A Brief Contemplation on Life, Death, Joy, & Sorrow.

We are all working towards the same outcome, death.

Death isn’t a sickness. Everything that is born suffers decay. Death represents the fulfillment of life. We will all be, as Cornel West says, “the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.” The only way to embody the fullness of our life is to willingly participating in our own death. We’re all working towards our final resting place, our deathbed. The only question is will we go willingly or kicking and screaming? In answering this question for ourselves, not in theory but with lived experience, we find joy or sorrow. Every morning, every moment we’re asked this question—life is this question; how we live our life—willingly or willfully—is our answer.

Old age, sickness, and death are not evils. They are examples of Truth—self existing realities that appear inconvenient only because we compare them to our man-made systems of thought, hypothetical situations, and ideals. Evil’s existence is contingent upon our insistence to maintain the sovereignty of our man-made systems, which we lay over the self-existing examples of Truth. Old age, sickness, and death do not “suck,” so to speak. What sucks is our naive and “unnatural” belief in eternal youth, comfort, and immortality.

To live in a hypothetical world is to deny the reality of your body. It is to consign yourself to an early death. To participate in your death is to step beyond the hypothetical veil of immortality and enter into the mystery of eternal life. There you will find something living that was never born.

Dr. King, Disembodiment, & the Death of Spirit.

Spiritual Death is a Mass Epidemic in Modern Society. 

God assured Adam that death would surely follow if he were to eat fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But the rationalizing serpent said, "You will not die." In this seductive moment, which we all experience many times each day, mankind was disembodied. We separate ourselves from the wakefulness and vitality of the present moment, as it is revealed in and through the body. We do this by thinking about our own thoughts. We create cold, lifeless worlds that are hundreds and thousands of thoughts removed from the immediacy and precision of direct experience. This is the "death of the spirit." Spirit refers to the source of "principle" or meaning. Next thing you know, a spiritual paralysis or shame set in, and the source of life—Eve—is exiled.

Dr. King waxes eloquently and poignantly on this subject.

“You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.
Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.