"Death Is Nothing to Us" #019

Hello and welcome again to Every Dawn, where we try to explore one thought every day that can accompany us throughout the day.

I recently rediscovered Epicurus, an ancient Greek wise man, a philosopher, whose main teaching was that one should simplify one's life, get rid of whatever makes it complicated. We already talked about this in another video. I talked about coffee as opposed to mint infusion from a mint plant that I have on my rooftop. The idea is that, you know, coffee is a very difficult thing to obtain, and for example, in catastrophic situations like COVID lockdowns, you might not be able to get it at all. Or in a situation where there's perhaps some international problem, a war, you might be cut off from coffee supplies.

So there are all kinds of things; it's very expensive, you need to earn a lot of money to afford coffee. Meanwhile, I can have a perfectly nice drink with my mint plant that I have in a little pot up on my roof or on my balcony. In this way, I can have a drink that's equally enjoyable but it is local, it is free, I can create it myself with only things that I have in my house. Of course, I need a mint plant to start with, but it's not difficult to get a few seeds.

Epicurus talked about this a lot in many different ways, and I would like to give you, perhaps for the coming days, a few of these ideas of Epicurus. So, the goal of Epicurus was to try to make people happy and to think about what are the causes of unhappiness, and how can we change our lives or the way we think about the world in order to be more happy.

He thought that one of the main things that keep us unhappy is our fear of death. So, he says, we should talk about death, we should make sure that we understand why we should not be afraid of death, and this would then automatically give us a better life because the fear of death is one of the main problems that we have. So, he says, “Death is nothing to us.” I will read it to you: “For the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.”

So the thought is, if you are afraid of death, then you should realize that after your death, the body will be resolved into its elements, it will have no feelings, it will feel no pain, there will be no dream or no other thing. Obviously, he was not a Christian; back then, there was no Christianity, so he was thinking that there really is nothing, life stops, and the time after our death will be similar in experience to the time before we were born. Nobody fears the time before we were born. Nobody has any bad experiences of that, although we all experienced it, but it is nothing because, you know, there was no perception associated with this period of time, and we felt really absolutely nothing. And the same will be true after our death. According to Epicurus, this is a reason not to fear death.

That's it for today. Have a thought about that the next time you think about death. I find it comforting. Even for a Christian, it may be comforting because in the end, nobody knows what will happen after death. It may be like Epicurus says, it may be absolutely nothing. It may be like the Christians say, it may be that we go, you know, to some place that is better, and whatever you want to imagine, or like Islam says, or like the Buddhists say, but whatever it is, the bare minimum, the worst possible situation is what Epicurus describes. And so, if this is already an okay situation, then it can only get better. So, I find this thought comforting, and perhaps it is something to think about also. Thank you, and see you tomorrow.