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I remember when I was a kid growing up in the 1970’s at about the age of 7, I asked my father what happened after we died. He went quiet for a moment, completely blindsided and unprepared for this spontaneous question from me and simply said, ‘you mustn’t think about that,’ and ‘you’ve got a long time to go, you’ve got years ahead!’ That was the moment that I became afraid of dying. Whenever I’d asked my mother that in previous times she’d simply said, ‘you go to heaven, and live happily forever.’ I’d expected my father to say the same kind of thing, but he wasn’t aware of the rules so to speak.
I was too young to know at the time but my father had his own issues with death and dying, having been forcibly introduced to it at a young age, probably about the same age by members of his family who thought that they were doing the right thing by forcing my sensitive old man to look at the corpse of some family member, recently deceased and barely ever spoken of again by my Dad as a result. To this day I don’t know who that was, was it his grandfather, or an uncle? Who knows. The fear of death was never spoken of by my father, but it was something that he ran away from for the rest of his life, I genuinely do believe that it contributed greatly to his mental health struggles that cast a long shadow the entire household for the entirety of his life.
My father was a good man, who tried to be happy but couldn’t, instead he drove his anxieties underground through hedonism. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die. Except of course that ‘tomorrow we may die,’ part was quietly forgotten about and almost never considered by him. I was 43 years old when he passed away, Lana Del Rey was big at the time with her song ‘Born to Die,’ which is an absolute classic by the way, but by then his bad choices, lack of exercise, bad diet and excessive drinking had caught up with him. He had a heart attack and was rushed into hospital where apparently; he died 6 times, but a dedicated paramedic brought him back, restarting his heart on every attempt. His condition was stabilised, and he came home, only to go back in again some 9 months later with a mystery infection that finally killed him.
About 6 weeks before he died I woke up one morning, unable to open my eyes, I could feel a pressure in the middle of my forehead, it wasn’t overbearing but it was in a spot just above the bridge of my nose, I would say right between my eyes but it was a little above that, in the place that many mystics and spiritual seekers consider to be a chakra, a vibrating, rotating energy centre that is a portal to the mind, the mind’s eye.
By the side of the bed was a woman whom I knew, I recognised her voice even though I hadn’t heard it in a long time, but I couldn’t place her. She kept on saying ‘everything is going to be alright,’ over and over again, repeating it, before finally this inner vision dissipated taking away the uncomfortable pressure with it, and I was able to open my eyes and get out of bed. It was that day that my mother called me on the phone worried about my dad’s condition, so I went to my parent’s house, an hour’s drive away and had a look for myself. When I saw the state of my tired, emaciated, and sickly-looking father I called the doctor out who had been unsuccessfully treating him for several weeks. He came to the house and just stared at my delirious dad with a puzzled expression on his face. I recommended that an ambulance be called, and he agreed, so it was in the midst of a frozen winter, late November 2012 in which we had unseasonably large amounts of ice and snow on the ground that the ambulance took my old man away for the last time but I wasn’t worried, after all the familiar yet unknown spirit had told me by my bedside that ‘everything was going to be alright!’ That same thought propelled me through the many and various hospital visits and consultations with my poor old mother for the next six weeks. He died in January 2013 which was especially poignant because he’d said a few years beforehand upon discovering a doctor’s note with an estimated time of death written upon it that he didn’t want to die in January. This spirit, this concerned essence by the side of the bed had said ‘everything is going to be alright,’ and then I understood, everything would be alright from their vantage point, their point of view, the vista of the spirit world she was there for my old man when he passed over, guiding him into the next life, but still, I felt a little cheated and to this day, I still do.
Going through the old photos I found a black and white picture of the lady in question, it was my father’s mother, or more aptly my paternal grandmother who passed away when I was a baby, she used to make a big fuss of me but of course she died when I was too young to remember her. I don’t even think of her as my grandmother because I have no memories of her at all. The shock of her sudden and unexpected death really hit my father hard because he was her youngest child, one of 8 children in total and loved his mother. The interesting thing about this spiritual experience is that she appeared to me exactly like that photography that I’d seen occasionally at the bottom of the family picture box, black hair, pale skin, short statue, that was my only conception of her and that’s how she appeared even though she’d had red hair when alive. Spirits present themselves not as they are but as you’d recognise them.
So, by now I’ll forgive you for wondering what the hell has this got to do with stoicism, or philosophy in general and why am I rambling on about an experience that is not rational, anecdotal that cannot be replicated by anyone else, unscientific and by extension of no use to anyone else? It’s because, that I like everyone else, has no idea what happens to the human soul after death, where does our essential essence go to when the body dies? I have my theories, but that’s about it. I am essentially in the same position as the Greek philosopher Socrates who in his apology (his defence against the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens) faithfully recorded by his student Plato in approximately 393 BC said that ‘death is not an evil,’ because life either continues in a new reality after death or it doesn’t, neither possibility is a cause for concern. If the materialists are right and there’s no such thing as a soul or an afterlife, you won’t be there when you die. You won’t be around to experience it and as such it’s nothing to worry about. This strain of thought became hugely influential to the Epicureans who were the great rival school to the stoics. My own experience of people dying is that one moment they are there, the next they are not. It’s over in the twinkling of an eye, there’s rarely, if any, time for last requests. It’s not like the movies where the dying man has enough screen time to demand that he be avenged by the hero. On the other hand, lots of people have good reason to believe that life goes on in a way that is broadly incomprehensible to us in the present, we can glean the rules of this other realm by studying the many and various tales of near death experiences that the experiencers of which insist really are short visits to the afterlife, whilst common elements abound they are often times contradictory, as compelling as these stories often are, we must always keep in our hearts the possibility that the materialists are correct and that life ends with the body’s demise. To reiterate life either goes on in another place or it ends at the moment of death, neither possibility is a bad thing when you learn to see it in the same way as Socrates who said:
“Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: – either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain….
….Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?”
Socrates goes on to say that he would then spend his afterlife speaking with the heroes of legend and continue to seek wisdom. Socrates had no fear of death because he considered both possibilities to be equally plausible and proved this by happily drinking the hemlock when convicted. As an aside, his friends bribed the guards to look the other way, so, he could have escaped but he decided to stay, to drink the hemlock at the appointed time rather than undermine the state of Athens which had given him everything that he had ever needed to live a good life. Rather than undermine the polis after having been sent to death unjustly he willingly drank the hemlock and by doing so cemented his place in human history as the greatest philosopher of all time.
This great divide in philosophy is essentially the root difference between idealism and materialism, dualists, and materialists, but I digress. I too was afraid of death, it overshadowed my every waking day, randomly and without warning it would intrude into my thoughts, that one day I would die, and it would terrify me, really terrify me, making my blood run cold, my veins full of ice. I would busy myself throughout the day, working feverishly at my job, throwing myself into my hobbies and my friendships, doing my best to be a good son for my parents and my best at being a good friend to all who fell into my orbit and tired out I would go to bed, late at night and read for a bit before turning in for the night, and then, as soon as my head hit the pillows and my eyes shut the unbidden thought would express itself. ‘You are going to die!’ This happened every single night from the ages of 16 (I had discovered religion at that age) up to the ages of 36, by which point the constant stress and anxieties that flowed from this had done their best to destroy my life, taking my mental health with it. I had to face this fear, and deal with it head on. So, one day I waited until the house was empty and found a big mirror on the landing and looked into it. I looked myself in the eye and simply said:
“I accept that one day I will die, but between now and then I am going to do the best that I can to live the best life that I can.’ It took courage to say it, to utter the words out loud, but almost immediately a weight lifted from me, a sense of relief came with it and then slowly over a period of time I became increasingly less bothered by death, to the point where some six months later it didn’t bother me at all, then I started looking forward to it, which is something I would never have thought possible. In the moment of death, I will either have all of my questions answered or will experience nothing at all, so in either case death is nothing to be feared. That was also the day I became a philosopher. Prior to that I had just been a seeker, a spiritual type, a nascent mystic, and a thinker trying to make sense of it all, forever squaring the circle, seeking answers that only provoked more questions, the answers of which hadn’t made me any richer, more prosperous or in any way better off. I’d completed my philosophical apprenticeship on the day that I beat the fear of death, with that out of the way I was then able to put my best energies into living a good life, living well and whilst not everything has worked out, because life is often a sequence of mistakes and their consequences, I have been happier. I had not yet read Socrates, or any of the Stoics, at that point in my life when I forced myself to look into the mirror, to look myself in the eye and deal with the fear of dying head on. I still thought that philosophy was essentially the meaningless twaddle of overpriced academics who didn’t provide anything useful to society. I didn’t know what a philosopher was, what they did or even what philosophy was for, none of this had ever been mentioned in school, for instance, but I wish that it had. Philosophy is essential to human flourishing, my own flourishing would come later, but overcoming the fear of death is absolutely essential to the pursuit of the good life. If you want to know the difference between philosophy and religion, it is this, philosophy is all about the good life or how to live the best life right now, within the life that you are currently living, religion is just the correct preparation for the afterlife, should one exist!
Socrates was a profound influence on both Epicureans and Stoics, for example, Epicurus a Greek philosopher born in 341 BC said that all sensations whether good or bad are a product of the body. All sensation ends with death and in death there is neither pleasure nor pain.
Therefore, as Epicurus famously said, “death is nothing to us.”
So, to put it more colloquially, when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we are not so, why be frightened of something that can’t exist at the same time as you. From this doctrine arose the Epicurean epitaph found inscribed on many of his followers’ tombstones: “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care”
In contrast the Stoic Philosopher King, our most noble Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his collection of notes to himself (meditations):
“The present moment is the only thing of which anyone can be deprived, at least if this is the only thing he has and he cannot lose what he has not got.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
In other words, death is not an evil because all we really have is the present moment, there is no future, it has not arrived yet, the past is instantly gone, so when we die, we only lose the present and that loss is the same for everyone. When you consider just how thin the present moment really is in terms of time passing, you can see that it’s not much of a loss. Marcus Also said “About death: Whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change.” Mortality weighs heavily upon us and none of us know exactly how much time we have left but rather than be frighted by this we can channel our energies into living well, seriously attending to duty in accordance with stoic virtues. It’s only within the present moment that we can develop virtue and improve our characters. We are not our past, that’s what he meant when he said: “Don’t behave as if you are destined to live forever. What’s fated hangs over you. As long you live and while you can, become good now.” —Marcus Aurelius
A similar sentiment was echoed by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and prolific writer of letters “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” —Seneca
He was ordered to commit suicide by the emperor Nero after being implicated in a conspiracy against him (probably wrongly) and whilst slitting his own wrists in a warm bath, thought nothing of his self and his impending demise, but was busy with his remaining time consoling his family, asking them not to be sad for his sake, because death is not an evil.
So just to round this up, I have had in my life probably more proof than anyone else that life continues beyond the grave, but I am mindful that this could be nothing more than an aberration of my brain chemistry. So I am not an idealogue, neither a religious fanatic nor an atheist, I keep my mind open to both possibilities and am happy that like Epictetus, the stoic philosopher of the ancient world often depicted with crutches now take the view that whilst “I cannot escape death, I can at least escape the fear of it.”
I am mindful of death, I know that my time is limited, that is the nature of being human and as we good stoics know, there is nothing bad in nature, all living things are born and then at some point die. This is the way that the universe is arranged but between this present moment and my last one I can at least try my best to be a good person, to live well, to be of benefit to my family, friends, employers, and community by focusing on my work, my relationships and my pursuit of wisdom and virtue.
Death is nothing to us, we only lose the present moment and eternity is but a single night to us, like a deep and dreamless sleep or perhaps we may go on into another realm entirely but that will be the subject of a later episode of this podcast.
A short life beautifully lived is better than a long life filled with the fear of the inevitable. Marcus Aurelius Stated:
“It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.” So, live well, be blessed.
