step outside of ourselves - and consider our troubles and most of all the idea of our death

from a wholly dispassionate perspective, as if it were someone else who would have to

go through the event and as if we could understand it in the same way that a stranger four centuries

from now might, in other words, as if it might not in the end be such a big deal at all,

just an inevitable return to an atomic mulch from which our life was only ever a brief

and unlikely spasm.

The Dutch seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza made a famous distinction between

two ways of looking at death. We could either see it egoistically, from our limited point

of view, as he put it in Latin: sub specie durationis – under the aspect of time - at

which point it would be a tragedy. Or we could look look at it from the outside, globally

and eternally, as if from the eye of another force or planet: sub specie aeternitatis – under

the aspect of eternity, at which point it would be an utterly untroubling and normal

event. Spinoza recognised that for much of our lives, we are necessarily pulled by our

bodies towards a time-bound and egoistic view, aligning all our concerns with the survival

of our own bodies. But he stressed that our minds also give us unique access to another

perspective, from which the particulars of our material identities matter far less. Our

minds allow us – and here Spinoza becomes lyrical – to participate in eternal totality

and to achieve piece of mind by aligning ourselves with the trajectory of the universe.

Below us will

be millions of near microscopic worms, waiting for us to succumb and be reabsorbed into the

soil and the life-cycle. In the trees outside might be birds

and in the grass, bugs

which would, given the chance, intrepidly venture across our necks or throw down a gelatinous

trail across our ankles. Above us will be a mere 60 miles or so of atmosphere, before

we enter a zone of unfeasible cold, in one corner punctuated by the lights of the distant

Andromeda Galaxy, a dotted spiral 2.5 million light-years away that started to take shape

10 billion years ago.

We can imagine floating free of ourselves, piercing the ceiling and the roof and rising

above our district and our city, climbing until we could see the whole countryside and

the coast, then the sea (plied by ferries and container ships), then the ocean, a next

continent, mountain ranges, deserts, until we penetrated the outer atmosphere and entered

deep space. We might continue outwards through our solar system, out into interstellar space,

then intergalactic space, past 400 billion stars and a 100 billion planets, past Saggitarius

A and the Laniakea Supercluster and onto the furthest galaxy from earth in the universe,

MACS0647-JD, where we would finally rest, 13.3 billion light years away from our own

bedroom.

Far from crushing us, this impression of the vastness of space and time in which we dwell

can redeem and lighten us.

We are - when we have the courage to know it - staggeringly unimportant in the larger

scheme. On a cosmic scale nothing we will ever do, or fail to do, has the slightest

significance. Everything connected directly to us is of no importance at all, when imagined

on an appropriate scale. We are negligible instances, inhabiting a random, unremarkable

backwater of the universe, basking for an instant or two in the light of a dying star.

This perspective may feel cruel but it is also centrally redemptive, for it frees us

from the squeals of our own frightened egos.

States of higher consciousness are generally desperately short lived. But we should make

the most of them when they arise, and harvest their insights for the panicky periods when

we require them most. Higher consciousness is a huge triumph over the primitive mind

which cannot envisage the possibility of its non-existence.

We can't know what our end will be. Maybe we'll be lingering for years, hardly able

to remember who we are; maybe we'll be cut off by a horrifying internal growth or a key

organ will fail us and the end will be instantaneous. But we can imagine our funeral; the things

people might say or feel they have to say; we can imagine people crying; our will being

enacted, then being gradually forgotten, becoming a strange figure in a family photo. Soon enough

we'll diminish into uncertainty ('one of my great grandparents was a lawyer, I think,

maybe…') someone will say. It will be as if we had never been.

We should expect to be a little melancholy. Melancholy is not rage or bitterness, it is

a noble species of sadness that arises when we are open to the fact that disappointment

and injury are at the heart of human experience. In our melancholy state, we can understand

without fury or sentimentality that no one fully understands anyone else, that loneliness

is universal and that every life has its full measure of sorrow.

But though there is a vast amount to feel sad about, we're not individually cursed

and against the darkness, many small sweet things stand out: love, forgiveness, creativity.

With the tragedies of existence firmly in mind, we can learn how to draw the full value

from what is good, whenever, wherever and in whatever doses it arises.

To meditate on the unimportance of our own end, stangely, does not make it more frightening.

The more absurd our death the more vivid our appreciation of being alive. Our conscious

existence is unveiled not as the inevitable state of things but as a strange, precious,

moment of grace. We may be amazed to be here at all - and no longer quite so sad about

the time when we no longer will be.

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