Learning How to Die

The Art of Living

In Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari describes how the Gilgamesh Project, the quest for immortality, is fascinating:

“The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life. Even if killing death seems a distant goal, we have already achieved things that were inconceivable a few centuries ago.”

The author also explains how death has always been a part of the spiritual approach to life up until recently:

“Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist?”

Indeed dying seems to have been taken out of the picture of our every day lives and we seldom think about it. Until it knocks on our door! But then, we are so consumed by where we focus our attention — and our attention is so over-flooded by certain aspects of our lives — that we didn’t take the necessary time to (re-)connect with our inner divinity. In that alignment lies the key to seeing our true nature and to face all aspects of life (and death) as transient…