! 100-100=0. Your money is clearly gone.” You don’t fall for this because your relationship to object permanence is a solid one.
The apple we take from the child isn’t gone. There is still an apple, and many more beyond the one of interest in the moment or the space. I think as kids we did this exercise with some sort of wooden or plastic discs on our desks and so if I were a teacher, I’d give extra credit to the kid that counts all the discs in the room and reports that figure as the number there are, and yet more to the child that returns the value “undefined,” aware as they are at the incompleteness of the problem posed.
The same works in reverse – moving these apples closer together didn’t create a greater number of them; I’ve only expressed the definition of my group of interest with this activity. In this case, that definition is proximity, and I’ve moved the second apple arbitrarily closer to the first to satisfy the group condition. This has massive importance in our lives—it’s only cute to point at a pile of bricks and say “there’s your building.” But we should be explicit to children that we are creating an arbitrary group to the task and desired outcome or, at least, that the lessons learned are not applicable to all questions. It would help them, as adults, grapple with existential dread.
We see the same with our other basic math operations. When I multiply, I’m just adding groups, and so we’ve already covered the implications in physical life by discussing proximities and arbitrary groupings. In order to 6×6=36, I’m first making 6 arbitrary, not-real groups of 6 things each, standing back a bit, and then recognizing there were 36 all along. Physical reality hasn’t changed by the exercise. There were 36 all along.
The converse operation, division, is messier for us a bit. The grouping thing still applies, and we know division to be rapid subtraction in a sense, but in physical reality the consequences of division are so much starker and harder to reconcile. This is intensely relevant to the study of Death.
Our easiest time is with identifiable pieces of things— Timmy cuts the apple in half and then cuts each half in half and we go from one apple to four pieces of an apple. The same occurs when I give you smaller bills for your $100 bill in a slightly more abstract way. In both, we know that the total remains in some fashion, though, don’t we? You aren’t surprised that your one hundred pieces of paper equal a $100 bill if we exchange again, and we aren’t surprised that we can tape the apple pieces back together and it resembles an apple, or that we’re still calling it “apple.”
Example 2 is a bit more challenging— “Timmy has an apple. He puts some explosive inside the apple and detonates that explosive. How many apples does Timmy have after the explosion?” Sufficiently powerful explosives and observation return to us the idea that he has 0 apples. He destroyed his only apple. The apple is gone. At best we say “mmm…I think there’s a little bit of apple on the wall.”
This is a nonsense per the law of the conservation of matter. The same matter exists after the explosion as it did before. There are only a few things that have changed: the physical and chemical states of that matter and our narrative around what that means, which is our narrative about what constitutes a group. We know without a doubt that a pile of bricks is not a brick building. Apple molecules no longer in proximity and configuration enough to be observed and eaten are no longer an apple. Again, this is practical so we don’t starve, but it is observably false. Brick buildings are actually just ordered piles of bricks. If we had the materials and skill, we could tape the apple back together again and there it would still be. We are now growing meat in labs without animals. The meat is in the air and the ground. It always was. It is even without a lab.
Einstein summarized this at the death of a friend:
“Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us that believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
In regard to our apple, you perceive it’s “not being” in relationship to the illusion you created about its being in the first place— it “was” only an apple per your understanding of its configuration, only “was” in relationship to your ego, both as an apple and a past tense. This is further evidenced by the likelihood that it will be again when nature does the taping back together thing we are not yet capable of doing. What is more accurate is that the apple went through a phase change but is still, and will always be, exactly what it was in the first place, only ever limited by you and your understanding, tricked too many times by elementary school teachers.
Even the staunchly religious eat and take multi-vitamins. We are fully aware that we need external inputs into our system to rebuild and run us. A dust of carbon and rocks and metals, in some food-shaped configuration, go into my body, are deconstructed into further dust, and I am kept whole by the powder and the process. To form my body in the first place, my mother put that dust into her body and, via the configuration and machinations of her own, already-formed-into-a-body dust, I am made the body that will consume its own dust for a while. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is misconstrued as a metaphor. It’s what has actually happened many, many times before you get to name your son Lazlo. It’s happened so many times that it’s not crazy to suggest that some of the dust you’ve eaten to build little Lazlo was dust that made one of your maternal ancestors’ bones look like bones.
It’s fairly clear that Death is a division. It’s also a taping back together and a reunion. The division, like all division, is also an illusion, propped up by our egos and what we believe our capacity to observe signifies. From our amazing and privileged, but also flawed, vantage point, Death is a phase change from dust and gas state A to dust and gas state B, and, somewhat unsatisfyingly, not much else.
~~~~~~~~~
We come back to the soul, though, and its state of “not being” that is created by my phase change, though, right? I am experiencing this body; I am writing to you; I am self-aware and aware of the computer keys and the concepts of computers and computation. This “I” thing, this ego, exists, at least enough to claim itself and admire Descartes. When I phase change from this configuration into some other, “I” no longer exist. Rignt?
This is where Einstein’s consolation comes back into play and our limited perception does us a disservice. We are forced to see that our life and being consists of this self-aware experience, and nothing more, by the confines of our physical configuration, by the finite number of years we get to spend in them, by our proximity and inhabitation of them, our ability to wiggle our asses, the stories we tell ourselves about that ability, and our inability to see time. Our understanding and beliefs about what it is to “experience,” especially, are limited by time and organs. It’s this experience and its meaning to us that we are grappling with when we are afraid to die.
That which makes you existed in a configuration, that isn’t what you have been taught to define as you, well before your current configuration. You were at one point a part of your mother’s configuration, and a smaller (temporally and constructively) part of your father’s. Long before that there was a chain of dust stretching back through your ancestry, back through animalia (no matter your acceptance of evolution), back to the earth itself, and back further still.
Sagan pointed out simply and serenely that:
“It makes good sense to worship the sun and the stars because we are their children.”
and
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
This isn’t a metaphor; it’s clear he meant it quite literally. I accept this beautiful fact. The dust that has been fortuitously configured to make a self-aware, typing, loving, fucked-up bipedal mammal is composed of materials that came from the explosive deaths of distant stars. The energy to animate it comes from those stars too.
Before those Deaths, and before the inconceivable amount of time that passed to lead to this configuration, my matter was in the configuration of one or multiple stars. In the interim, it was in configuration of planets, of meteors hurtling through space, of algae, of single-celled creatures that consume algae, of more and more complex miniscule living things that consumed the other ones, of lizards and birds— even dinosaurs, of mammals that seem less self-aware, of my great-grandfathers, without argument equally aware but not aware of me, then to me.
Each of those configurations had an “experience” by any definition that makes sense; they were and underwent and vibrated and were “about that” in whatever ways specific to them. At least some of them were aware of it in the sense we mean aware. It’s a nearly unequalled challenge to try and imagine what the experience of one of those stars was. Our notion of feeling, awareness, experience is pent up in our configuration, nerves, and inferior vena cavas, and narratives recorded in synaptic structures, so much so that imagining the experience of a star from its point of view, or what it even is to experience without a point of view, or how the notion of experience is so tied to “viewing” with eyeballs or the experiences of other senses unique to this configuration of star-stuff, is almost as impossible as imagining nothingness.
If we could, though, give the star an imagination, just as a thought experiment, we could see that it’s quite unlikely that these stars would have imagined being us— at least as much as our great-grandmothers of the ice age, or the mammoths they ate that our matter used to be configured in the shape of, could have imagined it. It is unlikely that they would have known that their “experience” would have translated, some day far into the future, into this experience that “I” am participating in right now and it even fully required their deaths to manifest the moment.
Given the gulf in how and what we— the example star that made me and I— are experiencing could it have possibly known that, some time in the future amidst a deadly pandemic which it also made and is experiencing from multiple perspectives, that it would be experiencing the taste of a spring roll, slathered in peanut sauce and sriracha, using the mouth configuration it shares with me?
It may be that the star that made me was terrified of its inevitable explosion or simply wanted to keep shining. (Terror and want here are the only metaphors employed; I don’t recall my star experience, but in attempt to relate to my past self for lessons now to carry forward, it’s a useful thought experiment addition.) If it were scared of the unknown to come, who could blame it? Fear of the unknown is the king of fears, and it had to leave star society for quite a number of other ones.
I, however, have the blessing of the witness. What was unknown to the star is known to me. I am a star eating spring rolls. I know that the unknown that the star was terrified of is fucking delicious.
I remain unafraid of spring rolls as I write this. I remain aware that everything I know, from my senses, to be “me” is going to die. I will explode like an apple or a star. The memories I’ve collected, and the body I’ve grown semi-fond of, will transmute into the configuration and experience of some other something (maybe even someone), and will no more cease to be than the star that made me. Experience will continue, something will continue, “I” will “continue” as much as I ever have in that I always was and always must be. Immortality lives in the cycle, and is a fact.
I can no more describe the experience of what is to come next than I am able to describe the experience of the star that came before, or than the star could describe this one. But with the hindsight of how not-terrifying spring rolls are, and my desire to assuage the star of its concerns, I can more or less deduce that what is to come isn’t scary. Fear is a universal human emotion, after all, and I have no reason to believe its one I’ll need to grapple with when I return to the stars some day after our collective star eats this tiny blue planet and explodes.
I think this is true even if you believe in souls and one or more gods. You can no more imagine what it is to be a soul without a body than I can imagine being soulless without a body. Your soul and its reunion with god, almost by definition, looks like an expansion beyond the confines of your senses, and you likely can’t expect spring rolls when you get there. Stories we tell to be able to relate to the experience that is going to come diminish it, remove the mystery from God in favor of the familiar, reject awe at the mind-bending vastness.
Death is expanding, not diminishing. Stars exploded and expanded into the poetry of Baudelaire. We are divided and are consumed and someday explode with the death of our sun into some other poetry. This is as much a taping back together as it is a division.
But all of that is arbitrary grouping based on the flawed view of time given to us by expiring configurations.
You are still those stars; you are already the next phase; you are already at the throne of God and have been all the while.
There is no change. The cosmic wheel just doesn’t fit in your brain at once.
The Drowned Rat Gospel Choir 