Read The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are for Free Online Page A

doubtful that there is any one natural and inborn emotion connected with dying. For example, it used to be thought that childbirth should be painful, as a punishment for Original Sin or for having had so much fun conceiving the baby. For God had said to Eve and all her daughters, "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." Thus when everyone believed that in having a baby it was a woman's duty to suffer, women did their duty, and many still do. We were much surprised, therefore, to find women in "primitive" societies who could just squat down and give birth while working in the fields, bite the umbilical cord, wrap up the baby, and go their way. It wasn't that their women were tougher than ours, but just that they had a different attitude. For our own gynecologists have recently discovered that many women can be conditioned psychologically for natural and painless childbirth. The pains of labor are renamed "tensions", and the mother-to-be is given preparatory exercises in relaxing to tension and cooperating with it.
    Birth, they are told, is not a sickness. One goes to a hospital just in case anything should go wrong, though many avant-garde gynecologists will let their patients give birth at home.
    Premature death may come as a result of sickness, but—like birth—
    death as such is not a sickness at all. It is the natural and necessary end of human life—as natural as leaves falling in the autumn. (Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time when surgeons will be able to replace all our organs with plastic substitutes, so that you will achieve immortality by becoming a plastic model of yourself.) Physicians should therefore explore the possibility of treating death and its pangs as they have treated labor and its "pains."
    Death is, after all, a great event. So long as it is not imminent, we cling to ourselves and our lives in chronic anxiety, however pushed into the back of the mind. But when the time comes where clinging is no longer of the least avail, the circumstances are ideal for letting go of oneself completely. When this happens, the individual is released from his ego-prison. In the normal course of events this is the golden opportunity for awakening into the knowledge that one's actual self is the Self which plays the universe—an occasion for great rejoicing. But as customs now prevail, doctors, nurses, and relatives come around with smiling masks, assuring the patient that he will soon get over it, and that next week or next month he will be back home or taking a vacation by the sea. Worse still, physicians have neither the role nor the training for handling death. The Catholic priest is in a much better position: he usually knows just how to go about it, with no fumbling or humming and hawing. But the physician is supposed to put off death at all costs—
    including the life savings of the patient and his family.
    Ananda Coomaraswamy once said that he would rather die ten years too early than ten minutes too late—too late, and too decrepit or drugged, to seize the opportunity to let oneself go, to "lay me down with a will." "I pray," he used to say, "that death will not come and catch me unannihilate"—that is, before I have let go of myself. This is why G. I.
    Gurdjieff, that marvelous rascal-sage, wrote in his All and Everything: The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ
    ... of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests.
    Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them.
     
    As we now regard death this reads like a prescription for a nightmare.
    But the constant awareness of death shows the world to be as flowing and diaphanous as the filmy