And so long as you haven’t experienced this,
to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
—Goethe
In a celebrated address to the Stanford graduating class of 2005, Steve Jobs said: “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” The message was particularly poignant because Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year earlier.
His reflection on death, however, was not a consequence of his illness. Jobs shared how an awareness of death had served him as a valuable coach throughout his life. He recalled that at age seventeen he had read a quote that reminded him to live each day as if it was his last, “because someday you’ll most certainly be right.” Understanding that he might die soon, Jobs said, was “the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” He noted that “death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”1
Jobs exemplified the Zen saying “Die before you die, so you can truly live.” The first “die” means “confront the fact of your mortality”; the second, to die literally. Dying before you die means coming to terms with the finite nature of your existence in order to fully comprehend life’s richness and possibility. If you leave thinking about your death until you are about to die, you will miss death’s wise counsel. Paradoxically, dying before you die is the answer to the Jewish prayer, “Let me not die while I am still alive.”
It’s easy for anyone, even transcendent leaders, to conduct too much of life on autopilot, constantly distracted by everyday busyness. We can sleepwalk through life, focusing our attention on the trivial and frivolous. We indulge in too many activities that leave us empty and unfulfilled. But instead of filling this emptiness with a disciplined pursuit of meaning, we soothe our anxious nerve cells with more empty busyness and trivial pursuits.
Imagine that you have only three minutes to live, and you want to make one final phone call to someone. Whom would you call? What would you tell that person? And what are you waiting for? When you have just three minutes to live, you may not even be able to make that call. After I ask people in my workshops these questions, I see them calling loved ones during the break.
Once we understand that the clock is ticking and there’s no time to waste, we want to elevate our sights, pursue something worthwhile, make every day count. The prospect of death directs us to focus on what truly matters: truth, happiness, meaning, love, friendship, gratitude, awe, compassion, peace, fullness, and freedom. And this responsibility is even more true if you aspire to be a transcendent leader, helping others fulfill their most meaningful purposes in the organization and in their personal lives.
In 2008, the management consulting firm Grant Thornton surveyed 250 CEOs of companies with revenue of $50 million or more. Twenty-two percent said they had had an experience when they believed they would die and, of those, 61 percent said it changed their long-term perspective on life or career. Forty-one percent said it made them more compassionate leaders.2
One senior manager who experienced a close encounter with death was Rand Leeb-du Toit. In February 2014, Leeb-du Toit worked as a research director at Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory firm in IT. He loved his job as one of the leaders of a brain trust advising a mix of Fortune 500 and high-growth businesses. Despite the pressures of his job, he took excellent care of himself. He ate healthy food, meditated, and enjoyed running, surfing, and stand-up paddling. He’d get out on the water and really push himself.
One Sunday morning, when it was still pitch black, he went for a stand-up paddle session on Narrabeen Lake, close to his home in suburban Sydney. After an hour on the water, he felt that something wasn’t quite right. “I felt a bit more drained than usual, but then again I hadn’t had breakfast and thought it was simply low blood sugar level,” he recalled. He went to the office and worked all day, but that night felt worse. He tried to get to the bathroom and became disoriented.
“Then, I collapsed and died.”
When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics discovered that his heart rate was running at 200 beats per minute. He was undergoing sudden cardiac arrest, which involves the electrical circuitry of the heart rather than the plumbing. Only 5 percent of people survive such an event, typically through resuscitation. He was in a state of heightened ventricular tachycardia—arrhythmia—and yet he was conscious (something that almost never happens).
Leeb-du Toit felt extremely grateful to be in the small percentage of people who survive such an experience. “That gratitude has made me feel I have a responsibility to make more of a difference in the world,” he says. “I’ve been given this incredibly rare second life—what, though, am I going to do with it?”
For Leeb-du Toit, sudden cardiac arrest was the trigger for transformation. “The experience altered my perception of time completely,” he wrote in an essay.3 “I no longer feel the same sense of urgency to be busy and to track myself against a linear, progressive timeline. Instead, the past and future are compressed and I see me only living in the now.”
The encounter with death taught him to focus less on things that satisfy his ego—making money, focusing on his career, building a business, and so on—and more on listening to his inner voice, his soul, and the things that resonate with him most deeply. Breaking through societal constructs and personal constraints helped him truly come alive and find joy. He quit his job and started a consulting company, coaching leaders to become more connected and empathetic, more transcendent. “Being more empathetic with others can not only create deeper connections and stronger leaders,” he noted. “It also acts as a forcing function for solving many of the big issues in our world: hunger, poverty, suffering, and war.”
Leeb-du Toit has achieved a greater understanding of purpose because of his brush with death. He’s thinking bigger—much, much bigger. His example, like those of others, is permeating the wider corporate consciousness, like welcome rain into an exhausted soil.
Leeb-du Toit’s rare opportunity for a second life compelled him to ask, “What am I going to do with it?” Is your life any less rare? Why not ask now, with equal gratitude, “What am I going to do with the remainder of this precious life?”
According to the philosopher and psychologist William James, the “worm at the core” of the human condition is the gnawing, usually subconscious, awareness of our own impending death. Death is at the core of the symbolic fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. After eating this apple, Adam and Eve were forced from ignorant bliss in paradise into the harsh reality of mortality: “For you are dust. And to dust you shall return.”
In The Denial of Death, the anthropologist Ernest Becker observed that the central driver of human behavior is our effort to deny and transcend the fact of our own death.4 The notion that most of human individual and cultural activity arises as a response to death might sound far-fetched, but Becker made a compelling (and Pulitzer Prize–winning) argument that all civilizations arise from death awareness. He argued that all our religious, social, military, political, and economic institutions, as well as the traditions, rituals, and taboos that support the social order, are fundamentally defense mechanisms against our mortality.
“Although like all life-forms, humans have a biological predisposition toward self-preservation in the service of reproduction,” Becker explained, “we are unique in our capacity for symbolic thought. This allows us to reflect on the past and imagine the future, realizing that death is inevitable and can occur at any time. We then need to manage this terrifying awareness by constructing shared beliefs about reality that minimize existential dread by conferring meaning and value. All cultures provide a sense that life is meaningful by offering an account of the origin of the universe, prescriptions for appropriate behavior, and assurance of immortality for those who behave in accordance with cultural dictates.”5
As we become aware of our mortality, we become anxious; to manage this anxiety we try to create or become part of something that we believe will last beyond our physical death—art, music, literature, religion, political movements, institutions, nations, and empires. This is the ultimate motivating force behind many human endeavors. More specifically, it is the motivating force behind every organization.
The people who found, lead, and staff organizations expect to be remembered because of what they have done. They want to achieve the kind of notoriety that will last beyond their lives. It is the same psychological force that causes us to carve our initials in the bark of a tree, or to leave our name on a brick in Fenway Park, or on the wing of a hospital or university if we have enough money. If we feel that we have done something worthwhile and enduring, our fear of death lessens. If we are revered, honored, or even simply remembered, our anxiety subsides.
We try to protect ourselves against mortal anxiety through two psychological maneuvers. First, we try to shore up our “I” self—our self-esteem—through our accomplishments. We try to “look good,” decorating our bodies and our homes and accumulating all kinds of toys. We also build our identity by making a difference, having impact, and claiming ownership of memorable feats. “Unlike the baboon who gluts himself only on food,” wrote Becker, “man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem.”
Second, we shore up our “we” self by aligning ourselves with groups that share our worldviews—our religions, our languages, our nations, our politicians, our favorite sports teams, and so on. We defend ourselves against death anxiety through culture—by which Becker means all our religious, social, and organizational institutions and the traditions, rituals, and taboos that support the social order. The closer our death anxiety bubbles to the surface, the more tightly we bind to the groups that we identify with.
The drives for I-based self-esteem and we-based cultural belonging are double-edged. If we are lucky and have positive self-esteem, we enhance it by doing good work in the world—working to cure cancer, contributing to our communities, becoming admired leaders, and so on—and the more tolerant we tend to be toward others with alternative worldviews. If we have poor self-esteem, we shore it up by bragging, belittling others, and engaging in risky behaviors, and the more likely we are to demean or attack those who don’t share our worldviews. (Fascinatingly, the greater your fear of death, the lower your self-esteem—and vice versa.)
Becker claimed that human beings have two selves, a “physical” self and a “symbolic” self. Our physical selves attend to our day-to-day problems. Our symbolic selves yearn to be part of something greater than ourselves. We are able to transcend the problem of our physical mortality through acts of small and large heroism, which allow the symbolic self to endure beyond the physical one. Anything we do that involves community—whether it’s going to church, temple, or mosque; serving in soup kitchens; working for positive change on a community or governmental level; and going to the office when we feel engaged—touches on an “immortality project,” that is, a belief system that lets the symbolic self transcend physical reality. Through such projects, we come to feel that we are part of something bigger and more eternal than our all too brief existences. This, in turn, confers meaning on our lives, the feeling that our lives are significant in the grand scheme of things.
From the cave dwellers who left their artwork on stone walls to the programmers who leave theirs in bits, human beings are always trying to leave their fingerprints (or “soul-prints”) on history. We all want to say, “I lived and it mattered; see me, know me, remember me.” We all want to feel that we have been “persons of value in a world of meaning,” as Becker put it.
William James observed that “the greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”6 A big part of it is being remembered. Every person wants to create or be part of something that can last beyond his or her physical existence. Very few of us can quench this thirst for transcendence on our own. Some of us satisfy our search for meaning through our families and children. But most of us need something more, an immortality project or mission that will make a difference to others in our community and the world.7
Unfortunately, immortality projects can be both good and bad. Besides being drivers of meaning, they are also drivers of war, genocide, bigotry, and racism. When one immortality project—say, a religion or a nation—collides with another, conflict arises as a test of whose way of life is right and whose is wrong. Such tribalism triggers aggressive and defensive behaviors, since both parties want to prove that their belief system is superior by eliminating the other. Much of human strife springs from the incompatibility of immortality projects that have generally been eliminative and unethical—eliminative because such a project seeks the obliteration of the rival, and unethical because it does so through aggression and violence.
The worm at the core has long gnawed on Wharton professor and bestselling author Adam Grant. As a child, he suffered an active imagination that became a kind of curse (he used to worry about the sun burning out, for example) and later turned into frequent existential musings.
In 2009, Grant and a coauthor published a paper that laid out how reminders of death affect people’s behavior at work. They found that when people’s reactions to reminders of death are “hot” (i.e., anxious and panicked), they tend to withdraw into their own beliefs and become more arrogant, judgmental, and bigoted. But when the reminders of death produce “cool” responses (i.e., reflective ones, as those in helping professions like medicine and firefighting do), people are more likely to think about the meaning of life and their potential contributions.8
Grant and his colleagues also found that when people think about death with equanimity, they are more “generative” (i.e., more engaged, productive, and helpful) if their jobs feel meaningful. But if their jobs feel meaningless, they are likely to quit and try to find a job that allows them to be more generative. Moreover, people who feel a “calling” at work are more motivated to leave behind a meaningful contribution, and to craft their jobs in order to make them more meaningful (e.g., by taking on helping initiatives like mentoring). By contrast, people who feel like they are merely job oriented (doing tasks to collect a paycheck) are less motivated to do so.
Grant’s research reveals how much we suffer when we don’t feel that we are persons of value in a world of meaning at work. We become anxious, disconnected, and disengaged. Moreover, these feelings are highly contagious and spread like a disease through a group, destroying its cohesion and effectiveness. Furthermore, organizations, just like human beings, can die of the disease of disengagement. In dead organizations, nobody cares. Everyone’s just there to exchange minimum effort for a salary.
If you are the average working person in a dead organization, you lie under a double curse—the inescapable fact of your individual mortality, and the deadly social atmosphere of the organization you work for. This double attack undermines the individual and cultural pillars of your strategy for overcoming anxiety.
By contrast, transcendent leaders offer employees a chance to engage in an immortality project. They understand that all human beings feel haunted by the prospect of their own insignificance. To help them through this fear, such leaders offer followers, in exchange for their passionate commitment to the mission, the chance to manage their anxiety through meaningful work and membership in a noble, ethical, and successful community. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “When a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble and that the work will enable people to connect with something larger—more permanent than their material existence—[then] people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise.”9
The question of a manager is “How do you…?” (do something, fix something, etc.), but the question of a transcendent leader is “Who are you?” (as a conscious being). The latter question cannot be put to people in a dispassionate, arm’s-length way. The leader needs to be “on fire” herself in order to “light up” and inspire her followers. That’s why looking to death for advice is necessary. A transcendent leader understands that a noble purpose overcomes the limitations of physical life, projecting those who pursue it into a kind of symbolic immortality. By offering people this awesome possibility, the transcendent leader becomes someone who can guide her followers through the most fearsome prospect of all.
A transcendent leader proposes a mission through which individuals can achieve symbolic immortality. They can reduce their death anxiety, replacing it for feelings of significance, self-esteem, and belonging to a meaningful community. The transcendent leader elicits passionate commitment to a collective, noble purpose—which is the only way to manage disengagement, disorganization, disinformation, and disillusion. When this occurs, people really care and give their best. They look beyond their silos and their small decision-making issues. They align their best efforts in ways that no financial incentives or other management system can. Organizations that offer workers symbolic immortality through moral projects, in solidarity with peers, with opportunities to learn and grow autonomously, outcompete those that don’t, reaping tremendous economic rewards as they become the dominant form in the meme pool.
Consider the difference between rowing and surfing. A boat moved by muscle is no match for natural forces. A board propelled by the waves flows in harmony with these forces. An organization moved by managerial authority is like a rowboat plowing against the current. One propelled by transcendent leadership is like a surfboard on a big wave.
Dying before you die means coolly confronting your own mortality and integrating the awareness of it into how you lead. Dying before you die is the hardest and most important work that you can do if you want to truly live and truly lead. It does not require that you face death in a literal sense, but it does mean that you have to look deeply at your own life and its inevitable end and realize that everyone around you is on the same lifeboat. Once you come to terms with mortality, you can begin to elicit and inspire the internal commitment of those you are leading. You can fulfill their hunger for meaning through a collective mission because you are much more aware and empathetic. Dying before you die makes you the kind of inspiring leader people want to follow.
As a leadership coach, my job is to wake leaders up to what is most essential in them (which is, paradoxically, universal and far beyond “them”) so that they can truly engage others at the deepest level. The most powerful leadership development process I’ve discovered is the “cool” consideration of one’s death.
Nobody likes to think, much less talk, about the prospect of death. Perhaps baby boomers, now in their late fifties, sixties, and early seventies, privately wonder how much longer they have to live as their aches and pains kick in. But besides some boomer senior executives, many of the leaders I help are fairly young—between the ages of thirty and forty-five. Most are in pretty good health. Few have given the topic of their own death much thought at all. The subject has certainly never been covered in their business school curricula.
With that existential perspective in mind, I invite my workshop participants to “die before they die” in a reflective or, to use Grant’s term, “cool” way. I first propose an exercise based on a notion that produces a vicarious near-death experience. It goes like this:
“Imagine that you are at the end of a long and rich life. You’ve accomplished everything you wanted, behaving honorably and building meaningful connections with your family, friends, and colleagues. You are proud of yourself for leaving a great legacy, and for having led an organization that brought great value to the world. You’ve done your work here, and you feel ready to go. So when you learn that your days are numbered, you take the news in stride. A lot of people who appreciate and admire you want to pay their respects, so they organize a ‘living funeral.’ (A living funeral is a celebration in which a living person with a life-limiting illness listens to the eulogies, praises, and farewells of family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues.) In the ceremony, a dear friend will stand in front of the audience and read a eulogy. Write the eulogy that you would like your friend to give.”
For this exercise, I ask the participants not to be humble; the more ambitious and grandiose they can be, the better. That way, they set the highest standards for themselves. “This kind of eulogy can become a true north star for your life,” I tell them. “It can help you discover who you want to be and how you want to act in order to leave the legacy you want to leave and feel proud of yourself.”
As I ask people to read their eulogies to one another in small groups, everyone is touched by the beautiful aspirations they hear.
Next, I ask them to do a “gap analysis” in which they consider the difference between their current lives and the things they would have to do in the future to justify such a beautiful eulogy. What changes would they have to make? And then I challenge them by asking, “Are you ready to make these changes?” (The relevant commitment is not to the outcome but to the process. Analogously, the question is not whether you want to lose weight but whether you are willing to stick to the diet that gets you to your goal.)
Following those exercises, I then invite them into a “darker” one. I ask them to imagine that they have just died and have not had the time to change anything in their lives. I ask them to answer the following questions in the third person, as if they were their own “devil’s advocate,” substituting their own names for the “X”:
What dreams did X not pursue?
What fears did X not overcome?
What loves did X not express?
What resentments did X not resolve?
What apologies did X not make?
What gifts did X not give?
When they’re finished, I ask them to share some of their answers with the group. Some typical statements are:
“He didn’t start his business.”
“She never volunteered for the nonprofit.”
“He died without making the trip.”
“She never learned to play the piano.”
“He was always afraid of not having enough.”
“She couldn’t overcome her fear of speaking in public.”
“He didn’t tell his wife how much he loved her.”
“She never told her employees how important they were to her.”
“He failed to make peace with his son.”
“She didn’t forgive herself.”
“He wishes he had apologized to his partner.”
“He should have spent more time playing and less time worrying.”
“Her great idea died with her.”
Many of the workshop participants return home with an existential bucket list. They feel more committed to pursuing their dreams, overcoming their fears, forgiving those who hurt them, apologizing to those whom they’ve hurt, and giving their gifts to the world. Months later, they send me messages and pictures as they cross off their bucket list items and flower into their true selves.
Try an experiment. Ask yourself the questions I listed above and see what comes up. Even this short brush with the prospect of your own mortality can heighten the intensity of your life. Facing the reality of your own death can be profoundly frightening, so it demands great courage. But it will also open you up in a way that nothing else can, setting you on fire with purpose and enabling you to inspire others. As Steve Jobs told the Stanford students, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
“Can you live with that?” is a typical question that people use to evaluate an option. I’d like to propose “Can you die with that?” as a complement. The idea is that when you’re deliberating about a significant decision, you imagine that what you’re about to do may well be the last gesture of your life. Then ask yourself whether you’d be at peace with your action, and if so, how you would do it.
Like a corrosive acid, death awareness dissolves the superficial, leaving only the essential, which is why it makes an excellent leadership counselor. For example, imagine sitting in a meeting. There is a seat in the corner where dark-hooded, skull-faced Death sits watching, and everyone is keenly aware of its presence. You can ask yourself how you would behave if you knew that you’d never have another meeting with the people in the room. The meeting is a final and unique opportunity to express your authentic values in action. Every utterance, every exchange, every decision, would be “death-proof,” meaning that you could “die with that.”
I actually do take a few minutes (or at least a deep breath) to meditate on this idea before I enter a coaching conversation, teach a workshop, or engage in an important dialogue. I prepare myself like this to always give my best parting gift, moment by moment, opening my heart and not holding back, as there’s nothing to protect when I’m at the end of my life.
In a 2015 study about the use of psychedelics to reduce the fear of death, researchers found that cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, and that these effects were still holding six months later.10 They felt that the experience with psilocybin was among the most meaningful of their lives. They described feelings of unity, sacredness, ineffability, peace, and joy, “as well as the impression of having transcended space and time and the ‘noetic sense’ that the experience has disclosed some objective truth about reality.” These feelings were every bit as real to them as any other experience.
Subjects overcame their fear of death by vicariously experiencing it. “A high-dose psychedelic experience is a death practice,” said Katherine MacLean, a John Hopkins University psychologist. “You’re losing everything you know to be real, letting go of your ego and your body. That process can feel like dying.”11
It certainly felt like that to me
Shamanic journeys have fascinated me ever since I read Carlos Castaneda’s stories about Don Juan.12 Castaneda’s experiences in nonordinary states of consciousness left an indelible impression on my young mind. For many years I dreamed of going to Mexico to find a shaman who could guide me into nonordinary realities.13
In 1998, a friend told me about the ceremonies a shaman held in the desert using sacred plants. I immediately applied. Eventually, I ended up in the desert of my fantasies with a shaman and a group of fellow psychonauts. I sat at the center of the circle and held the pipe that the shaman had ceremoniously loaded with a white powder. Since I didn’t smoke, my main concern was that I’d embarrass myself by coughing and exhaling the smoke that I was supposed to hold in my lungs as long as possible. I closed my eyes and cleared my mind, taking three deep breaths. I brought the pipe to my lips and inhaled as the shaman lit its contents. Immediately, I felt my mind on fire. My throat itched and my lungs ached, but I didn’t cough. Invisible hands helped me lie down. That was the last seminormal feeling I had for the next hour.
I had entered into an extraordinary realm, not because anything changed outside but because something inside me finally relaxed and dissolved into waves of bliss. The feelings were like intense light and heat, like spiced honey running through my veins. (As I write this, the expression makes no sense, but my memory of the experience is as clear as the feeling of my fingers on the keyboard.)
The waves grew stronger. I began to feel an ecstatic sort of pain. After a while, I started feeling as if I were burning from the inside. I felt an uncontainable, unbearable bliss that “exploded me out” of myself. Awareness was there, but it wasn’t mine. I was there, but I wasn’t the ordinary “me.” I felt as if there was light dissolving me from the inside and, simultaneously, light dissolving me from the outside, penetrating through every pore of my skin.
The light outside wants to merge with the light inside, I just knew. It is the false belief in the separateness that prevents this beautiful act of love. For the first time, I (as an ego) am unable to block the light. The light is going through me, appearing as me, becoming me, being me. I am the ocean of light appearing as the wave of Fred.
I felt myself letting go of my fear of death. I felt completely safe—not because there was no risk, but because what was at risk was not really “I.” I was laughing and crying, tears of joy and relief streaming down my face. I rolled with the ecstatic waves of pleasure-pain. You die the way you live, an inner voice said. If you live in darkness, you are right to fear death. If you live in the light, there’s nothing to fear.
The author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has explained the shift in awareness produced by nonordinary states of consciousness better than anyone else I know. In Waking Up, he describes how his sense of the human mind’s potential shifted profoundly through his experience with Ecstasy (MDMA).
My sense of the human mind’s potential shifted profoundly. (…) My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. (…) It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. (…) I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from another.14
“The feeling that we call ‘I’ is an illusion,” claims Harris. “There is no discrete ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished.”
When the illusion of the ego disappears, what is left is a stance of transcendent connection in agape. Agape is a very healthy platform for an organization to build upon as they unite in a mission and an expression of values.
In my personal journey, I saw that the feeling that I call “I” is a mirage. My ordinary state of consciousness—the one in which I experience myself as an ego having perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, making decisions, and taking action from about five inches behind my eyes—is a delusion. Although I’d had previous glimpses of this awareness through meditation practice, the noetic quality of the experience with the shamanic journey convinced me, in a way that I cannot doubt, that I am not who I used to think I was.
Beyond the scientific accounts I have read, I now know in a direct, undeniable way that my “ego,” my sense of being a unified subject, is an illusion. Like blue skies, multicolored rainbows, and turquoise waters, the ego is not what it appears to be. In fact, it is nothing but an optical illusion of consciousness. I still have the strong impression that “I” am the owner of my experience, the one who perceives, thinks, feels, and wills from somewhere behind my face, but that “I” now vanishes every time I look at it closely in meditation. It is no more real than the desert oasis that appears in the distance but disappears as I get closer to it.
Such psychedelic experience can alter the fear of death very profoundly, and at the same time bring sanity to ordinary life. “Existential distress at the end of life bears many similarities with mental illness, including excessive self-reflection and an inability to jump the deepening grooves of negative thought,” writes Michael Pollan. “The ego, faced with the prospect of its own dissolution, becomes hyper-vigilant, withdrawing its investment in the world and other people. It is striking that a single psychedelic experience should have the power to alter these patterns in a lasting way.”15
We are all dying. We know it but we hide it from ourselves. Until we face up to it, our existential distress will always be there in the background, as a low-grade mental illness. We become self-absorbed, unable to connect with others or the world. We lose our souls. We become hypervigilant, hypercritical, hyperanxious. For most of us, shamanic substances are not safe. How can we then wake up from the bad ego trip in which we live? I believe that we can do so through meditation, and participation in a community of purpose, engaged to a transcendent project, led by a hero who has taken a journey to the underside and came back to share her or his gift of awareness with us.
In his Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs said that death was “very likely the single best invention of my life.” Death is the ultimate wake-up call. Death is a reminder of the preciousness of your human life, and of your limited time to experience and manifest it.
“I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected,” Steve Jobs’s sister wrote in her eulogy for him, “but Steve’s death was unexpected for us. What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.”
“The work of dying had to be done,” she wrote. “Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude. He seemed to be climbing. But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.”
And his final words were a mysterious, beautiful observation, repeated like a mantra, three times: “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”16