MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

Welcome Everything, Push

Away Nothing

Ostaseki was hired as the first director of the Zen Hospice From a Conversation with

Project in 1987. This project started in San Francisco in one of Frank Ostaseki
the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic. Many of the first clients
were inflicted with AIDS and the center focused on providing EPISODE #104
compassionate care informed by Buddhist and secular The Lessons Of Death
philosophies.

Drawing on the lessons he learned while caring for the dying, as well as his own personal journey, he
authored a book which almost serves as a workbook for dying on its own. He organized it into 5 distinct
ideas, which he called “Invitations.”

1. Don’t Wait - An encouragement to recognize the

impermanence of life and to live fully in the present
moment. Live life with a sense of urgency and purpose.

2. Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing - Embrace

life in its entirety, including the difficult and painful
aspects.

3. Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience - A reminder

to not hold back or try to protect ourselves. Cultivate
deeper connections and compassion.

4. Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things - An

invitation to find moments of stillness and peace even in
the midst of busyness and chaos.

5. Cultivate “Don’t Know” Mind - Approach life with

curiosity and openness rather than clinging to fixed ideas
or beliefs.

“Too often we hold back from life, not wanting to be hurt, not wanting to be disappointed. But in holding
back, we also hold ourselves apart from the richness and fullness of life. When we bring our whole selves
to the experience, we open ourselves up to the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences. We
may feel joy and we may feel sorrow, but by not holding back, we are able to fully engage with life in all
its richness.”

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MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

Sensing Death and the

Toppled Pyramid

Kaufman’s exploration of Abraham Maslow is a helpful reimagining From a Conversation with

of the well-known “hierarchy of needs,” which is often represented Scott Barry Kaufman
as a pyramid that looks something like this:
EPISODE #209

A Good Life

Following a major heart attack in 1967, Abraham Maslow reexamined his hierarchy of needs and began to
question the idea that self-actualization was the ultimate goal of human motivation. Instead, he saw self-
actualization as a continuous process that could occur at any point on the hierarchy, rather than just at
the top. Maslow also explored other areas such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, refining and
expanding his ideas about human motivation throughout the rest of his life.

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CONTINUED

Sensing Death and the Toppled Pyramid

Kaufman’s book Transcend is an effort to understand exactly what Maslow may have meant by “self-
actualization.” In the end, he keeps the shape of the of the pyramid and some remnants of the relationship
between different types of needs, but reimagines it as a sailboat like this:

Kaufman writes: “The pyramid from the 1960s told a story that Maslow never meant to tell: a story of
achievement, of mastering level by level until you’ve “won” the game of life. But that is most definitely not
the spirit of self-actualization that humanistic psychologists like Maslow emphasized. The human condition
isn’t a competition; it’s an experience.

Life isn’t a trek up a summit. It’s more like a vast ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and
discovery but also danger and uncertainty. In this choppy surf, a pyramid is of little use. What we really
need is something more flexible and functional: a sailboat.”

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MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

Noetic Qualities

Griffiths has been spearheading the effort to study and promote From a Conversation with

the use of psychedelic drugs as a therapeutic intervention to treat Roland Griffiths

all forms of anxiety and depression. Among those most universal
forms of anxiety is the fear and discomfort surrounding death. EPISODE #306

Psychedelics & Mortality

In one study published in 2016, he and his team worked with 80
patients with life-threatening cancer in Baltimore and New York
City. They were given laboratory-synthesized psilocybin in a carefully monitored settling in conjunction
with limited psychological counseling. More than three quarters reported significant relief from
depression and anxiety.

In an interview about the study given to Scientific American Magazine, Griffith’s summarized what the
patients were telling him: “There is something about the core of this experience that opens people up to
the great mystery of what it is that we don’t know. It is not that everybody comes out of it and says, ‘Oh,
now I believe in life after death.’ That needn’t be the case at all. But the psilocybin experience enables a
sense of deeper meaning, and an understanding that in the largest frame everything is fine and that there
is nothing to be fearful of. There is a buoyancy that comes of that which is quite remarkable. To see people
who are so beaten down by this illness, and they start actually providing reassurance to the people who
love them most, telling them ‘it is all okay and there is no need to worry’— when a dying person can
provide that type of clarity for their caretakers, even we researchers are left with a sense of wonder.”

In the paper that we mentioned in the episode, God-

Encounter Experiences, Griffiths uses a questionnaire scale
to attempt to quantify these kinds of spiritual encounters. It’s
called the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ ). It was
developed in 1962 under the supervision of Timothy Leary,
who became a prominent figure of the anti-war movement of
the 60s and once uttered the famous phrase “turn on, tune in,
drop out.” The MEQ contains 43 items of inquiry with names
like “perceived oneness with the universe,” “feelings of peace
and harmony,” “sense of the sacredness of all things,” “sense
of being filled with love or compassion,” and “noetic quality.”

Noetic describes a type of knowledge or understanding

that is acquired through direct personal experience. In this
context, it describes a deep and profound sense of insight
or understanding which is felt during the psychedelic
experience.

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MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

Reflections on Mortality

As we noted in the episode, Galloway is not particularly interested From a Conversation with

in death. Most of his commentary and insight is about business, Scott Galloway
technology, politics, and society. But as you heard in his exchange
with Sam, he does recognize the ever-present role of death- EPISODE #189
anxiety in shaping all emergent sociological phenomena, such as Wealth & Happiness
status seeking, war, greed, loneliness, and religion.

In the subsequent years since that recording with Sam, Galloway has written about these topics much
more directly. In 2020, he published a book entitled Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity, which
emphasized the pandemic’s impact on our relationship to mortality. He writes:

“Death, or rather our avoidance of death, is an organizing principle of Western society. It’s the thing we
spend the most money on, from medicine to insurance to entertainment. It’s the one thing we can’t
outsource, can’t automate, can’t opt out of. And yet, for most of us, death remains an abstract concept. We
know it’s coming, but we don’t want to think about it. Until COVID-19, that is. The pandemic has forced us to
confront our own mortality, and the mortality of those we love, in a way that no other crisis has.”

Galloway goes on to make societal

predictions stemming from a new kind
of “cautiousness” that the pandemic
engendered. He predicts that this awareness
will accelerate the shift towards a more
digital, online, and remote society.

Perhaps the pandemic’s reminder of our

mortality only further entrenched the kind of
fear, denial, and avoidance of death which
Sam encourages us to reframe as motivating,
calming, and centering forms of mindfulness.

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MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

4,000 Weeks

There is a paradox that can happen when a “mindlessness” of From a Conversation with

death manifests as anxiety and ultimately grows into a form of Oliver Burkeman
constant “busyness.” We can feel like we are in a race against the
relentless passage of time. But if we actually were ignoring or EPISODE #289
successfully denying death, then why would this feel like a race at Time Management for Mortals
all? Why would there be a finish line?

This paradoxical picture is likely due to the impossibility of actually forgetting death. That thesis is
famously explored in Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death” (in our recommended list). But Burkeman’s
Time Management for Mortals takes this paradox on directly and outlines some practical tools for readers
to use in order to find harmony with the limitations of mortality.

Burkman names his philosophy “timefullness.” He

describes this framework as being engaged with
the present moment while not feeling rushed or
distracted. This mentality fights against the feeling
of just “wanting to get things done quickly” and
instead focuses on the quality of our experiences.

Throughout the book, and the full curated lesson

included on the Waking Up App, Burkeman favors
measuring life in terms of weeks. This pegs the
total number at approximately 4,000. This kind of
exercise of quantizing and counting a lifespan is
not meant to spark anxiety about a diminishing
remainder of days. Instead, it’s meant to remind us
that we can’t accomplish everything in the world,
and therefore “we have to make choices and
prioritize the things that matter most.”

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MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

Repairing the Machines

West is a theoretical physicist by training, but has applied From a Conversation with

this area of study towards cities, economies, companies, and Geoffrey West
biological organisms. This final application is what brings him into
this contemplation of death and dying. He does not go as far as EPISODE #86
the Silicon Valley dreamers who imagine an army of nanorobots From Cells to Cities
in our bloodstream constantly self-repairing the system in such a
way that a human organism could continue living indefinitely. But
he does bring a kind of mechanistic thinking to assessing why any system decays and dies.

When it comes to an organic living body, West notes the complex relationship between metabolism and
aging. He describes a kind of trade-off between metabolic rate and lifespan where larger organisms tend
to live longer due to their slower metabolic rate per unit of mass.

His book Scale does not focus specifically on

the notion of extension of human lifespans,
but it does surface some underlying
principles which are useful in understanding
the decline of living organisms. But perhaps
the most interesting philosophical point
to consider in a compilation about death
is the idea that doing things like reducing
one’s internal temperature to exponentially
slow one’s metabolic rate, lowering caloric
intake, and reducing one’s activity could
theoretically extend a lifespan. One pictures
something like a computer in sleep-mode to
preserve its battery, or a bear in hibernation
for months on end.

But the question is obvious: Do we want longer lifespans simply for the sake of having more time? Do we
want to be “couch potatoes,” as West jokes, living boring, slow, cold, but long lives? Or is there another
inherent trade off where the philosophical picture looks less like a futile game of hide and seek with
death, and more like an acceptance of its inevitability and a full, energetic, healthy engagement with the
opportunity to live well.

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MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

Live Fully, For One Day You

Will Die

In this solo episode, Sam examines many paradoxes when it From a Conversation with

comes to the phenomenon of death. The one he ultimately Sam Harris

focuses on is the unexamined, often religious, notion that if death
is truly the end of the continuity of self and personal experience, EPISODE #263
then nothing matters and all beauty is lost. Sam points out that, The Paradox of Death
upon closer inspection, the very opposite seems to be more
true. The transitory nature of anything is what makes that very
thing beautiful.

If one could view life from the perpetual philosophical “view from nowhere,” it might appear as something
like a flower which only blooms for a brief moment. The briefness of the thing amplifies its beauty and
provides a suggestion to savor it and be attentive to it, for it will not be here tomorrow.

As a meditation on this final point, consider the Tibetan Buddhist monk tradition of creating “mandalas.” This
tradition dates back over 2,500 years. The monks create elaborate circular designs out of colored grains of
sand. The results are intricately designed art pieces full of moral and religious symbolism. The art piece can
take weeks to produce, but then they are unceremoniously wiped away in a process called “dissolution,” an
homage to the impermanence of all things and the Buddhist concepts of non-attachment.

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SERIOUS QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

How often do you think about death?

How do different theories of consciousness (materialism, panpsychism, idealism - see

our compilation on Consciousness for more) change the nature of death?

Ostaseki says that one thing we know for certain about death is that it is more than a
“medical event.” Do you agree?

What are the benefits of mortality? Should we want to keep it?

What are the benefits of immortality? Should we want to achieve it?

Is there any way to describe a fear of death as psychologically healthy?

Have you used psychedelic drugs as an aid for explorations of death and mortality? If
not, is Roland Griffiths’ work intriguing to you? If so, how do your experiences inform
your mindfulness of death?

Would you like to know the exact time of your death? How about the deaths of your
friends and family?

How would meditations on your death affect your level of compassion towards others
and/or your daily behavior?

In 1951, Dylan Thomas wrote a famous poem called “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good
Night,” which delivers an emotional plea to resist the inevitability of death and continue
fighting for life until the very end. The poem repeats the line “Do not go gentle into
that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” How does this plea strike
you after listening to this compilation?

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 STUFF TO CHECK OUT

Included Making Sense Episodes Academic Papers

#104 — The Lessons of Death Survey of subjective “God encounter experiences”:
#209 — A Good Life Comparisons among naturally occurring experiences and
#306 — Psychedelics & Mortality those occasioned by the classic psychedelics psilocybin,
LSD, ayahuasca, or DMT by Griffiths, R., Hurwit, E., Davis, A.,
#189 — Wealth & Happiness
Johnson, M., & Jesse, R.
#289 — Time Management for Mortals
Factor Analysis of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire:
#86 — From Cells to Cities
A Study of Experiences Occasioned by the Hallucinogen
#263 — The Paradox of Death Psilocybin by MacLean, K. A., Leoutsakos, J.-M. S., Johnson, M. W.,
& Griffiths, R.
Relevant Non-Included Making Sense Episodes Revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire
#297 — Preparing for the End The Pre/Trans Fallacy by Ken Wilber
#98 — Into the Dark Land Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity by Thomas Clark
#7 — Through the Eyes of a Cult
Art
Books Death and the Miser by Hieronymus Bosch
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman Music
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens Blackstar by David Bowie
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Scale by Geoffrey West Audio
The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski Don’t Disappear by Jay Shapiro
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty
Sum by David Eagleman Board Game
Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr
Blogs
Wait But Why - The Tail End Death Resources
Death Over Dinner
Poems Death Cafe
Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas The Conversation Project
Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson Death Doula Network International
Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant Griffiths Fund
Aubade by Philip Larkin
The Layers by Stanley Kunitz Debate
Death is Not Final
Youtube
Ask a Mortician Caitlin Doughty

Art and Design

Series art and layout: Morgan Braaten | Illustrations: Jason Chatfield