The fear of death is unnatural to a rational being. A human being’s fear of death is an awareness of his sin.
An animal does not anticipate its inevitable death and so knows no fear of death. But a human being is often fearful of death. Is it really the case that a human being’s possession of reason, which reveals to him the inevitability of his death, makes his situation worse than that of an animal? It would be so if a human being used his reason for the anticipation of his death instead of for the improvement of his life. The more a human being leads a spiritual life, the less he fears death. If a human being leads a wholly spiritual life, he has no fear of death at all. For such a human being, death is only a liberation of the spirit from the body. He knows that what he lives by cannot be destroyed.
The one who fears death is not living.
— Seume
Nothing affirms the indestructibility and timelessness of one’s life and helps one accept death calmly as much as the notion that in dying we are not entering a new state, but are only returning to the one in which we were before we were born. We should not even say “were,” for we will be entering a state which is as natural to us as the one which we currently are in here and now.
Death is the body’s final and biggest change. We have all experienced changes in our body and are experiencing them now: at one point in time we were naked lumps of flesh, then we turned into babies, then we grew hair and teeth, then our teeth fell out, then new ones grew in their place, then our hair started turning gray and began balding. And we were not afraid of all these changes. Why then are we afraid of the final change? Because nobody has told us what had happened to them after this change took place. But, after all, nobody will say about a person who had traveled away from us and who does not write to us that he does not exist, they will only say that we have not heard from him. It is the same with those who have died: our not knowing what will happen to us after we die, just as our not knowing what had happened to us before this life, shows only that we are not meant to know this, because this is something we do not need to know. We know only one thing, which is that our life consists not in the changes of our body, but in that which dwells within that body. And what dwells within that body is a spiritual being, and for a spiritual being there is neither a beginning nor an end, because it is timeless.
Socrates said that if death is the same state that we enter when we are asleep, when we lose all consciousness of life, then we all know that there is nothing frightening about this state. And if death is a transition to a better life, as many think, then death is a blessing, not a curse.
Death is more certain than tomorrow, than night after day, than winter after summer. Why then do we prepare for tomorrow, and for the night and for the winter, but not for death? We must prepare for it. And there is only one preparation for death: a good life. The better your life, the less frightening death is and the easier it is. For a saint there is no death.
