If you are reading this right now, you are reading it as a being that has already been defined. This definition of you comes from many sources. Your family has defined you, not only by assigning you a value (or lack thereof), but they have also told you your first stories about the world and what it means. You have been additionally defined by institutions–educational, religious, legal, and political. They have taught you what it means to be a good citizen. Finally, you have also been defined by the stories told to you through books, music, and videos. These larger cultural references further shape your values and self-conception.
Just as importantly, this you that already exists, in no small way defines how you experience what you think of as reality. If you’ve been brought up in a culture with cheese, you may find it most natural to top almost any dish with it to give your food a little more flavor and texture. If you have not, however, you may find the tendency of others to slather the fermented fats pumped from the teats of animals on top of their food, and lord forbid, to melt it into the consistency of snot, somewhat disconcerting.
Although you didn’t get to choose this definition of you and the lens through which it shapes your reality, this historical you isn’t all bad. These historically defined views of yours, don’t just limit your vision, they also help provide your life with meaning. Whereas for you, the statement that Aaron Judge has once again punished Red Sox pitching may be an entirely meaningless sentence, because of my culture, for me, it may be a source of great joy.
Although these culturally defined lenses provide us with meaning, they also limit what we can see, and in so doing, limit what we can become. The lens of our personhood shapes reality in such a way that we become blind to ideas that don’t make sense to the being we already are. We continue on as the person the contingencies of our past have defined us as without ever getting the space to see those constructs for what they are and to choose whether they are the lenses we wish to see life through.
Death, however, strips us bare. It rips through whatever cultural constructs we define our world with and gives us the eyes of a newborn. It doesn’t show us as our history has defined us, but rather as a raw, conscious being that shall one day be no more. It obliterates the person that we’ve created and reduces us to pure care without definition. The definitions and filters that our culture has taught us are essential about ourselves, can be seen as optional. And although this stripping down of who we are hurts as we lose layers of meaning built up over a lifetime, it also levels the horizon of obstructions, so that we can see what was before hidden.
The New Testament tells us that “Death comes like a thief in the night”. I’d heard that phrase a hundred times before I ever truly felt its terror. Death will come for us when we least expect it and by the time we realize that our time has come, we will already be gone. Having said that, as a Thanatist, I’ve come to realize that life also comes as a thief in the night. It presents us with little unexpected moments of joy like when a ray of sunlight pierces the clouds and illuminates the greenness around us, as well as life altering possibilities that we could have never foreseen.
Our modern culture has become obsessed with building and planning our lives from birth to the grave. We’ve become so adept as humans at controlling our worlds that we see ourselves as the architects of our future. In ancient Greece, at a time when humans were much less in control of the world, they had a much different view of the future. Whereas we see the future as something in front of us, they describe the future as something behind them, like waves crashing against the back of a person looking toward the shore of their past. Life was something that happened to them, not something they controlled.
As I look at the arch of my life, I see much more crashing than architecting. Life often happens to us. This is why the daily cleansing that Thanatism offers is so important. When we give up our own personal immortality project, we free ourselves of this illusion of control. When we clear away that which we have always been, we create the space for life itself to reach in and surprise us. It may seem frightening, but chaos is only chaos if you’re working toward an end. As Thanatists, we realize our end has already been chosen, and as such, we can open ourselves up to the possibilities of life that we couldn’t see because we ourselves were standing in the way.
This is the first truth of Thanatism and our relationship with ourselves–Thanatism gives us the opportunity to see the world outside of the we who has always defined it for us. It reduces the essence of who we are to our very existence. And although this raw, human being that we’re left with can feel almost unimaginably naked, it also creates the space for us to re-evaluate, and it’s this space that’s essential for recreation.
As Thanatists, I’m not suggesting that we abandon the us that we currently are. As I said, our cultures are what provide us with definition and meaning. I am suggesting, however, that every human, once we’ve been defined, could benefit from a fresh look at the world and ourselves outside of that definition that we never chose. In so doing, we can consider if the we that we find ourselves to be, is the we that we want to continue to be for the rest of our lives. We can open ourselves to the life that’s crashing against the doors we’ve built to protect ourselves and consider if we might want to let it in.