I really wasn’t intending to write about death this week. Summer has finally arrived in London: the unseasonal winds have dropped, the sky is blue, I’m writing to you from my balcony, and the prospect of reading a book under a tree is calling to me. Why on earth would I, or anybody else, want to think about death?
Yesterday I drafted an entire essay about selfhood instead, much of which survives in what follows. The subject of death was creeping in around the edges, but I didn’t lean into it because I didn’t want to come across as morbid. Then a very timely conversation with in the comments section of her latest essay made me realise that death was the true subject of the piece I’d drafted — I was just tiptoeing around it, resistant to looking at it directly. And so here it is rewritten, with death given the place it demands and deserves. As so often when we talk about death, it is also (perhaps most of all) about life.
I think about a lot about the fact that I will one day die.1 I never really considered this unusual until I read these words by
in her essay ‘befriending our mortality’:One of my friends explained that he thought about death almost every day, which blew my mind. I don’t think he meant this in a morose sense, but rather was trying to articulate that death was something he tried to keep in mind. Unlike most of us who happen to be in good health, death isn’t something he tries to ignore.
It blew my mind that learning this had blown her mind. To me, thinking about death almost every day — whether in passing or in a more considered, philosophical sense — feels unavoidable.
This has historically caused me a lot of anxiety. I’ve always been fearful of my coming demise — not just the fact of actually ceasing to be, but the limbo state of being gravely ill, or the possibility of dying too soon. Of ruining my mum’s life by dying before her, for example, or dying when I’m at a crucial stage of writing a book.
But while mortality is a fixed, unchangeable state, being anxious about it isn’t. Over the last year or two, aided to one degree or another by therapy, meditation and magic mushrooms, I’ve begun wanting to make peace with that fact that I will die. I can’t say I’ve succeeded at this yet, but the attempt seems like one of the most important things I could possibly do. Life is precious. What could be more wasteful than spending it fretting about the one thing that can’t be altered?
It seems to me that changing the way I feel about death begins with changing the way I understand myself. Or rather, my self.
I once wrote a Masters essay about an artist whose work troubled popular ideas about the self. She conceived of it, I stated, as a ‘“rather poorly assembled patchwork of thoughts”, layered around an empty centre’.2 The essay got a good mark, but the examiner’s report wasn’t wholly complimentary — the chief criticism being that I came across as unwilling to fully subscribe to the artist’s position, that my argument ‘sometimes seem[ed] a little too wedded to the idea that there just might be a whole, true self after all.’
Busted! The examiner was entirely correct. I was wedded to the idea of a whole, true self. I didn’t see how a self could be anything but ‘whole’ and ‘true’ — which isn’t really surprising, because our culture subtly reinforces this idea all the time.
Phrases like ‘being oneself’ or ‘staying true to oneself’ suggest there’s a real self somewhere in amongst all the facets and faces we present to other people, and that to lead a happy life, we need to find and honour it. Once upon a time, when Christianity was the dominant ideology in the West, we all believed ourselves to be in possession of a soul that would end up in heaven or hell. Even those of us who have given up believing in heaven and hell still cling on a little bit to the idea of the soul, I think — it’s just that we prefer to call it a ‘self’ because it sounds more secular. We still think there’s an essential me inside us somewhere, and I suspect that’s why so many of us also believe that there’s nothing after death but oblivion. If there’s no heaven or hell for the self to go to, it follows that the only remaining option is for it to get snuffed out altogether.
But what if we’ve got the self all wrong?
My own thinking on this topic has changed fairly drastically in recent times. Part of the reason for this is my interest in Buddhist philosophy, which holds up the idea of ‘non-self’ as one of its fundamental tenets. It’s not easy to get your head around this idea, and I’m certainly no expert, but the most accessible explanation I’ve come across so far is on this episode of Noah Rasheta’s ‘Secular Buddhism’ podcast.
We tend to think of the self as something fixed, Rasheta explains; that’s why we’re so attached to our ideas of who and how we are — why we might think ‘I’m clever’ or ‘I’m kind’, and take these thoughts to be facts. In reality our selves are something akin to a fire or a river: unfixed, fluid, constantly evolving. There’s no one spark or flame that constitutes the essence of a fire; nor is there any one wave or ripple or water molecule you can point to and say: ‘That is the true river.’ I’m not the same person I was yesterday any more than the river is the same water.
The idea of non-self started to get its hooks into me a year or so ago, when I watched the Netflix documentary series How To Change Your Mind. It’s based on the journalist Michael Pollan’s book of the same name, and it investigates the neuroscientific and clinical possibilities of psychedelic drugs. It was the episode on psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, that really captivated me. Psilocybin can reliably give people profound mystical experiences. It can have hugely positive effects on numerous mental health conditions, and — most interesting to me — has been found to alleviate depression and anxiety in terminal cancer patients, to temper the ‘existential anguish’ of facing one’s own imminent death.
Part of what makes psilocybin so transformative, I learned from this documentary, is the way it enables people to escape the self. It was explained that psychedelics act on the default mode network, the part of the brain that ‘houses the self and the assumptions about the self, the stories that we tell about ourselves’. Taking psychoactive mushrooms causes those stories to disintegrate and the self to break down.
Pollan told the camera about a psilocybin trip of his own in which he saw his self ‘explode into a cloud of blue Post-it notes’, and felt ‘no desire to collect all those Post-it notes before they flew away in the wind.’ The experience gave him an understanding of what some of the cancer patients he’d interviewed had experienced during their own psilocybin trips. They had come to see their approaching deaths as ‘the most natural thing in the world’, he said, and to feel that ‘without a self, they would somehow merge with something larger, and that would be their immortality.’
Hearing all this, I thought: I want some of that! I want to escape the self and make peace with death and feel that I’m in some sense immortal! I also thought: this sounds quite a lot like Buddhism.3 The doctrine of non-self, which I’d been aware of for a while without really subscribing to, suddenly seemed not only like something I could experience, but also like something that might improve my life. If the self was series of mental habits rather than a fixed thing we get lumped with, perhaps I could let go of mine, too. And perhaps doing so would help me, as it had helped the cancer patients, to stop viewing death as The Great Enemy.
I’ll spare you the details of my magic mushroom trip, except to say that at its peak I did indeed feel that I had transcended my self, and the result was a feeling of connection and joy and euphoria that I’ll never truly be able to capture in words. In scientific terms, my default mode network had been well and truly suppressed; in experiential terms, I’d broken through the ceiling of mental chatter, rational awareness and everyday reality — out of my self, out of my skull, into the great beyond. It was as if, having lived my whole life beneath a band of grey clouds, I’d finally emerged into the bright blue sky above.
My mind has clouded over again since, of course, but the difference between the pre- and post-mushroom me is that now I know the blue is there, even though I can’t ordinarily see it. I know it’s possible to escape the self, and I look on art, nature and meditation as things with the potential to help me do so. I’ve also started, tentatively, to think of ‘me’ not as a closed vessel or container of thoughts, memories and emotions, but as a gathering of those things — a shifting, evolving, porous assemblage of them. And this in turn helps me to reframe death. These days I think of it less as a form of destruction than a process of dispersal, like Pollan’s post-it notes. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit speaks of death as ‘the point at which the river enters the sea.’
I find that death feels far less cruel when I think of it this way. I still fear it, or more particularly, the process of decline that will likely bring me to it. But it seems possible, now, to think of it not as something inherently bad, but as ‘the most natural thing in the world’. And in the meantime there are books to be read, and trees available for sitting beneath, and blue skies waiting for me to lie down and stare at them.
Death has been on my mind this week in particular because a few days ago I watched this talk at the London Buddhist Centre.
The artist was Claude Cahun, the visionary French photographer, writer and pioneering queer icon, whom I urge you to look up if you don’t already know her work. She’s incredibly cool. (I say ‘she’ — I suspect she might have used the pronoun ‘they’ had she been born a century later, but that’s not my call to make.) The internal quote here is from Jennifer Mundy’s introduction to Disavowals, the English translation of Cahun’s book Aveux non avenus.
I have a friend who’s convinced the Buddha must have taken mushrooms, which sounds plausible to me.
Thank you for writing about your experience with mushrooms and meditation. It encourages me to ponder what I think about this, as I wrestle with the idea of self. I keep practicing Buddhist meditation as an ordained Christian pastor because it helps me let go of the atomized Self we love so much in the West. Jesus once said we needed to lose our self in order to save it. I think he was talking about the separate self that we think is ours alone and the most important thing in the world. The separated and isolated self is the illusion. Our consciousness is a part of something greater. I may call that God, while others call it Being or Consciousness. The paradox is that as we let go of the self, the more we become free to be related to life around us, because we are a part of it. It makes us who we are, and we give our being over to it. Another way to say this is that the self exists only in relationship, but not as a completely separated entity. The separation is an illusion.
Love how you articulate this. Funnily enough I also found myself writing about death this week without intending to. I do believe an awareness of death helps us live more fully and very much welcome these conversations 😊