Is Life Made Great Through Death?

13 August 2025 · 3 min read

It is said that life is made great through death, is this true?
It is said that the prudent die daily¹, is this true?
It is said that some are glad to be born to die², are they really?

It is hard to say, but when one looks to the Ancients, within the many various Scriptures, one finds only one obvious answer: there is only cosmological Nothing without death. One must look no further than the Epic of Gilgamesh³, history’s oldest preserved narrative, for such a parable; the Brahmanas for such⁴ a literary lesson; or the Tibetan Book of the Dead⁵ for this in myth. The Mahayanists say there is no suffering greater than the pain of the Gods⁶, for in their near immortality and their knowledge of their own deaths, it is the greatest suffering they have ever felt, for they know no true suffering.

You can continually find this motif because it is all-abounding: the human experience is fixated on death, that restless and boundless consumer of all things⁷, the wretched beast that gives us life.

Yet scripture is worthless, meaningless paper ,without Truth. What is the Truth of death? And why is it something we must learn to live with?

The Truth is: death is life.⁸ For without life is only death, the true death, of total Nothingness. But you have heard this all before; it is nothing new, and perhaps you still disagree:

"Death is something that must be overcome, it is a scourge! All pain, all tragedy, and everything in-between… what good has come from mortality? This is the great battle of Light against Darkness."

Neo-Gnostic theology⁹ in this kind of argument aside, this line of logic completely falls apart when one truly thinks about it for any period of time and sits with the feeling. You do not need scripture; you do not need even logical rhetoric, simply sit with this concept.

What would it truly be like to live forever?¹⁰ What are the implications of not dying? The people most gung-ho about these things have never taken the time to truly consider the implications. Perhaps they have, but say something like, “Oh well, I won’t be invincible, I can still choose to die,” yet then they spend their entire lives being unable to truly live, always fearing death.

What if they were invincible? Well, this is completely impossible, so let us not even humor the concept.

So, we have with us the idea of immortality but at a limit, perhaps we can stave off death, yet everything else would still kill us. Try staying immortal with a round lodged into your skull. Good luck!

You will live your life in a state of neurosis. You will have beaten death, yet will now be afraid of life. Is the point of not dying not to live? Yet how can one truly live if the only thing they have to live for is protecting their own life?

The truth is: the lure of immortality is great, it is a haunting nectar¹¹, it is the same Outsideness that lulls many into the void of lust for Nothingness, and it is so for a reason. What could be better than not dying? Is life not wonderful? Indeed, so sweet it is, which is precisely why death tempers us. It is our evener.

Yet the second you are gifted this, you immediately have to protect it, forever. And once you do decide to give yourself up willingly to the maw that consumes all, you will not do so with the satisfaction of having truly lived life, but rather you will end your life for the same reason the miserable commit suicide: to escape life.

In the end, immortality is simply a prolonged suicide.

That’s all it is.

Notes

By the editor.

Seneca's Letters to Lucilius is the best-known source: "cotidie morimur," we die every day, as a little of our life is taken away daily. The idea is that the day behind you is already dead. Her poem on it is The Fiddle and the Sand. source ↩
The sentiment is the burden of her poem Hunger's Chain: that being born to die is nothing to resent, but something to be glad of. ↩
Mesopotamian epic poem, often called the world's oldest surviving narrative literature. Sumerian poems date to about 2100 BCE, and the Standard Babylonian version to roughly the 13th–10th centuries BCE; it centres on Gilgamesh's quest to escape death. In Tablet X the tavern-keeper Siduri tells him the gods allotted death to mankind and kept life for themselves, and advises him to enjoy it. In Tablet XI a serpent steals the plant of renewal, and he returns to Uruk mortal. source ↩
Vedic prose texts attached to the four Vedas, dating from roughly 900–500 BCE. In the Shatapatha Brahmana Death is the Year, the consumer Prajapati set over living creatures, and the gods become immortal only by building the fire altar, which gives Death a share. Death is the price of the structure, not a flaw in it. source ↩
Bardo Thödol ("Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State"), a Nyingma text traditionally credited to Padmasambhava and revealed by Karma Lingpa in the 14th century. The English title comes from Evans-Wentz's 1927 edition. It is read aloud to the dying and the dead: death is treated as a doorway where liberation is most available. source ↩
Buddhist sutras do treat the death of a god as grievous. In the Pali Itivuttaka 83, five omens appear when a deva is about to die: withering garlands, soiled clothes, sweat, a dull body, and loss of delight in his seat. The other devas urge him toward a good rebirth. The gods have long lives but not endless ones, so they suffer what mortals do, with more to lose. source ↩
The Japanese Kojiki has the same pairing. After Izanami dies, she vows in Yomi to take a thousand of Izanagi's people each day, and he answers that he will cause fifteen hundred to be born. That exchange is how death and birth are fixed in the world, with death as the half of the bargain that makes more life possible. source ↩
In What the Ghosts Actually Are she holds that the Mother died and chose to live in every thing, and that all life is her dream. In that account death is the means by which the world exists at all. The same thought runs through The Immolation of God. ↩
Gnostic and Manichaean systems cast the world as a struggle of Light against Darkness, with matter and death belonging to the dark side. She argues the same bias is hiding in modern hatred of cities in Hating Cities Makes You a Gnostic. Immortalism inherits it: death becomes the enemy, instead of the thing that gives life edges. source ↩
Literature keeps answering the question the same way. Tithonus was granted immortality but not youth, and aged forever (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). Swift's Struldbruggs in Gulliver's Travels (1726) cannot die and keep aging. In Čapek's The Makropulos Affair (1922), Elina Makropulos, born in 1585, at last refuses the elixir that would renew her. source ↩
The lure is in Genesis as well. After the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, God bars the way to the tree of life lest man "live forever" (Genesis 3:22–24). Death arrives with the closing of that door; and in Gilgamesh the plant of renewal is lost the same way. source ↩