How do you face death without fear?

Do you think the “soul” lives on?

Q: Could you say a little more about when the body dies, “you” die? I have been diagnosed with a health condition that can cause sudden death, and am having a procedure for it that could result in death. Do you think the “soul” lives on? How do you face death without fear when it is no longer a theory but something you are facing now?

A: I don’t know. The question that arises for me is not whether I think a soul is immortal, but to what the word “soul” refers in the first place.

It’s tempting to imagine that anything one can name exists and is understood. So first, does the soul exist at all, and if so, what is it? How does it function? If that is not known, then any talk of “souls” is just superstition.

To be clear, I use the word “soul” myself. “That blues riff has soul,” I might say, or, “I love you body and soul.” But whether that “soul” in the way I mean it survives death is not even an issue.

Soulfulness, for me, is now: the sound of a guitar in the hands of a troubadour, the naive gaze of a child, one of my photographs. All that is impermanent, clearly.

In my view, there is no “how” to face death without fear that can be given to you by another person.

Leave the soul out of it for the moment. Then the question is not a matter of opinion, such as the Dalai Lama says one thing and Robert Saltzman says something else.

After all, regarding ultimate matters, opinions mean nothing. Then the question is stark. Not “do souls survive death?” Not even “how do I face death?” which is a far better question. The present question seems to be: How do I face fear?--the fear that arises when “myself” contemplates not being at all, which is a primal fear, an existential angst. How do I face those emotions right now?

Since you seem to be asking for advice, I’d say head-on.

Everyone has to die, after all. There’s no avoiding that. If fear is part of letting go, it is. If that sounds cold, I don’t mean it that way at all. Quite the opposite. Fear is real, and I wish you all the best.

Q: So what you’re saying is the fear of dying isn’t about dying. It is the fear that is the issue. Deal with the fear, and the dying part isn’t an issue? Is it the ego that can’t face the idea of not being here?

A: No, I am not saying that fear of death isn’t about dying. Of course it is.

All one’s life, the ordinary perception is that the world around me changes. A building collapses. The rubble is put in a landfill. A houseplant flowers. The flowers last for a while. Then those lovely flowers wither and die. Eventually, the plant itself dies. Its dried husk is put outside in the compost pile. A puppy is born. Grows into a dog. Lives for a time. Ages. Dies. That is impermanence.

Myself watches this, sees all these changes in the apparently outside world, but somehow feels more permanent than what it is looking at.

Various spiritual systems reinforce that feeling of permanence by claiming that I am different from what I observe. The claim that a human is not impermanent like a dog or a flower but is an “immortal soul” is one version of that reinforcement.

I don’t buy it. I see no reason at all to imagine that a flower is one kind of thing and Robert is quite another. As I see it, we are the same. We are expressions of this aliveness. In this view, a dog and Robert are the same kind of thing, but a dog and a rock are not. Robert was born, and so will die. The dog was born, and so will die. The rock was never born and so will never die. Animate entities die. Inanimate ones do not.

The rock is not permanent either. Nothing is. Even stars go nova and disappear. Eventually, the rock will disintegrate into sand or dust, but that is not death. Death is what comes to living entities such as you and me.

Each of us living beings will live for a time and die. And when we die, other people will see our deaths as unremarkable and expected. Burial at sea. The ship sails on.

Poor old Robert is no longer around. People might continue to read his books and argue about what he “really” meant, but Robert is no longer around to explain anything. Except in memory, there is no Robert.

I do not fear that. It seems normal to me--just the way things are. But if you fear it, you do. Many of us do. The fear of not being is a normal human emotion, shared by probably the majority — but not all — of us.

This is not about ego, as you asked. It’s much deeper than that. When death comes, it is not just ego that dies. The entire organism — ego and everything else — disintegrates and disappears.

If you fear that, you do. And if you fear it, then you have fear to deal with as well as whatever illness is in the foreground. I can offer you my sympathy and mean it, but I cannot provide an escape hatch from that fear. Accepting impermanence is something one must do alone.

All your life, you have accepted the impermanence of the world around you. “Yes, things change, people die every day, but I am always here.” Now you are forced to understand that you are in no way separate from that world. You only imagined you were.

I wish you all the best of luck with the operation.

Q: Robert, that was very helpful. Thank you.

A: Thank you for telling me that. I wondered if my view might seem too harsh just at a vulnerable time. You have set my mind at ease on that score.

Sending love.