Memento mori is Latin for “remember you must die”. It is a great starting point to discuss zen which is all about skipping to the end.

I have written this basic blog which is a good starting point and an advanced account of how memento mori factored into my spiritual awakening.

Photo by Brian Patrick Tagalog on Unsplash

“People may not want to play by the rules, but they’re still the rules. One of the rules is that you die. We have one unalienable right, and that’s it.”
— Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

Fear of death is pervasive throughout all ages in Western culture and creates intense suffering at the end of life as people put themselves and loved ones through increasingly painful therapies in an effort to prevent what is inevitable.

Memento mori is about the practice of accepting death.

An example of memento mori

The first really visceral experience I had of my own death was the informally named Church of Bones in Rome. Its official name is Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini meaning “Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchin” in English and it contains the artfully arranged remains of 4,000 friars who gave their remains to the Catholic church between 1500 and 1870.

I hate to spoil the surprise because I think everyone should experience this church. However, its all recounted on Wikipedia so I feel okay in telling you that after progressing through several rooms of artistically arranged bones (the composition is rather disappointing but certainly industrious) one encounters a small sign saying:

"What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.”

There is no way to adequately relay the punch this statement packs in the dry dust of the cramped church. It’s so easy to disregard the dead in the pleasure of being alive, of living in the known that was previously unknown. Stumbling out into the fall sunshine after visiting the tomb I knew something I had previously chosen not to know.

I would die.

Why accepting death is transformative

One of the biggest barriers to spiritual awakening in the West is the sterilization of exposure to death and birth. I was to learn later that even my medical school classmates had relatively little exposure to these natural cycles. My contemporaries were not only terrified of death and disease but also of childbirth.

I currently believe the soul’s cycle through death and birth is no different from the sun’s cycle through sunrise and sunset. Like the sun’s passage through the horizon, these changes are always accompanied by the transient beauty of transition.

It seems to me now that the human spirit has time on the other side of life as natural and meaningful as the time spent on this plane of existence. But I do not feel qualified to comment on it any more than a fish can comment on flying.

I am alive, and there is a forgetting I have not penetrated beyond at this time in my life, although I do have experiences that are beyond consensual reality on a regular basis and I have been unmistakably out of my body twice. I accept what the divine chooses to show me.

Memento mori conclusion

The benefit of facing death is that one can truly appreciate their life. Our culture’s insistence of avoiding thoughts of death leaves us helpless to enjoy our lives in the proper context.

After all exposures to death, my aim with my own death is to reach a point where I am very happily embodied. Then let myself croak as gracefully as a leaf falls from the tree.

“The Zen Master lives happily enough in the world, but ready at any time to quit it without being in the least disturbed by the thought of death.”
— Eugene Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery