Back in 1958 I was in Zürich, and there met a most extraordinary man by the name of Karlfried von Dürckheim. He was a former German diplomat who had studied Zen in Japan, and when he came back after the war, he opened a meditation school and retreat in the Black Forest. And he said, Well, I tell you what, a lot of my work has to do with people who went through spiritual crises during the war. And he said, You know, we all know when a person’s in an absolutely extreme situation, and they accept it, there is a possibility of a natural satori. And that’s what I mean when I was explaining that, when one gets to an extreme—that is to say, to the point where you realize there is nothing you can do about life, nothing you can not do about life—then you’re the mosquito biting the iron bull. Well, so in the same way, he said, Look, you heard a bomb coming at you—you could hear it whistle, and you knew it was right above you and headed straight at you, and that you were finished—and you accepted it. And suddenly, there was a strange feeling that everything is absolutely clear. You suddenly see that there isn’t a grain of dust in the whole universe that’s in the wrong place. That you understand completely—absolutely, totally—what it’s all about! You can’t say what it is. But he said, In so many cases, the bomb was a dud and they lived to tell the tale.

Or, he said you were in a concentration camp; you’ve been there so long that you gave up all hope whatsoever of ever getting out—you were just going through this miserable, boring, degrading grind, week after week, after week. Nobody paid the slightest attention to you, as an individual. You knew you would never get out and you accepted it. And suddenly, something changed. This extraordinary feeling. Freedom. Or he said you were a displaced refugee. You had lost your family, you didn’t know whether they even existed; you were miles from your home, you didn’t know whether it existed. You had lost your job, your very identity. You were absolutely nowhere. And you accepted it. And suddenly you were as light as a feather and free as the air.

Now, he said, So many people have had those experiences, and they talk about them to their families and friends, and they say, ‘Oh well, you were under terrific pressure, you probably had some hallucination,’ you know? Well, he said, I am showing those people that, so far from having a hallucination, those were the few, few occasions in which they woke up.

So, you see, this is always the opportunity presented by death: that if one can go into death with eyes opened and have somebody help you, if necessary, to give up before you die, this extraordinary thing can happen to you. So that, from your standpoint in that position at that time, you would say, I wouldn’t miss that opportunity for the world! Now I understand why we die! The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life is all about; by letting go. Because then we come to a situation that the ego can’t deal with.

When we are no longer hypnotized by that, then our natural consciousness can see clearly what all this universe is for. So, therefore, we have missed this golden opportunity by institutionalizing death out of the way instead of having a socially understood acceptance of death, and rejoicing in death. Now, I can imagine that one person would want to rejoice in death in an entirely different way from another. Like, say, a wedding. It’s a rite of passage. There are certainly some forms of celebrating a wedding which I would find a total bore and quite offensive. Other ways would be very good; I would enjoy it.

So everybody—in other words, I’m not saying that you’ve got to get mixed up with a lot of people coming, laughing around you, and bringing you presents, and cards, and everything because you’re going to die. But I’m only indicating a general thing. That the doctor, the ministers, the psychiatrists—and, above all, us—really owe it to our friends to work out an entirely new approach to death. Because what has happened, you see—from earliest childhood, the child learned that great uncle was dying, and saw the family put on long faces and say, Aaaawh, that’s too bad. Even Christians, who think they’re going to go to heaven, you know? They get absolutely morbid—more so than anybody else—about death, because heaven, as they all know, is a very boring place. And so this frightful thing: Oh! He’s dead. You know?

No one understands that, for the living to lose someone you love—or even for a dying person—to worry about what on earth my wife, my children, my whatever are going to do without me? One can understand a certain worry in that. But nobody is indispensable, and there comes a point when you have to say, I’m sorry, but I’m completely going to abandon responsibility for anything. Because there is no further way I can do it. This is another way of that surrender. And then the curious thing that occurs is: the moment all that is dropped, suddenly it dawns on you that, to be important, existence does not have to go on any longer than a moment. Quantitative continuity is of no value. How long can you hold your breath? Who cares!

So it follows from that, you see, that if any one of us—without being shocked into it by being bombed, or put in a concentration camp—could, at this moment, be as one about to die, genuinely and honestly, we would understand the mystery of life. Because death is the—in a certain sense—the source of life. Just as we see in nature when the leaves fall from the trees, they mold and rot, and this supplies humus from which more plants can grow. It’s a cycle like that.

But in every way—symbolic and otherwise—human beings try to stop that cycle. Unamuno said, Human beings are the only species that hoard their dead. And therefore, with the ghastly art of the mortician, we try to make the body unpalatable to the worms, and so to stop life. As if to be eaten, in due course, were an indignity to the human being. Whereas we eat everything else and we give nothing back. So that is a kind of a social symptom of our profound disorientation with respect to death.

We think death is unnatural—and furthermore, in our culture—we think birth is a disease, and send the mama to the hospital for the most unnatural and weird kind of parturition. In other words, more and more, one regards the healthy and inevitable and natural transformations of the body as pathological. I can imagine, you know, people having sexual intercourse on an operating table to be sure that the whole thing is hygienic. You know, everything about us, like that, is becoming over-interfered with by specialists, and less and less the province of our own preferences. It’s very, very hard, indeed, to die in your own way without some blasted bunch of relatives come fussing around and insisting that you go to a hospital, that you get fixed with the tortures of being fed through tubes, and things to keep you alive indefinitely, and waste the family’s savings. It’s even a crime to commit suicide. That’s simply nonsense. It’s this perfect panic to survive at all costs.