Sunday 27 June 2010

Death: when the wheel of life stops

The theory


Sorry for late posting (but I'm cheating, backdating for future readers) but I have an excellent excuse: I received the news that my husband died on summer solstice day. This leads me to a change on plans on the theme for the post: it just will have to be death. (If you find the subject unpleasant, I'm sorry, but it's one of those unavoidable and fundamental things, you might as well get used to thinking about it.) And I'd like to reply in this post to two questions that somebody sent me when he commented on my recent widowhood: "Do we exist beyond death? And what does 'we' mean here?"

Before going any further, I'll have to explain what is death from a systems perspective. The fundamental difference between a living body and a dead one is that the dead one isn't moving, isn't breathing, and is starting to decompose. In other words, it's a system that isn't self-sustaining or self-controlling any more. The wheel of life has literally stopped.

But the interesting thing about most self-controlling systems is that they don't exist in isolation. That's certainly true for all living creatures. We could do a journey from the smallest to the biggest scale, what's called the hierarchy of life, and I will do exactly that on my next post.

Big living systems are made up of small living systems: bodies are made up of cells; cities are made up of human beings and the things, animals and plants they bring with them; and the Earth is made up of... well, everything in the world.

Big living systems couldn't exist if there weren't small ones, but they can survive quite well the death of a single of their small elements, even the death of many of them. In fact, big living systems are completely dependant on the constant renewal of their small elements. Our skin is in constant renewal, and the surface of our skin is made of dead cells, constantly renovated with new skin (that's why peeling the very outer layer of your skin doesn't hurt at all: it's completely dead). Our society simply couldn't function if people stopped dying tomorrow. And the Earth could be in some serious trouble if any ecosystem started expanding beyond its usual boundaries... wait a moment, is that what agriculture has been doing to the planet for the last five thousand years?

So the systems answer to "Do we exist beyond death?" is something like Bill Clinton's famous quote: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." What scale of existence are we talking about? From the scale of a single cell, it isn't always straightforward to tell if the body it's in is dead or alive: hair keeps growing for a few days after death. And from the point of view of a cell - imagining such a simple living thing has something like a point of view - they live the lifetime of a cell, and many die well before the body dies. And looking at a bigger scale, anything slightly bigger than a single body - a family, even - one death is a relatively minor event: the family definitely continues existing beyond the death of one of its members.

The whole point of may religious, spiritual, and ideological traditions seems to be that focusing just on your body is the wrong way of looking at things: "This body is not your own." And they pretty strongly recommend focusing on a bigger system, at the narrowest your community, at the largest the whole Earth.

Now, nobody is going to stop you focusing on whatever you like. If you want to believe that your soul resides in your little left toe, that's up to you. You might have trouble explaining why some people seem to survive and be fundamentally the same after amputation of their little left toe, so maybe you want to choose a more vital organ. I haven't got any money to make selling any sort of heaven, so I don't really care what you want to believe. You can think that what you fundamentally are is in some tiny part of your brain or that it's spread all over your family, your country, or the whole Earth. It's all one to me.

All I'm saying is that just because the wheel of life stopped in one little living system, nothing has changed much: it's still turning in the same way in the bigger systems, all over the world, and everything is just the way it's always been. I don't know how that makes you feel, but I quite like that.

The practice

Experiment 1

Take a small pet, preferably one very lovable, and k... Ooops, I forgot a lot of the English-speaking world doesn't like black humour.

Okay, I think I'm leaving this one mostly up to you. I'm sure you've seen something living die, I just want you to ask yourself this question: how did you know that he/she/it died? What stopped happening? Would you say that the wheel of life just stopped all of a sudden, or did it turn slower and slower?

Experiment 2

As I said above, big systems are usually more resilient than small ones. On the other hand, if a big system dies, all of its parts often die as well. Taking this into account, how safe is your job (or any source of income that you have)? Consider the following:

- How important is what you do or what you are for your source of income? In other words, how likely is your source of income to survive without your help?
- How important is your source of income for society at large? In other words, how likely is society to survive without your source of income?

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