Sigmund Freud believed that our psyche is the arena where the drives of life and death struggle. It could be a pure, idealistic perspective if these drives were not a bestial affection toward pleasure and primeval fear of extinction that cause repeating acts of self-destruction. Freud was partially right, of course. His are the definitions that fit our animal nature. Though love is certainly something bigger than this.
Last year, in a conversation on meditation practices, I learned about Metta, or Maitrī, also known as ‘loving-kindness’ which is basically a heartfelt wish for the well-being of all living creatures, including yourself. Metta is certainly a form of love but it’s far from sexual attraction on the scale of physicality. It needs no body to express love towards. There are other forms, too: friendship, newborn love, love between spouses that is separate from the desires of the flesh. If we step out of our anthropocentric bubble, then to love will mean to empathize with other species, to admire nature, to look up at the starlit sky and wonder.
All of this can be explained with the effects of oxytocin and other chemicals on our bodies but at the same time, these are different edges of our qualia, and — different sides of our culture.
Love has a gift for us too, besides itself being a perfect gift. When you’re in love — in love with yourself, especially — you become unstoppable. Productive, even though the word is marred with often undeserving guides on personal development. It’s great to love yourself, and I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way. It naturally happens when you share your own interests (sounds silly, right?) and you’re glad to stay in your own company as long as it will take.
Alright, love is diverse and fruitful but what about death?
The most primitive reaction — yet a totally understandable one — is terror and denial. People fear the unknown and either completely avoid thinking about it or tag it as a known thing and incorporate it into their belief systems. This is what happened with all Abrahamic religions, maybe with the exception of some sects. This is what brought about macabre cults of flesh-eaters in Hinduism. But then, there are long-lasting cultures that made death their cornerstone, and not in a religious sense.
One of those is bushido, the way of samurai. Never being a singular list of rules — the codex greatly varied from clan to clan, and from era to era — bushido prescribed to live “as if you were already dead” thus boosting your awareness to the limits. Some of the works — like The Book of Five Rings and Hagakure — explicitly depicted death as a tool to keep yourself sublimely alert.
Another example, much more obscure and unsung, is the teachings of an alleged Yaqui mystic don Juan Matus set out in Carlos Castaneda’s books. Alongside the ideas of personal history and controlled folly, death — while being our ultimate adversary — is pictured as also one of our life’s central protagonists, the best friend and advisor. Always to our left, at an arm’s length behind us, death is there for us to ask: what do I do now? What should I do if the next moment there is no “me” anymore?
I think this is beautiful.
The ever-present sense of death may be comforting, not alarming. It may be easier to digest than the notion of a distant death, as we are often afraid to find ourselves weak and trembling on the day we will have to face the inevitable. Withstand your ultimate adversary right now, and you will assume the stance of the greatest personal power. You will become truly resilient.
Both love and death reside on a wide spectrum that we have barely glimpsed. Both are too broad to be covered with a handful of words we have in our vocabularies. Yet I don’t urge you to invent new words. I invite you to look into yourselves and map as much as you can of these stunningly wide plains of death and love. Different cultures ventured into different areas of that space, finding new interpretations and meanings.
You may find something no one ever found before.
Thanks to Steven Fan, Arnoe Talee, and Nick Cammarata for reading drafts of this.