4.5 On the inevitability of death

One should meditate on one’s death, and continue this practice until one is capable of calling the inevitability of one’s own death to mind at any time, in any context without excessive fear and without any desire to run or get away from it. Once this state has been achieved, pay death no more mind except when it is needed and relevant to life.

Of course, the desire to run away from death (in most circumstances) is good and should be cultivated. I should say just the feeling of unreasoning, mind-erasing fear should be learnt to be overcome by this (or some other) exercise. As to "when it is needed or relevant to life", I mean either in planning one’s life, in the event of one’s imminent death, when deciding whether to have "just one more fatty, heart-disease-inducing jelly doughnut," or whether to put it all on the line for some great goal. My point being that we need the awareness of the fact of death-as-inevitable as a context. Something we take into account all the time. For if we are unable to do so—paralyzed by fear—then death remains a fact we cannot take into account in life, and we will act accordingly. And witness the way so many people squander their lives acting as if there will forever be a "manyana" to which to put off the achievement of their goals, and always be another chance—one less risky.

Ayn Rand said that the process of integration consists of differentiation and integration—learning what is, and is not a part of something. To know a thing, to define it, means to know the limits of that thing; to know where it ends, and where other begins. This applies to life as to anything else. To know your life is to see it in the context of both its beginning and its end. To know it’s limits.

One must be able to integrate the idea of one’s own death before one can know the nature of life—for, in the words of Dirty Harry, "A man’s got to know his limitations." Accept the truth, the absolute reality and inevitability of your death, and only then will you be able to fully live.

2000.10.13
Based on an email to Kimberly Kanigel