Death and the meaning of life

 Let death be your greatest teacher.

—Buddha

(Unfound in Pali Canon, but not in contradiction with it)

DEATH, RISK, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

What lies beyond this life? Heaven? Hell? An endless cycle of rebirth? Simple nothingness? Opinions abound, but it’s all speculation: No one knows. I’ve watched good people die, and I can attest that, more often than not, the final moment doesn’t seem very pleasant. If life is a song, it ends in a minor key. 

If we take it seriously—that is, if we don’t avert our eyes from the truth that we have an expiration date similar to a carton of eggs—then death becomes the most powerful teacher that we can ever hope for. If we think of death in Wedge terms, our assured demise is the ultimate stressor, and thus our motivation to make choices that mean something. Death is the stake that all of us are born with. No matter our triumphs or failures, death will always be waiting. With the end inevitable, it’s only our choices that matter. 

In other words, life is the wedge between birth and death.

I sometimes think of life as being the captain of a small boat bobbing up and down on choppy seas. We steer our vessels into waves, or around them. Sometimes we navigate into placid lagoons, and other times we push our limits and challenge the high seas. And while we can never predict what the ocean will throw at us, every sailor knows that when you’re caught in a storm and see a massive wave start to form, there’s one option. You turn the bow directly into the threat and hold fast on the rudder until you make it over the top or let it take you down into the depths. Running from a rogue wave almost always invites disaster. But it takes courage to face doom head on. Only the bold can hope to make it through.

This is why the Wedge is so powerful. We always have one choice in the face of life’s obstacles. We can follow reactions that are already hardwired into our body’s physiological responses, or, for better or worse, resist those urges and will ourselves onto a different path. Either way, life’s challenges—the crests and valleys of that turbulent ocean—are the stakes that define what we’re made of. The decisions we make in the face of death are what make us real. 

We may not always think about our death, but we sense death constantly on a cellular level. Evolution gave us this morbid gift. We are built to propagate the species. Every hormonal response, reflex, sensation and cognitive ability exists to serve this purpose. Every emotion, from fear, love and happiness to sadness, ambivalence and ennui, confers critical information that helps us stay alive.

Even so, our nervous systems can really only issue two commands: tension or release. This is the interplay between the sympathetic and parasympathetic wiring. In a moment of crisis, we can engage all of our physical and emotional powers to combat the situation we’re in, or we can relax and let the chaotic forces do with us as they will. At some point our personal powers have limits. There’s only so much that any of us can do. In the battle of man versus nature, nature always wins. 

In the beginning of this book, I wrote that evolution seeks to preserve experiences. It’s not a meaningless cycle of birth, reproduction and death. We struggle against challenges because they’re worth struggling against. We feel happiness, sadness, anger, fear and lust because those are inherently meaningful. 

The great spiritual adept Eckhart Tolle once wrote: “You are not in the universe, you are the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.” The miracle of being alive is that you have a very specific perspective on things both larger and smaller than yourself. It might be just one of an infinite number of perspectives, but it’s special because it’s yours. You’re responsible for how you want to live your life, and all the while, you know that every action you choose either moves you closer or further from the end. 

This is why it’s so important to take death seriously. It’s why death is so beautiful. No decision you make will ever make it possible to avoid death. Which, in a strange way, means that the whole idea of risk is something of an illusion. If avoiding death was the goal, then we’ve already lost the game. But what if the point of being alive was instead to experience the entire bounty of human emotion, failure, triumphs, love and loss? To my mind, the goal of life isn’t to live as long as possible, but rather to find our true selves as a reflection of the world that we inhabit. It’s to test our mettle and resolve as we race to make the most of the time we do have. 

Most of the experiences I’ve written about in this book are dangerous in one way or another. An errant kettlebell could land on a foot; a person could overheat in a sauna, fall into hypothermia in the ice or suffer hypoxia while holding their breath. Never mind the universe of unknown drug interactions with traditional medicines and illicit drugs. There’s no doubt that at least something I’ve written in the last few hundred pages has made you pause and wonder if any of this is really a good idea. And, honestly, as a writer far removed from your own personal circumstances, I can’t make that call for you. All I can say is that taking these risks have made me healthier, happier and stronger. I am more at peace with life because of the journey of reporting and writing this book. I’ve accepted that I don’t have any control on how things end up. I just have control of how I get there.

A person can choose a life path of muted sensations, avoiding pain and living indoors protected by a cocoon of technological comfort. That person can work a 40-hour work week, fully fund a retirement plan, carry acceptable insurance, dutifully pay taxes, have a few children and ultimately die comfortably in bed. This is the default life plan that many Americans follow. But it’s not as risk-free as it seems. On the one hand, we all risk the ordinary misfortunes of the modern world: cancer, car accidents, heartbreak, economic downturns and bankruptcy. On the other, by pathologically avoiding failure, we can miss out on the opportunity for unexpected rewards. The great paradox of life is that there’s no obvious meaning to it. And so we need to supply our own meaning. If we don’t, then life itself becomes unlivable. Purposeless. 

Success doesn’t happen if you only act when you are sure of a positive outcome. Real success means risking failure. We succeed only after we accept that we might fail and plan for the worst.

On a neurological level, the anticipation of failure is stress. When a person enters into an ice-cold bath, the first thing they feel is a desire to clench up and protect themselves. In a sauna, they want to escape the heat. Facing down a flying kettlebell, a person might cringe at the thought of it crashing onto their feet, and before an ayahuasca ceremony, it’s entirely reasonable to fear going insane. These are all innate responses predicting some sort of bodily harm. They’re sensations and emotions that we’ve trained into our neurology or inherited from a long line of evolutionary succession. However, when we tackle those sensations head on, when we insert a wedge into the space between stimulus and response, we don’t just become better kettlebell throwers, sauna endurers and plant imbibers. Facing those challenges makes us more robust, healthier and more capable of just about anything.

Indeed, it’s our anticipation of the worst possible outcomes that gets in the way more often than not. We envision negative consequences for our actions. And yet more often than not, a missed kettlebell lands safely on the grass, a sauna relaxes us, and an ice bath brings alertness. For me, the ayahuasca ceremony gave me a new perspective and answered questions that I didn’t even know I had about the deep bonds I have in my marriage, my connection to a lineage of ancestors and my vulnerability to electronic addictions. 

I began this journey by accepting the possibility of catastrophe. I knew my inquiry might lead nowhere. I also knew I might get injured or even die while seeking answers. But I kept going. I pushed through. Despite some doubts along the way, I believed I would come out the other side better, stronger and more resilient, that my life would be richer for it. When I think about my own death—no matter how I end up meeting it—I want to know that my choices made a difference. I do not want to have my final moments consumed by the notion that I was passive when I could have been active. Of course, I know that if I do this kind of work long enough, it’s likely that I’ll get hurt at some point. But that doesn’t mean the journey won’t be worth it.

This book and the wedges I’ve introduced are the tip of an iceberg. They’re exercises, practices and ideas that speak especially strongly to me. They’re examples of challenges that I needed to try, stressors that I needed to push up against in order to grow. Some of these wedges showed me powerful new ways to enter into a flow state. Others let me reprogram patterns in my nervous system. But it was my journey. Your life—the time between birth and death that the gods grant you—is your journey. It’s your Wedge. What you do with this opportunity is up to you. 

And just maybe, somewhere on your journey you will catch hold of that thread that connects the choices of every iteration of every Russian doll to a consciousness that none of the parts can comprehend on its own. In this way, we can all be individuals and the universe at the same time. 

Scott Carney

The Wedge