Die Before You Die

With few exceptions, deep within each of us exists a somewhat lonely, separated self that fears annihilation.

Our religions may give us some comfort. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever you are — or even if you’re an atheist — your spiritual or philosophical path may point the way. Still, you have to walk the path by yourself. Face death by yourself.

If you’ve got terminal cancer or another disease, you may not feel psychologically prepared.

How can you accept your own mortality with grace and dignity?

The “Die before you die” quote is attributed to the Sufi poet, Rumi, but the same idea has been repeated by other mystics. Let’s take a pragmatic look at how you “die” to your “self.”

There comes a time…

Granted, some people — especially very ill or older people — may be ready to go. My 104-year-old grandmother was an example. She couldn’t see or hear very well, and spent her last years in nursing homes.

When people asked her secret of long life, she’d say with a mischievous grin, “I don’t smoke, drink, or cuss.”

She was a strong woman who had withstood dust storms during the Great Depression. Grandma protected her first two babies — my mom and aunt — from lung disease by draping wet sheets over their cribs.

She birthed four children, three in her own Kansas home, with only a country doctor and my grandfather in attendance. Grandma worked in the wheat fields, cooked meals for the field hands, raised chickens, kept house, and made her own butter, sausage and bread.

Is it any wonder that such an independent woman would loathe dependence on caretakers during the final years of her life?

“What’s my purpose?” she would lament.

Still, Grandma tried to find meaning while she lived in those nursing homes. After an initial period of resistance, she told me that she’d finally found her purpose: It was to pray with her caretakers and make them laugh.

It helps to have a purpose

My own recent mental health crisis occurred when I couldn’t find any purpose to my life. I didn’t plan suicide or anything drastic, but I just didn’t want to live. What caused my crisis was a faltering late life marriage and a disastrous move from an urban retirement community — where I had family, friends and a support group — to a small rural town on Colorado’s Western Slope.

My new husband and I didn’t know anyone there except one couple. While my husband adapted readily to our unfamiliar environment, I did not.

My plunge into anxiety and depression shocked me. I’d always thought of myself as adaptable, perhaps because I’ve moved so often during my lifetime. I thought I would make new friends and build a new life.

Instead, I became a shell of myself. I lost interest in food and dropped more than 30 pounds. I couldn’t sleep. Life seemed pointless. I no longer feared death. I felt that if death came, I would welcome it.

I no longer wanted to be me

In that chaotic state of mind, I went through what is sometimes called the “Die before you die” process described in Zen Buddhist, Islamic Sufism and other traditions.

You’re probably wondering, How do you do it — die before you die? And What’s the benefit?

The benefit is that when the pain of being yourself becomes unbearable, the way out is to die. I’m not talking about physical death.

The “self” is a fiction of the mind

At 29 years old, spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle underwent a mental health crisis and said to himself, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” Upon examining this odd thought, he realized its absurdity. How could there be two of him — the “I” and the “myself” he couldn’t live with?

That realization forced his consciousness to withdraw from its identification with what he calls the “unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind.”

Reading Tolle’s books helped me focus on being merely present. I desperately needed to escape my intolerable mental state. Gradually, my obsession with my past and my life situation dropped away. So did my fear of the future.

Soon my life “story” no longer seemed that important — or even that real.

The unreality of my own life story

The truth of who I really am became most obvious to me when I tried writing about myself.

What I wrote just didn’t seem like the real me anymore. The words couldn’t even begin to describe the majesty of my own simple, present awareness.

My just sitting there and being alive, just being myself, felt miraculous. I saw the truth of myself as an honest, decent human being who no longer feared what others might do to her or what might happen.

I had the right to be myself, just as I was.

Authors as instruments of a higher power

The process of writing itself freed me from the dark spell of my mind. Authors and other artists sometimes say they have a sense of being an instrument of a higher power that surges through them during the creative process. You don’t need to understand that power.

I remember asking myself, “Do you need to understand how oxygen refreshes your body in order to breathe?”

“No. You just breathe.”

“Do you need to understand how your digestive system processes food in order to eat?”

“No. You just eat.”

So just write, I told myself, even though you don’t understand life, or yourself, or anything.

Here’s what I discovered.

As you write about yourself, you can’t trust your mind chatter to explain or understand everything. Like your memory, your thoughts can’t entirely be trusted. Thoughts are restricted by your age, your race, your gender, your culture, your religion, your education — by almost everything about you.

Beliefs are thoughts that we keep telling ourselves are true. But that doesn’t necessarily make them true. Besides that, beliefs usually change over time. So do people.

Sometimes the voice inside your head doesn’t know what it’s talking about

Rather than assuming that the voice inside your head knows the truth about everything, just observe what it says. Great mystics have said:

“The single most important technique on the Mystic Path… is self-observation.” -Vernon Howard

“…honest self-observation leads to the very salvation for which you would gladly give everything.” -Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard

“… ‘here’ is never good enough. Through self–observation, find out if that is the case in your life.” -Eckhart Tolle

Observe and then record the words of your inner voice. But don’t accept that what you’ve written is the real truth, or even the real you.

Writing down your thoughts makes it easier to avoid identifying with them. You realize that you are not your thoughts. Nor are you the “I” that you created with words.

You may feel exhilarated by the sense of freedom that writing about yourself unleashes! Suddenly you are freed from the prison of your mind.

Wait a while. A few hours or days. Later, you can read your words with a dispassionate attitude. You’ll feel unruffled, at peace deep inside, because you’ll know without question that the self-image you’ve projected onto paper isn’t real.

The real you — an awesome, mysterious, aware presence — can never be captured on paper by the fallible tools of thought and memory.

You are not your life story. But you are a kind of hero. Each one of us is. And that’s a joyous discovery.

P.S. If you enjoy video, the following one I created illustrates some of the ideas I’m putting forth in this article.