Mortality

What life is for, who we are as human beings, why we are here...it is death that forces these questions on us. If we could live forever, there would be little urgency in finding answers. But the fact is that whatever our age or the status of our health, none of us has time to waste in learning what life is for.

In this sense, then, death is a friend - not the clinical experience of dying, but the fact of our mortality. We begin to take life seriously when we take death seriously. Otherwise, as Thoreau said, we run the risk of discovering, when we come to die, that we have never lived.

This realisation is the goal of life; not an end but a beginning. No pursuit can be more rewarding.


Eknath Easwaran


Many of the nightmares that wake me up involve, as nightmares often do I suppose, death. But what turns them from mere dreams into nightmares is the manner of death. And whilst I am not afraid to die, like anyone, I'd rather that I and everyone I know die peacefully.

I've always been fascinated by dreams, partly because my dreams have been so vivid for as long as I can remember. Over the years, I've kept pages and small books in which, intermittently, I've noted down my dreams from the previous night, wondering if they mean anything. Often I'm sure they don't,but sometimes they do and as I'm discovering, the role of the sub-conscious in our everyday lives is incredibly powerful. Which leads me to ask the question: why do so many of my dreams involve such violent deaths of the people I love? Am I scared of death? No. Do I have a morbid fascination with death? No. I don't have the answer for it yet. But I think, with Reiki and the questions I'm asking of myself at the moment I'm on the right lines. What I do know is that, as Thoreau points out, it's important to learn how to live. To really be alive. It sounds an obvious statement, but too many of us are sleep-walking through life. I know I often am. And without this experience of insomnia, I'd never be questioning many of these issues.

It would be too easy to just dismiss the nightmares I have and say ok, they're nightmare, everyone has nightmares, so what? But I'm seeing this as an opportunity presenting itself, by writing them down in the middle of the night and thinking about them the following day, I can start to see a pattern. And whilst my nightmares certainly don't wake me up every night and are not responsible for my sleeplessness as such, they are clues to the root cause of my insomnia. The deaths I witness, or the threat of deaths, represent a deep-rooted fear. Because, as I said earlier, nobody wants to die in pain. This fear is something that, in the coming weeks, I feel strong enough to confront.