Letter to Alex
[Undated — received April 7th 2003]Dear Alex,
I hope to be around when you read this. If I’m not, I hope you won’t think so little of me that you won’t care about what I’ve written.
Your mother will tell you what she sees fit to tell you about me and what I've done in my life. This letter can’t be about personal, family issues, because either I’ll be there to take care of those issues when you read it, or your mother will have coloured your opinion of me and the way I’ve treated both of you. All I’ll say from a personal perspective is that I’m sorry I wasn’t there at your birth. I was only absent in order to protect you and your mother.This letter is about something far more important than our personal situation. It’s about the bars of the cells than people started building for themselves generations ago and which still hold so much of humanity prisoner today. If you can understand what I’m trying to explain in this letter you might be able to free yourself from that prison and help others do the same.
Your mother should let you read this letter for the first time when you’re somewhere around eight or ten years old. Ideally, this will coincide with your first real experience of death and the sadness it brings. At that time you won’t understand much of what’s written here, so you’ll have to re-read this letter again and again as you get older.Death is sad. It's normal to feel sad that we won't see someone ever again. It's normal to feel sad that someone who has died didn't get the chance to do everything they wanted to do or see everything they wanted to see. And it's normal to feel sad about our own death. But of course our own death doesn't just make us sad — it makes us scared.
You see, the problem with consciousness is that the main thing one is conscious of is oneself. The next thing one is conscious of is the death of the self. For whatever reason, this is something that is unacceptable to conscious beings. Or at least to people. Maybe dolphins, dogs and elephants are conscious and maybe they don’t care about the death of the self. In their case, we'll probably never know.
So what do we do to make ourselves less scared of dying? We pretend that it won't happen. With about as much logic as a small child who thinks that he's invisible when he closes his eyes, we close our minds to death and think that it has gone away. For millennia, and in all cultures around the world, people invent stories about what happens to them when they die. Whether it be identified as reincarnation, heaven, ghosts or whatever, a soft, comforting blanket of lies is wrapped around the human perception of death.
And what's wrong with that, you might ask? What's wrong with making people feel better about the most terrible thing that will happen to them? Well, I'll tell you what — it's that those lies don't really make people feel better. Very few people feel at ease with the thought of their own death. (By 'at ease' I don't mean that death is something one shouldn't care about one way or the other — we are all programmed to survive and should struggle to stay alive.) No, most people, when faced with their own death, are terrified. Only the obsessively religious believe deeply enough to be comforted at that moment.
Not only are the lies ineffective, but they are then used to control people. This is what organised religions do. They gain their power from one source — the willingness of their followers to believe a particular religion's version of the 'death lie'. Those lies are so powerful because they make life acceptable. And once your life hinges on a lie you'll do anything to defend that lie. This is why organised religions can cause extreme violence — their followers would rather die in defence of their own death lie than live and see the lie disproved or replaced by some other religion's lie.
I could go on, but I won't. It seems clear to me that the benefits of having these death lies are outweighed by the damage they cause. It's the same scenario as a drug which makes you feel euphoric, but which eventually rots your body and causes a multitude of social problems.But how can we stop people feeling frightened at the thought of their own death without resorting to these death lies? Maybe we should encourage people to leave monuments of themselves which will last beyond their death. That's what powerful men do, after all. Faces carved in stone or moulded on coins; names of cities and streets; thousand year Reichs. Hmmm… that last example is a reminder that the men who know the ‘death lie’ is just a lie, and who try to leave physical monuments behind after they die, often do so at the expense of many lives. Besides, there aren't enough streets for everyone to have a street named after them. Mots people in our country make do with an engraving on a tombstone. I don't think that those engravings make them feel any better about dying.
Perhaps we should look at life from a different perspective. I'm lucky to automatically have a different perspective of the world than most people. Maybe you'll have that perspective too, Alex, and if that’s the case then what I'm going to say now will be relatively easy for you to understand.
Life, in the largest sense, is about survival. Life survives by reproducing, and by doing so in an ever-increasing variety of forms. This variety is one of the secrets to survival. The greater the variety of forms, the greater the chance there is that life will persist. Pedigree dogs are much more vulnerable to illness and genetic weaknesses than mongrels. Mix-and-match means strength. That was one of the Nazis most fallacious and damaging ideals: the insistence that purity equals strength. Another of their misguided ideals was that purity equals beauty. You might wonder what's wrong with purity equalling beauty. Surely a clear, blue sky is beautiful; surely a perfect sphere is beautiful, isn’t it? However 'perfect' also means 'unchanging'. Change the form of the sphere, put a dent or a hole in it, and it's no longer perfect. So 'perfection' also equates with 'permanence'. Which is the problem with the life of the individual — it isn't permanent. Hence the fear of death.
But are permanence and perfection things we should wish for? Let's take this line of reasoning to an extreme. If the universe was perfect what would it look like? Like a perfect sphere? Like a balanced spiral with all the galaxies distributed evenly? In our frame of reference there aren't many choices, but they all amount to the same thing: a perfect universe would be unchanging. Beauty equals permanence. And where would life be in this equation? Nowhere. A perfect universe might continue to expand until all matter was evenly distributed, or contract back to a perfect sphere. But neither of these scenarios has room for life, because life unbalances mathematical perfection. Life produces a variety of forms, and variety is the opposite of perfection.
Perfection and permanence are therefore the antithesis of life. As far as life is concerned, beauty lies in impermanence and in variety. So to wish for impermanence is to wish for the opposite of death in the widest sense of the word. The reason people are frightened by their own deaths is that they don't see this wider sense of the word. They see their own life as all that matters, rather than life in general. And they see their own deaths as negative, instead of appreciating their necessity for the continuation of life.
This might seem confusing, because we don't have a word for this 'wider sense of the word'. There should be one word for the death of the individual (the word 'death' seems good to me) and a new word for 'the absence of life'. Just for the heck of it, let’s use a foreign word to represent 'the absence of life'. Let's use the Russian word for death: 'smyert'. The universe where there is no life whatsoever is the universe of smyert. The universe of perfection and permanence is the universe of smyert. Life needs death in order to reproduce and evolve. As I said in the previous paragraph, the beauty of life lies in impermanence and variety. Anyone who proposes permanence and perfection in society, in knowledge or in art is proposing a world of smyert.
Life is fleeting, and that, literally, is its beauty. If we didn't die, we wouldn't have anything to live for. Knowing that death exists, and not even knowing when we will die, makes us really live; it makes us struggle, create, explore and love.
So by all means feel sad when you think about dying. But don't feel scared. We are all part of life. It's impermanence is a beautiful, happy thing, because without that impermanence, the only thing that would exist would be the cold, lifeless perfection of smyert.As I said at the beginning of this letter, I hope I’ll be around when you read this to talk about it with you. If I’m not, I hope your mother will understand what I’m trying to say and will help you understand it in turn.
Live your life in the full knowledge that it won’t last forever and you will live it to the fullest.
Your father,
B (signed)