The life you live is not yours. You do not have a life any more than an ocean has waves. The ocean doesn’t possess the waves with ownership. Rather, it is a temporary behavior of the ocean.
When we take ownership of our lives, we spend much of our time trying to protect them. This creates a sense of high-alert anxiety, trying to protect something that is destined to end.
Instead of trying to own our lives, we should just be aware of them.
When we own our lives, we believe death is a catastrophe. If we are merely aware, we see the cessation of one stage and the beginning of another. Even though the waves calm down, the ocean is still there.
To own life means to value it. Most disregard deaths with the belief in the sanctity of life. We tell ourselves we value life because it is sacred, but we only label it sacred to justify our own lives. It’s quite the selfish notion.
By making life sacred, we inevitably hold death as the ultimate evil.
Voluntary Exit
Due to the sacredness of life, the collective tends to be up in arms when it comes to those who choose suicide or euthanasia as a way out.
In truth, we discourage voluntary exit because we impose on ourselves and others the idea that life is a mandatory experience.
Everyone playing their part keeps the movie going. If an actor leaves the stage mid-scene, it disrupts the story for almost everyone involved.
We say that we don’t want anyone to die because of ethics, or love for thy neighbor. However, if someone chooses to end their life, an existential crisis can occur. If the person who takes one’s life can decide that life is not worth living, what is stopping my life from being optional as well?
To prevent this realization, the collective demonizes the exit. We perceive the action as an error rather than a choice to stop participating in the show.
The interesting point is that the person who decides to die is no different from the person who decides to live. Both people will eventually die. It doesn’t matter if a person voluntarily slit their wrists or involuntarily has heart failure.
The horror for one and not the other is purely in the mind. To the person who dies by suicide, another might say, “He shouldn’t have done this.” Yet this statement rests on the flawed belief that we have authority over our bodies.
Egoic Excuse for Living
So, why do we keep those who are suffering alive?
We force the terminally ill to linger and the miserable to endure because their presence validates our own struggle. If we allow them to leave, we admit that “suffering” is not a sacred duty.
Demanding that everyone stay until the very last breath reinforces the “sanctity of life” as a prison. The thing we can’t understand is that we are not protecting the individual; we are protecting the idea of the individual.
We have no experience outside of what it means to be an individual. As a result, we are afraid of what will happen when the show ends, so we can’t possibly allow anyone else to leave on their own volition.
When someone voluntarily exits, it undermines the idea that life is a gift you must be grateful for and a burden you must carry.
In awareness, you realize that life is a temporary appearance. It doesn’t matter how long the appearance is. If someone dies at 80, 18, or 8 months, nothing is wrong.
Saving Someone’s Life
The highest form of human compassion is saving someone’s life at any cost. This is the basis of all of our superhero stories.
In truth, this could also be a subtle form of violence, as we don’t allow situations to be as they are.
We have to question the true intent of our attempts to save lives. We don’t save people because we love them. Actually, we do so because we are afraid of how the story will continue without them.
To keep a body functioning through mechanical intervention is to treat it as a museum exhibit. We preserve the body as a way of avoiding ourselves.
If someone dies, it means that I lose a witness in my existence. To live, I need others to perceive me.
It’s very hard for us to align with what is. Due to our stubbornness, we use morality as an intervention to stop the process of death, which is actually an act of resistance.
Living for Tomorrow
We try to stop death out of arrogance, because we believe we know better than the whole function of life. We call it medical progress, but it’s just a delay in the inevitable.
The “sanctity of life” becomes a desperate grasp at permanence.
We know that the body is fragile, so we seek to outsource our existence. Children, monuments, charity, and our digital footprint tend to be the life insurance policies we invest in. We tell ourselves that we are living through our works and children, but this belief comes from the flawed idea that life can be archived.
No one can be warmed by the memory of fire. In the same way, a child is their own person. They are not continuations of their parent. We try to live forever by colonizing a future we will not be present in.
There is freedom in realizing that no legacy needs to be created. The sun will shine in the sky until it doesn’t. The sanctity of life comes with a synonymous need to be remembered. However, if you understand life’s impermanence, there is no need.
Peace with Life and Death
You may have read this article and reacted in two different ways. Your mind may have found these words liberating or disgusting. I don’t think there’s anything in between.
Regardless of how you feel. Remember that nothing is wrong. Clinging to life is a movement of the mind, whereas letting go is also the same movement. Beyond these ideas, you sit.
If you understand that these judgments are you, you will cease to judge those who decide to take life away. There is no sanctity of life, and death is not real. It’s just the last story the ego tells itself before you return to where you never left.
Questions and Responses
The mind perceives a lack of “sacredness” as “meaninglessness” because it wants to be special. “Meaning” is a story the ego tells to justify its struggle. Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. It simply is. When you stop trying to project a purpose onto the wave, you are free to be the water. Nothing is required to be “sacred” for it to exist perfectly as it is.
There is no such thing as “wrong”. If the impulse to save a life arises, it is simply the body-mind acting according to its nature. The error is the attachment to the outcome and the belief that you are “defeating” death. Saving a life is often just a stay of execution for the ego. Perform the action, but do not be deluded into thinking you have altered the nature of reality.
The anger is the ego’s immune response. You are watching a character walk off the stage, and it threatens the validity of your own performance. If their life is optional, yours might be too. The fear you feel is not for “them”; it is the “me” trembling at the realization that the mandatory nature of this struggle is a fabrication. You are not angry at the exit; you are terrified of the emptiness it reveals.
Effort happens. Trees drop seeds; the sun radiates heat. The problem is not the “doing,” but the identity toward the action that believes it is building a monument to survive death. A child is a fresh appearance, not a sequel to your biography. Create, build, and parent, but do not mistake memory for reality.
The “you” that is worried about what happens does not exist now, so it cannot exist then. The person, along with the collection of memories, preferences, and “moral” stances, ends. But the substratum, the awareness in which the birth and death occurred, remains untouched. The wave flattens; the ocean does not change. You are not going anywhere because you never arrived
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