The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part II, Ch 10: Life and Death

The promise of heaven is one of the most efficient machines ever built for getting people to neglect the only world they will ever have. I gave it up, lay awake terrified of dying, and found what let me sleep.

In brief: In this chapter I face the question I had put off my whole life: what happens to me when I die. I take away the comfortable story of a heaven on the far side and look plainly at what is left. What is left turned out to be plainer than the story, and kinder than I feared. It matters because the way you see your ending decides the way you spend your days, and whether you waste the only world you will ever have.

There was a night, not long after I had let the last of it go, when I could not sleep for being afraid of the dark. Not the dark in the room. The other one. It was the dark that comes for everybody, and all my life I had let someone above keep a small door open on the far side of it. I had taken that door down myself, slowly, across years of pulling things out of my own head and looking at them. I do not regret a single piece of it. But that night the question I had been putting off for as long as I had been alive stood at the foot of the bed. There was no one left to answer it but me. I lay there until the light came, frightened in a way I had no words for. I was a grown man, scared of the dark like a child. What happens to me when I die?

Let me tell you what finally let me sleep, because I think you may need it too, and because nobody gave it to me plainly. I had to dig it out for myself.

I used a potter earlier in this book, to talk about the way a thing gets made: clay pressed into a shape on purpose. Here I want the other end of it. A potter takes a lump of clay and gives it a shape and a name. For a while there is a pot. It holds water. It sits on a shelf. You could point at it and say: that one, the blue one, mine. Then one day it falls, or it simply wears through, and what is lying on the floor is clay again. The thing I was slow to see is that the pot was never anything except clay wearing a shape for a while. Nothing was added when it became a pot. Nothing is lost when it stops being one. Only the shape came and went.

That is what I am. That is what you are. Before there was a me, there was energy, moving under laws nobody wrote and nobody runs. I began, as most of us begin, as a wish in two other people. A particular gathering of that energy answered the wish and took a shape and was given a name. For a while there has been a me. And that, as far as I can tell, is the whole honest answer to the oldest question we ask ourselves. It is the question that has worn out a thousand holy books: who am I? Energy, in the shape of a human idea, held for a while inside the small fences of space and time. One day the shape will go back to being what it always was.

I had walked through the five stages of any change a few chapters back. They are the birth of a pattern, its growing, its slow decaying, its death, and the return of whatever it was made of to the source it came from. I walked through them as a rule the world obeys. What I had never once done was turn the rule on myself. It is a strange thing, how long a person can hold a law in his head as a fact about flowers and stars. All that time he never notices that it has his own name written at the bottom.

The body is an open system while it lasts. That is, energy moves in and out of it every minute: food and air and heat in, heat and work and waste out. The whole arrangement is borrowed and never owned. It is built up to a point, and then the taking-apart gets the upper hand, and it wears through, and stops, and is given back. After that the energy goes on to be a hundred other things. None of it is destroyed. Energy, as I said early on, cannot leave the room. None of it was ever ours to keep.

So there is really only one thing happening in this universe, and I have said it before in other rooms of this book. It is change. One form turns into another, endlessly, with nothing ever actually leaving. Birth is energy taking a shape. Death is the shape letting go. They feel like opposites, and we treat them like opposites: a party for the one, a terror of the other in the small hours. But they are the two ends of a single ordinary process, the going out and the coming back. The only real difference between them is which way the traveller happens to be facing.

I used to envy stones, a little, on the bad nights. A stone never has to do any of this. There is no death in the inanimate world, the world of things that were never alive. A rock does not die. It only changes state, slowly, forever. But the price of never dying turns out to be never being alive. The living things made the other bargain. They took on mortality (the plain fact of having to die) on purpose. What they got back for it was the whole lit-up business of being a thing that knows it is a thing. They got a second trick too, a borrowed kind of going-on. Each one hands its pattern to the next before it goes, so the line continues even though no single runner does.

And that ending is the engine of every good thing that has ever happened to us, because nothing improves that does not also die. The line learns, adapts, passes the lesson on, and tries again. That slow handing-down of a slightly better pattern is the only reason you are reading this at all. It is why you have a mind clever enough to be frightened of the very thing that built it. The pull to stay alive is the strongest one we are born with. And yet a person can override even that. They can walk into the fire for a child, for a cause, for the belief that their going will buy someone else's staying. That override is the most human thing there is, and we will look at where it comes from in the chapter after this one.

So if the shape does not continue, is there nothing? I said earlier, when I was walking through the rules, that there is no small immortal passenger who climbs out at the end and goes on elsewhere. There is no soul in the old sense, only a point of view that stops when the body stops. I will not argue it again. But I also said, in the same place, that something does continue, and it is simply not the something we were promised. What continues is everything you set in motion: your thoughts, your words, your actions. That is your karma in the exact old sense of the word, which simply means action. It goes on working inside the people you touched, long after the body is given back.

That is the only afterlife there is. Whether it is a good one or a terrible one is settled entirely by what you spent your life putting into other lives. People carry the good forward, and they carry the harm forward, and they pass both on. They honour a kind life and curse a cruel one, in the memory of a few, and, for fewer still, in the long memory of a whole people. In old India they named stars after the ones who had given the most. The seven bright stars of the Great Bear, for one, are still called the Saptarṣi, after seven sages. They were named so the giving would not be forgotten and might steer somebody not yet born. That is as near to heaven as anyone actually gets: a light left burning in other people, pointed forward.

I want to add the one hard thing here that belongs to this chapter and not to the earlier ones, because the earlier ones did not say it. Being good is not, by itself, enough. Take a kind and gentle person who never bothered to learn how the world actually works. That person will still walk straight into the wall, again and again, and suffer, and not know why. The world hands out no soft landing as a reward for a soft heart. You need the goodness to point you somewhere worth going, and you need the knowing to keep you alive long enough to arrive. The good have to also be wise, or the world eats them. That is not a cruelty in the world. It is just the world having no exceptions.

And the bill, when there is one, does not always fall on the one who ran it up. I said at the close of the last chapter that we are a long line of lives, each handing the world on to the next. Here is the hard edge of that. If a person does real harm and is lucky enough to slip the consequences inside their own lifetime, the harm does not evaporate. It waits, and it lands on whoever is standing there later: the children, or the children's children. We do not end at our own skins. And there is no second world held in reserve for after we have used this one up.

There is one place a comfortable story does real damage, and I want to be exact about it, because I was handed that story young. I know what it cost me to set it down. I have said twice in this book that a story is a fine thing for a child. Children learn through soft things, and there is no harm in it for a child. The harm comes later, and the story of a heaven waiting on the far side of death is where the harm is worst. A grown person still living inside that story starts bending the facts to keep it standing. And a mind that has rearranged reality to protect one comfort will rearrange a great deal else.

Worse than the private cost is the public one. A person, or a whole people, certain that the real life begins after this one will treat this one as a waiting room. They will let it burn. They will use it up, because the part that matters is supposed to be somewhere else. A promised paradise beyond death is one of the most efficient machines ever built for getting human beings to neglect the only world they will ever actually have. The relief it gives is real. So is the price. I would rather be afraid for a few nights, as I was, and learn to carry the fear. I would take that over buying a calm that quietly hands me permission to waste the one thing I was given.

Because here is what changed, once I stopped reaching for the story. Death, looked at straight, turned out to be the best teacher I have ever had about how to spend a day. A thing that ends is a thing worth something. If the days did not run out, no single one of them would weigh anything. It is precisely because there is a last day that the ordinary ones become worth holding. I do not mean by this that you should live like a future corpse, counting down, careful and grey. I mean the exact opposite.

Knowing it ends is the permission to take as much real joy from it as you can, lightly, freely, without bracing. There is a single condition, and it is the one the world actually enforces. I keep coming back to it under the old name of mutualism: that your joy is not bought with somebody else's loss. Keep the body well while you have it. Do not simply hand yourself over to the years. Eat well, move, do the dull things a good doctor tells you. Do them not to cheat the ending, but to be fully present right up to it. And spend some of your strength lifting the people walking alongside you, because that lifting is the part of you that will outlast the shape.

There is one kind of rebirth I believe in, and it is the only kind I have ever watched happen. Now and then a person does the hard, frightening work of really changing. They reach down, pull something rotten up by the root, and plant something better in the hole it leaves. The one who walks out the far side of that is not quite the one who walked in. That is a death and a birth, both, inside a single life. It asks no priest and no permission, and you can do it as many times as you have the courage for. We never finish. None of us arrives at finished. The bettering is a road you do not see the end of. But a genuine change of direction is as close to being born again as a human being ever gets. It is yours to have, here, while the shape still holds.

I will not pretend I sleep perfectly now. But the fear has gone quiet most nights, and what quietened it was not a story. It was understanding what is actually happening. The shape I call myself is energy lent a name and a form for a little while. When the loan is called in, I go back to being part of the enormous, ongoing thing I never really left. That used to sound to me like the most frightening sentence in the world. It is not. It is the most ordinary one there is. Held without flinching, it sits surprisingly close to a comfort: you are not a small thing facing the end of everything. You are a small shape inside something that does not end, on loan from it, on the way back to it.

I said earlier in this book that the trick is to love what is temporary lightly enough that, when it goes, you can still walk. The last thing it asks you to love that lightly is your own shape. The clay does not mourn the pot.

If you keep one thing from this chapter, keep this. Do not waste the shape while you have it. Leave the place you pass through a little better lit than you found it, the way the ones who named the stars meant to. And when the shape finally lets go, set it down the way you would set down something heavy you had carried a long way and carried well. Set it down with relief, even, and without shame.

What I wanted to understand next was the instrument itself. I mean the thing that had been doing all of this the whole way through, the thing that fears and decides and changes and stares at its own ending and asks what it means. I had spent the entire book using my mind to examine everything except my mind. It was time, at last, to lift the lid on it and look.

Words to Keep

• Shape: the form energy takes for a while when it becomes a thing with a name, like clay becoming a pot. It comes and goes.

• The five stages of change: the birth of a pattern, its growing, its slow decay, its death, and the return of what it was made of to its source.

• Open system: something energy keeps flowing into and out of. The body takes in food, air and heat, and gives out heat, work and waste.

• Change: the one thing really happening in the universe: one form turning into another, endlessly, with nothing ever actually leaving.

• Mortality: the plain fact of having to die. It is the bargain living things made in return for being alive and knowing it.

• karma: your thoughts, words and actions, which go on working inside the people you touched long after your body is given back.

• Afterlife: the only one there is: everything you set in motion in other lives, good or harmful, carried forward after you have gone.

• Promised paradise: the comfortable story of a heaven after death, which turns this life into a waiting room that people let burn.

• Mutualism: an arrangement in which both sides gain. Here it is the one condition on joy: that yours is not bought with somebody else's loss.

• Rebirth: the only kind I believe in: a real change of direction inside a single life, a death and a birth with no priest needed.

Sources and Further Reading

• This chapter comes from one frightened night, and from the years of thinking around it, not from any one book.

• The Indian idea of karma. At root the word simply means action, and I use it in that plain, old sense: what you do, and what it goes on doing.

• The law of conservation of energy, also called the first law of thermodynamics. Energy changes its form but is never made or unmade, which is why nothing we are made of is ever destroyed.

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859). How a living line hands on its pattern, and slowly improves it, because each single life ends.

• The Indian names for the stars, such as the Saptarṣi, the seven sages of the Great Bear. An old way of keeping the givers in the sky, where the young can see them.