Death: The Ultimate Teacher

Unlike other species on the planet, humanity has the distinction of being aware of our impending mortality. But the idea of death actually can save us, and this is what is so powerful. 

I bring it up here because underneath all this fear we’ve been exploring is really this ultimate fear of death. If we can transform that, however, we're able to use death as our greatest teacher to inform what's possible.

So it's this impermanence of all things that gives us a gateway to possibility. And of all things we experience in the world, music is one of the most impermanent. 

Think about it: music only exists in the moment. You can't touch it or feel it. It only exists in time. It's not like a sculpture or a painting. It plays and it's gone the next moment.

And this impermanence of music, as we listen attentively to it, connects us to the present moment. That's why music is so powerful. When we extrapolate that experience of music out further, we realize that the whole world, the whole universe is changed.

Just as music is changed moment to moment, so is everything in the whole universe. We come to realize that even something as stable-seeming as a mountain is an event in time. A mountain can last for a billion years and we, as humans, don't even last for a meaningful fraction of that.

That's really a powerful realization: that everything around us is an event in time. 

You see the impermanent nature in every element of the cosmos and it will inform such an urgency to your life that you won't be able but to be more present and transformed in every moment. From there, we see that everything is a continuum; things are not black and white, birth and death.

There is a complete continuum, a spectrum of experience, with very, very fine gradations. And only if we have a word for the gradation do we actually recognize it. Otherwise, we just lump it in as part of a category. 

As an example, we have a name for the word cloud, and we don't realize that there's really no distinction between a cloud and the water in the ocean.

There's a continuum between them. One creates the other. One cannot exist without the other. We have different words for them, but ultimately we must see them all as one system, as one continuum.

We wouldn't say that the wave is different from the ocean, right? Yet we have two words for them. The wave is a momentary expression of the ocean, but it falls back as ocean. As Alan Watts said, “You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” 

Having said all that, death (which is an underlying fear) actually becomes a possibility. This idea of death creates this urgency to live. So let's now use it to call in possibility. 

And I'd like to present the idea of each of us as a possibility. That a possibility is not something external. 

It’s the difference between saying, “I really want that job” or “I really want that house,” and instead saying, “I am somebody that can have that house.” YOU actually are the possibility, the rest is just details. 

Now if having that job means that you need certain skills or knowledge, then you're empowered. If you don't have the knowledge you figure out how to gain that knowledge.

There's so much available for each of us, no matter what the possibility. But without a sense of urgency, any possibility is just a dream. It's an illusion. It's not real. 

It gets relegated to the pile of “one day,” right? How many things have we put in that pile? 

And what gives it urgency is an intimate relationship with impermanence. That knowledge that life has a certain timespan – which is never as long as we like – propels us forward in a powerful way.