Marcus Aurelius on Embracing Mortality and the Key to Living with Presence

The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

"When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive," the great Lebanese poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote in her beautiful meditation on time, self, impermanence, and transcendence. It is a sentiment of tremendous truth and simplicity, yet tremendously difficult for the mind to metabolize — we remain material creatures, spiritually sundered by the fact of our borrowed atoms, which we will each return to the universe, to the stardust that made us, despite our best earthly efforts. Physicist Alan Lightman contemplated this paradox in his lyrical essay on our longing for permanence in a universe of constant change: "It is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues against us."

Two millennia earlier, before the very notion of a universe even existed, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius provided uncommonly lucid consolation for this most disquieting paradox of existence in his Meditations — the timeless trove of ancient wisdom that gave us his advice on how to motivate yourself to get out of bed each morning, the mental trick for maintaining sanity, and the key to living fully. The speed with which all of them vanish — the objects in the world, and the memory of them in time. And the real nature of the things our senses experience, especially those that entice us with pleasure or frighten us with pain or are loudly trumpeted by pride. To understand those things — how stupid, contemptible, grimy, decaying, and dead they are — that's what our intellectual powers are for. And to understand what those people really amount to, whose opinions and voices constitute fame. And what dying is — and that if you look at it in the abstract and break down your imaginary ideas of it by logical analysis, you realize that it's nothing but a process of nature, which only children can be afraid of. (And not only a process of nature but a necessary one.)

In a sentiment Montaigne would echo sixteen centuries later in his assertion that "to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago," Marcus Aurelius rebukes our pathological dread of death by demonstrating how it ejects us from the only arena on which life plays out — the present. Long before Rilke made the counter cultural, almost counter biological observation that "death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love," he adds:

Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?

Remember two things:

1. That everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period;

2. That the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

He concludes by summarizing the basic facts of human life — a catalogue of uncertainties, crowned by the sole certainty of death — and points to philosophy, or the love of wisdom and mindful living, as the only real anchor for our existential precariousness: Human life.

Then what can guide us? Only philosophy.

Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or dishonestly and with imposture, not dependent on anyone else's doing something or not doing it. And making sure that it accepts what happens and what it is dealt as coming from the same place it came from. And above all, that it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed. If it doesn't hurt the individual elements to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating? It's a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil.

You absolutely cannot lose anything that is NOT yours. "I lost my mom"... You cannot lose your mom as you don't own your mom for you to lose her. You do not have yesterday so you cannot lose the past... just as you cannot lose tomorrow as it is not here yet... you can ONLY lose this particular moment... for you are present and here at the moment... unfortunately too many chose to lose the moment by being preoccupied with the past or future or other people's business... Even worst yet is through fragmentation and escapism, lose the only tangible moment you are in!!!

The only given, for certain way to embrace mortality is to CHANGE what does not work for you, constantly changing to accept challenges in life that offer growth; spiritually grow, through a change in perception, offering yourself a different outlook, leading to a change in belief, resulting in changed attitude and changed being from reactive based to response based and eventually resolution based.

If you are willing to change, not only once in your entire life, but constantly changing, ever changing, always changing, never stop for familiarity, never seek habitual same to identify as security, then and only then will you have achieved immortality.

How, you ask? By you changing every moment you have let go and released that moment, because you have fully reaped the benefits of that moment, either by successfully learned the lesson offered, appreciated all energies involved, enjoyed what has been shown, grateful for what has been given, then you can let die all that presented and move forward, that is death: as DEATH is parting and no more. So, die every second and rebirth every nano second...before your physical body decomposes and your vehicle perishes...

Tags: Marcus Aurelius, life, death, immortality, change