What we always live surrounded by is death. But strangely it’s a phenomenon that’s simultaneously ubiquitous and absent. It’s ubiquitous in the sense that we routinely see the individual lives of living beings coming to an end. It’s absent for you in terms of an existential experience. Living humans cannot experience what death is like or what dying is about. The dead for being dead can’t tell you the story and the living having never tasted death have no story to tell. To borrow from Heraclitus, we can say that one cannot step into this river twice. Going into it means total immersion.

The ones who go into flowing waters are no more and the spectators at a safe distance have no experience of what it means to be no more. Death in other words is an experience for the dead that they cannot describe and for the living it’s a phenomenon that they cannot experience. Death is always for the other, not for you. So your ‘experience’ of death at best is mediated through a network of relationships you have with what dies. It can be understood in the context of an ensemble of the animate, species, tribes, clan and family. It’s certainly true that death is an irretrievable loss and thus is a cause of eternal absence of something valuable. Death reminds you your own perishability. Thus fear of death constantly stalks you and a swift-footed spectre of ephemerality keeps haunting you as long as you live.

Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, helps us overcome fear of death through logic by pointing out: ‘why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not’? It’s logically correct but still fails to dispel the visceral fear of death which accompanies life.

Fear of death, however painful it may be, enhances the significance of life and consequently your love for life. In our literary and spiritual traditions classical poets especially the mystically inclined ones attempted to banish the dread of death and galvanise the life instinct through their concept of ‘Dying before one’s Death’. Looks eerie and weird? It turns out to be something different when you scratch its veneer.

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Shah Hussain aka Madho Lal Hussain [sixteenth century], a naysayer among mystics and self-deprecating poet who pioneered one of the most popular poetic genres ‘Kafi’, says; ‘let’s live like dead while being alive’[kahay Hussain Fakir nimana jiundian mar rahiye]. Sultan Bahu [seventeenth century], poet and mystic, says; ‘Only those who die before their death discover the meaning of their life [Mrarn theen agge marr gae Bahu, taan matlab nu paya hu]’. Is it mumbling of an arcane mantra by minds gone wild? Not at all if you try to decode what is coded in it.

Love for life is in-built and instinctual. But humans are a special case. They live in an organised society built on the bedrock of all kinds of hierarchies. Desires born of animal psyche and human consciousness are both affirmative and self-destructive; they are driving force of what we call civilisation and dehumanisation that we see all around. Without the role of desires it’s impossible to imagine human achievements, material and intellectual and tangible and intangible. But desires in a hierarchic society, which human society is, have disproportionately empowered certain segments that exploit the less empowered and impoverished.

Life is seen more and more in terms of possessions and power individuals and groups acquire. The process leads to open and subtle exploitation. It’s purely a human phenomenon. A predator hunts its game but when satiated doesn’t bother about other animals it can prey on. But a human being despite being part of animal kingdom does its opposite; the more he has, the greater his appetite to have more. His desires are limitless. Limitless desires demand for their fulfillment limitless work and limitless exploitation of resources. On the one hand, it dehumanises the human and on the other naturalises the unnatural.

Life when measured on the scale of possessions and power turn into a mechanism of controlling and directing other human beings in the hands of those who are fired by their overarching desires to rule. Infinite desires in a finite world are a disaster, Fritjof Capra, a physicist, tells us in his remarkable book ‘Uncommon Wisdom’.

Lord Buddha in the 6th century discovered that desires were the cause of sufferings. Desiring to have more than what you need for living your life modestly is undesirable. Getting rid of undesirable desires is what is meant by ‘one’s dying before their death’ in mystics’ view in our humanist tradition. Such an act is not a wish for death but rather for life which is sustainable without unnecessary destruction of natural resources and unjustifiable exploitation of human labour.

It’s falsely believed in our world driven by material incentive that life means struggle for possession by means fair and foul. Being dispossessed is being as good as dead. Dying before death for our mystics means the experience of being dispossessed by choice which makes them survive on what is essential. Infinite consumption which is equated with successful life results in infinite destruction which a mystic or a physicist like Capra would like to prevent at any cost.

Humans can continue to exist as a tiny but integral of nature, not its masters as it has been believed till recent times under the grand illusion of absolute human superiority.