The Death of Us Transcript
Liz: Today we are talking about physical death.
Rhea: Death is change, right?
Liz: It is. It’s transformation
Rhea: So whatever death is, death always come with a bit of grieving because you have to let of the old to welcome in the new. It’s tinged with sadness even though it’s also tinged with hope.
Liz: That’s right. It’s part of our reality right now, and it’s something that we are always processing. All of our stories involve death. Even our childhood stories, and yet we are not feeling very good about it ever. As humans, we have faced death if you believe in past lifetimes, we have died many times but we are not good at it, because we fear as you said the grief. We fear the sadness. We see all those things as such negatives to the extent that we will do anything to avoid them.
Rhea: What upsets me when I think about my own death is the people I will hurt in dying. When I think of someone else passing away that I love, that’s always been a lot more of a fear. It’s like any other ending, except it’s an ending that feels finite, rather than for example, a fight with a friend. It always feels like there is the hope of reconciliation, re-meeting, whereas with death, without the absolute faith that there is an afterlife of some kind, there is always the chance that it is final.
Liz: That’s it.
Rhea: Death can be so powerful as a tool because it allows you sometimes to take jumps and take risks, and actually live.
Liz: Yes, because it moves you out of your complacency
Rhea: Shutting down and just staying in safety. I wonder whether that is the real death.
Liz: Well, it’s not living. It’s more of a paralysis. You are really just shut down, and you’re between life and death.
Rhea: Because death is very much linked to the fabric of time, the idea that time is running out so it’s part of our living story. The fear that in a lot of ways if you look at it differently, it can be really fucking freeing.
Liz: Oh, completely! When we detach the significance that we put on this experience of the physical realm, not just happiness but joy, not just lust but love, what happens is that sometimes we become so invested in the experience that we forget that death is an inevitability, and then we begin to fear it.
Rhea: The polarity of life gives us rise to polarize everything, even if we explain everything just is. Even if we explain, everything’s gray. We get to a point where we look at life and death as polarized until we turn around and go, actually let’s then deconstruct this one too, because how can we, in every episode that’s past and in every episode to come, say it’s not about right and wrong, it’s not about black and white? Everything just is, when the very fabric of our existence in our reality is life and death. If we can’t be certain about life, and if life can be in the gray, and if being alive can be in the gray, then maybe being dead can be too.
Liz: We have that ingrained in us about death because we don’t know necessarily what happens. Who really knows the definitive answer?
Rhea: No. What’s funny is as humans we are most scared of the unknown, and if you put death for a second in that, we don’t really know how someone is really going to react to us. We don’t know if we’re fully loveable. The unknown can mean pain or pleasure. The unknown can mean acceptance or rejection, and again, you can deconstruct each one of those things back and back and back, but eventually you get to the final one, which is life and death and death is an unknown. So just like black and white, you can see a lot of our fears in everyday life really coming back down when it’s purely distilled to death. Just as I am scared if I send a text message to someone I fancy, I don’t know what the response is. Just as I see the world in black and white, right and wrong, I see the world as life and death. So I can distill a lot of my core fears, a lot of my core assumptions and a lot of my being which is actually harming me by not allowing me to be in flow, by not allowing me to live in light because it informs so many of the other bigger fears that then stem on from it.
Liz: Yes
Rhea: I kept thinking about this in terms of relationships. The faster you fall for someone, the faster you fall out of love with them, right? And it’s this kind of what’s good is followed by bad, and the more good is followed by more bad. The happier you are, the sadder you are going to be. The more in love you are, the harder it is going to be when you break up. The happier life you have, the harder it is to die. I can enjoy life but I have this thing hanging over my head constantly, which will one day be done, and that fear of one day life is going to be done is the same thing that gets echoed when we all think things are too good to be true.
Liz: Let’s hold on for dear life for oh my God, I’m going to die! It’s something that is so overwhelming that it’s going to kill you.
Rhea: I’ve never really had an issue with that until this moment. I didn’t realize how many of my hang-ups, how many of the beliefs I have about life are informed by the very nature of life and then death.
Liz: Well, you and about everybody else on this planet, by the way.
Rhea: It’s just fascinating and so I guess in order to start unpicking at the bigger things of black and white, good until it is shit and fear of the unknown, we need to first reconstruct our relationship with death.
Liz: Precisely
Rhea: And once we see that life and death is actually gray, we can then allow for everything else to become gray afterwards
Liz: Yes
Rhea: That is the building block.
Liz: Now you understand why we had to do abundance just before this one too?
Rhea: No, not there yet.
Liz: No
Rhea: Is it because abundance is enjoying the joy of life? That the fear of lack is the fear of the future, so is again the fear of the unknown, which is again the fear of death?
Liz: A bit of that, yes, but it is about making most of one’s life, but the fear of death has defined so much of our lives and our constructs
Rhea: And it defines how we interact with each other. It’s the worst case scenario.
Liz: Oh yes. Everything has an expiration date that defines so much of our relationships. It’s not only just individual, but it’s also institutional. It’s religion and even government preys upon fear of death, therefore we need protection. Therefore we need to anticipate outcomes, but I don’t really want to talk about the afterlife today.
Rhea: Oh, that’s not what we are talking about?
Liz: No, we are not going to necessarily get there. Everybody has their own belief systems around that and we are not necessarily here to challenge it
Rhea: No
Liz: We are not here to add some other idea to the already busy business of death
Rhea: We are just asking how your views on death are impacting your life
Liz: And to consider that those views and those fears, how much not only do they shape your attitudes, but then to also consider that the way that they limit your interaction with the world and relationships. So let’s sort of talk about the physical body for a moment, and this is the one thing I will say. So while we are not talking about afterlife, we are who we choose to be. Physical body is merely the way in which we express ourselves to the rest of the world. If we consider that we are more than our bodies, that we are more than our egos, we are more than our souls, we are more than this experience and story, how we live in the present is often out of fear of the future, out of fear of death. It defines all of our actions now.
Rhea: My expectations for the future are currently my one source of discomfort, my one source of unhappiness because I am getting let down, because I am having all these expectations. We are all energy, right?
Liz: Yes. We are living, conscious beings.
Rhea: The only thing that we can be kind of sure of is the present.
Liz: Absolutely.
Rhea: So the moment that we are living in becomes the moment we need to be present in.
Liz: But not in a way that you just say ‘well fuck it all. I’m just going to live like I’m going to die tomorrow.’ It’s allowing your consciousness to be completely and entirely there in that, because most people, even if they say they are in the now, they are still thinking about tomorrow.
Rhea: Yes, and I guess this brings us back to the nevermindfulness podcast when we were talking about being mindful is when you are in the now. It’s also about allowing whatever emotions you are feeling to come up and be processed and come out.
Liz: Yes
Rhea: So don’t try and block things down, but being in the now of however you are feeling and allowing that moment to be, allows you to flow.
Liz: Very much
Rhea: Because you are ever in the moment you are meant to be in, rather than you are jumping across time.
Liz: And this is why a lot of our previous podcasts have been about dealing with the past, because we can’t be in the present if we haven’t healed the trauma and disappointments and patterns of the past. They just keep coming in and coming in and entering.
Rhea: So how can we tell people to not be scared of death? It’s ingrained in us. It’s human.
Liz: Well, that’s where I kind of touched upon understanding that we are more than just our human selves. We are more than just how we define this human existence, which is through our physical bodies and this physical experience on our earth plane.
Rhea: So it’s kind of whatever belief you have, whatever you subscribe to, of life after death.
Liz: Yes
Rhea: And if you don’t believe in life after death?
Liz: That’s okay
Rhea: But that’s just what you believe in – peace after death.
Liz: Right, or just that if nothing happens, that’s okay too, then you don’t fear it at all. That’s great. Whatever attitude you have about death and dying and the beyond, you’re not allowing your future or your life to be defined by that fear, which is fear of inevitability, and it’s also allowing you to fear your divinity because you then sort of think I don’t have a choice in this life
Rhea: I think most people are scared of dying, and I think sometimes you are so much in pain, physical or mental or emotional, that you think you could die from the pain. Death is a painful experience. It’s not just an experience of ceasing to exist. It’s also an incredibly painful and hard concept. It’s the opposite of life in many peoples’ minds, and I think we wouldn’t be doing justice to this podcast if we didn’t even pivot a perspective here.
Liz: Yes, because as much as we sometimes see life as struggle, we that it’s sweet enough that we’d rather have whatever we have to death. So we tend to create stories to process death. So many of our movies, violence in our stories has to do with death, so we are constantly trying to process it, but the problem is that we’ve gotten to the point where we have created so many violent scenarios around death that we fear it more and more. We are still at this very new point in understanding death and talking about death. When we look at how it’s portrayed in our media, it’s still really this terrible, awful, painful struggle. But to the point that rather than allowing us to process it, we’ve gotten to the point where we have become desensitized and numb to it. Where we can’t handle grief and sadness as we talked about on a previous podcast, we have become so numb to our emotions, to our coping mechanisms, that we feel that we will be awash and destroyed if we feel anything, and that relationship to death is right there at that very moment of ‘it will kill me if I have to confront this’.
Rhea: So we are asking people to confront the idea of death?
Liz: Yes
Rhea: And to make peace with it?
Liz: Yes. To find wholeness with it.
Rhea: It is less about dissolving the fear and more about just accepting that it exists?
Liz: Acknowledging that it exists. Acknowledge that that fear exists and how much it defines how you live
Rhea: Acknowledging your fear of death means that you are really able to acknowledge how many of your other fears stem from your fear of death, and then you can make your own decision as to how much you want your fear of death to impact living your life.
Liz: Yes
Rhea: The more you can acknowledge how you feel about death, the more you can see how the concept of death is affecting your life, the more then you can change the bits that you don’t like. So for example for me, I just realized that my fear of the other shoe dropping stems from a serious fear of after life comes death. Now that I know this, when that fear props up again in different places, I now have the tools to challenge it. I now understand where its core comes from, and whether or not I can make peace with the idea of death remains to be seen, but whether or not now I can ascribe why I am feeling these other fears alleviates them slightly. Once you understand why you fear something, you can own it. Like my fear of death, it’s a concept that you already understand as a legitimate fear. It allows all your other fears to become more approachable when they are linked with it.
Liz: That’s interesting.
Rhea: So then ironically, the more we are able to acknowledge how we feel about death, the more peaceful our lives become.
Liz: Very much
Rhea: Because we are extinguishing our fears.
Liz: Absolutely
Rhea: Our fears that have spun off from our fear of death.
Liz: Yes
Rhea: The side fears, as they were, which I for a very long time personally thought were core fears, but turns out were just the side fears. I am really impatient. I say this to you all the time.
Liz: Yes
Rhea: You see my impatience. My impatience is totally linked with time is running out. I have a massive fear of the unknown. I try not to, but I see everything in black and white. I think it’s going to get bad once it gets good. These we have traced back on this podcast today also to my fear of death. Therefore in acknowledging my fear of death, these fears that have controlled every aspect of my decision-making, become a lot more approachable and all of a sudden, have a reason.
Liz: Amazing!
Rhea: So with that reason, I can integrate them. I can understand them, and in understanding them, I can learn to extinguish them or at least, I can learn to incorporate them in a way where they are no longer scary.
Liz: No
Rhea: At some point, I will become at peace with what happens once this life is done, but until then, at least I can acknowledge how that fear is impacting my life and make a decision to live before I have died.
Liz: The irony is the more at peace we are with our own death, the less tolerant we become of violence.
Rhea: Why?
Liz: Because we find wholeness in ourselves, because violence outside of us is really just a projection. It’s happening to somebody else. It’s inevitable. It’s all but it’s not me.
Rhea: You are dying, but I am still alive?
Liz: Yes. It’s the comparing—it’s not me. I’m not connected to that person. Though violence again in our stories is how we process everything
Rhea: Well, you can see that in a very physical context with what becomes acceptable in the society. Stoning an adulteress was acceptable. Putting a witch to the stake was acceptable. The minute a human does something and other people allow it to happen, it becomes acceptable so more people do it. So yes, one act from one person does affect all of us.
Liz: It does. It does, and then it just perpetuates the violence and the killing, but the more we deal with that and the more we acknowledge our issue with death and we can then embrace the idea and find some wholeness with it is the moment we become less tolerant
Rhea: Because we are no longer numbing ourselves to death. We are facing it.
Liz: Precisely. Yes.
Rhea: So, for example as we were saying before, by me acknowledging my fear of death, I don’t particularly now want to see other people dying
Liz: No
Rhea: Whereas before, I was squashing my fear of death down and it was manifesting itself through other fears. So I was okay watching extreme violence and people dying because I had numbed everything. When you told me what we were talking about today, I thought it was going to be ‘whoo-whoo, past life, we’re all one and there is no such thing as death’. I didn’t realize what we were really talking about was how death affects life.
Liz: Yes. It’s funny how you can talk about death, and then realize that you are not talking about death. And there certainly is such a thing as death. It exists. We know that. How we perceive what comes after is entirely up to us.
Rhea: But another way of looking at death is rebirth, and that can be while you are still alive. The old you can die many times when new experiences happen, one way or another.
Liz: Oh yes. We can have many “deathings” in a single lifetime, yes
Rhea: So in a way, there is nothing to fear about death because you have probably already died many times in this life.
Liz: That’s right
Rhea: To break it down very simply, where something has happened—good or bad—and your life has changed totally. Whether it was you walked into the coffee shop one day and you met the love of your life. There you go! Death of your singe life! Whether it is something horrific that happened and you lost someone close to you, or you had some trauma which then shaped your future for a little bit, that was the death of an old you. Every time we learn something new, every time we experience something new, every time our life changes in one way or another, the old version of us is dying.
Liz: Yes
Rhea: So you can be afraid of death, but the reality is we have all died in this one life many, many times and we are still alive to tell the tale.
Liz: We are living it. We are living death every day.