Mortality as a Path to Liberation
In many Western societies, death has become sequestered from daily awareness. Once an experience that unfolded at home and with community, dying is now cloistered within the walls of hospitals, nursing facilities, and long term care centers.
Without communal or spiritual outlets to engage with dying, we can fall into the fantasy that death only happens to other people: the elderly, the sick, the unlucky; those facing tragedy, war, or famine in faraway places. We grasp at the delusion that death will come gently, sometime when we are “ready” after long, full lives.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Death is never far off; people die in all kinds of ways at all different ages. However hard we may try to ignore it, we are in intimate relationship with death every moment we are alive.
By erasing death from view, our culture has rendered mortality as abstract and terrifying. We need only look to the rise of biohacking and wellness-industrial subcultures to see this anxiety and avoidance in action. Our cultural fixation with longevity, bodily optimization, and the relentless preservation of youth reveals a darker fantasy: that we might outpace impermanence, control the uncontrollable, and transcend the limits of being human.
In refusing to face death, it is all too easy to numb our emotional depths, lose touch with the gift of life, and pour energy into the bottomless pit of material accumulation and self-image. Our withdrawal from the truth of impermanence not only subtly haunts our inner world, but also shapes the collapse we now collectively inhabit: dehumanizing others, consuming without end, distracting ourselves to the point of madness, and needlessly desecrating the Earth.
In a landscape of crisis and dislocation, coming into relationship with death is a radical act of resistance and repair.
While this may seem daunting to those of us raised in death denying cultures, nature offers us a safe way to come into relationship with our impermanence. In the natural world, decay and renewal are constant: seasons turn, decomposition seeds new growth, water carves stone, forests regenerate through fire. What appears to be ending almost always reveals itself as wild, unspeakably beautiful transformation. By engaging with mortality through the clear mirror of the Earth, we can see that death is not a distant foe, but part of a larger ecology of becoming.
Wisdom traditions and spiritual lineages have long affirmed this wisdom. In Buddhism, the contemplation of death is regarded as a path to both personal and collective liberation. The practice of maranasati, or mindful awareness of death, imparts heightened presence, awakens contact with our true nature, and rekindles a resolve to live boldly from the heart. By embracing the finite nature of all beings and phenomena—starting with ourselves—gratitude bursts forth and the illusion of separateness begins to dissolve.
