Have you ever wondered if you’ve exhausted the set of emotional states available to you?I never really have until now, assuming I’ve known them all. Hardly. In processing all this information it’s clear that I’m charting new emotional territory. Or maybe something is different. This now resonates: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T.S. Eliot In parallel some of my previous anxieties seem to have fallen away – day to day stuff. Or at least they’ve been replaced by a single, larger, more immediate & looming concern. It crowds out the others as the noon sun crowds out the other constellations. It’s been a weird place to be.
In practice it seems that facing one’s mortality occurs as a bi-phasic process: the first is coming to the realization that one will eventually die; the second is actually processing that knowledge when shit gets real. This was definitely the case for me. In retrospect a much better approach, the one I’m currently working on, is a single-process in which one visualizes death in great detail. Spending time actually feeling the emotions one will encounter; thinking the thoughts one will encounter.
There are two death scenes I recall, both from circa second grade. The first one I remember threw me for at least a week and made me sick that day. I went to the back of the room and grabbed a book off the shelf. I still remember the title, my brother sam is dead, (I just checked it to ensure I wasn’t mis-remembering). As was my habit back then I started at the end. The final pages described an execution scene in which a potato sack was placed over the head of the man about to be killed. It described his thoughts. It was horrifying. Why? Because the cruelty of man was made manifest in a way that I hadn’t directly experienced in my somewhat sheltered life. Also, my country was built on this foundation – this was about the civil war after all, something I didn’t quite grasp at that age except that it happened early in the founding of the place I lived.
The second scene I don’t recall except it was a read-aloud in class. The whole story took probably 30 minutes. In the end it became known that this whole long scene occurred in the space of a few seconds in which a man fell to his death. This story we just read described a magic. That magic was the slowing of time as a person approaches death. So I figured this compression of mental time was available to everyone only if they are about to die. So I was fascinated with this idea. Indeed I realized that I’ve been holding onto that notion until recently as it was unexamined – just kind of sitting on the neural shelf somewhere. Can we experience this business without dying? After all if that’s true we only get to use this once!
I’ve always thought that great art is not wholly dissimilar from math/science: the latter while the former is an emotional proof of sorts. The evidence is written on the faces and emotions of the viewer (we can argue numbers; is great art that which elicits the greatest emotions in the greatest numbers or is it the depth of emotional resonance in merely a few keenly attuned, sensitive humans? I’ll leave that one to someone else). about the civil war.
And as with any sporting event there is no real limit to how granular the vision can get. Ideally visualizing one’s mortality should be a true simulation versus some abstract conception. This is not easy.
Of course the obvious alternative to this, and one favored by many, is simply to not bother. After all that’s time and energy that could go into living. Also, some might argue this whole conversation is a major downer. But I’d argue the opposite; as with most planning exercises the majority of the value lies in the actual process of planning, and less with the actual output. In this case the value is that by visualizing death in great detail would be the key to living more fully. That’s been my experience anyway. The mindset that tends to produce the worst outcomes (for me) is the simple avoidance of the topic – that’s when I tend to watch (metaphorical) cat videos.
But that would be to miss the key point that life is an energetic process and energy is NOT infinite. Whatever those limits are (let’s just say, at a cellular level) that there is merit in the practice of visualizing. One might ask: What merit specifically – would that make the difference between dying well or not dying well? Who cares – you’re dead! But as with most planning exercises a good part, if not most of the value lies in the actual process of doing it, less with the actual output. In this case the value is that by visualizing death in great detail would enable living more fully. That’s not an idea to take lightly.
So it would seem that if one is taking this stuff seriously then a simulation that gets onesself as close to the actual process is important. How else can you know if phase I is working, or you’re just deluding yourself? As the only way to know a person’s true character is to theow them into hardship
. If I can claim any sort of expertise in this area it’s directly a result of my own personal phase I being frankly out of sync with the reality. Because of my current circumstance I’ve had to basically deal with this