I’d like to start off with a reading:

“Now it is autumn, and the falling fruit and the long journey toward oblivion.  The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves and exit from themselves.  And it is time to go.  To bid farewell to one’s own self and find an exit from the fallen self.  Have you built your ship of death?  Oh, have you?  Oh, build your ship of death for you will need it. We are dying!   We are dying!  So, all we can do is now to be willing to die and to build the ship of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.  A little ship with oars and food and little dishes and all accoutrements fitting and ready for the departing soul.  Now, launch the small ship.  Now, as the body dies and life departs launch out the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage.  The ark of faith with its store of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes upon the flood’s black waves, upon the waters of the end, upon the sea of death where still we sail darkly, where we cannot steer and have no port.”

I offer my reflections on death from the point of view of an amateur. There is an enormous difference between dealing with death and grief as an objective occurrence and as the primal, existential fact of my death and my grief. I am dedicated to trying to understand human existence through the mirror of the life of Sam Keen, and I am convinced that I can best understand what’s going on in my culture by reading my own psyche and my own soul. As a philosopher, it is my hope to be a physician of the spirit and the soul. And, that means that I must first be a physician to my own spirit and my own soul.  Philosophy is about the healing – or if you want – the salvation of the soul, not particularly or necessarily in a religious sense of the word.

It has been said that philosophers are perverts! And it’s true!  That was the charge made against Socrates. Everybody in Athens pretty well understood the cultural norms until Socrates came on the scene. Euthyphro, for instance, was on his way to turn his father in for impiety when he met Socrates who started asking him questions. By the end of the dialogue Euthyphro has no idea what piety is. For this disturbing habit of questioning,  Socrates was charged with perverting the youth of Athens and given a hemlock milk shake. And that is the job of philosophy, to turn things over, switch appearance and reality.

As a philosopher of sorts, I would like to examine the ways we think about death and suggest that maybe we’re dealing with it the wrong way.

The structure of my remarks is going to follow a scheme I learned a long time ago from Paul Tillich. Tillich taught us that there were three questions that any religion, philosophy or therapy has to ask and answer.  First, “What’s wrong with us?  What’s the disease?  What’s the pathology?” Second, “What would we look like if we were whole? Healed?” (We don’t even have a word for a state of positive health, or ideal.)  Third, “How do we get from one to two?  What are the means of healing?” My remarks are going to follow these three questions.  First, I will look at the pathology of death. Second, at a good or ideal way of dying. And, third I will ask, “Is there any way to achieve a better death?” (Full Essay)