Thoughts on Death as a Sacred Art

February 3, 2011

Death is something that is a part of life and life is a part of death. Each needs each other for without life there is no death. There is a beginning to every end, beginning to a sentence, beginning to life and with each comes an ending which is ultimately death. Life always leads to death and we are constantly going towards our endings. It is even said in Shakespeares play Hamlet that death cannot be overcome. "All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity." (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.2). Discovering life in death and death in life is an important aspect for every person to unravel. It may be an overwhelming realization or even something that comes with time.

It took death to bring Betty Maltz back to life. Essentially the woman who was pronounced dead and then reborn believes her old life was meant to die so that the knew Betty could be born in order to leave the old life behind for good. Many people die a physical death only to waken up from the dead to be reborn with a new sense of life as their old life is gone or dead and a new life is born.

With three different faces of death, physical, psychological, and spiritual, it shows how much death is a part of ones life. The physical part of death is the loss of a heartbeat, brain activity, and breath. A psychological death is something that one does when they begin to live as if they have already died. It seems to happen mostly to depressed beings and those who just feel as though they can’t take any more of life’s challenges. With a spiritual death, old patterns, habits, and identities are wiped away and the birth of a new person becomes a realization. Betty Maltz had a spiritual and physical death when she died and it was pronounced by doctors and then had a spiritual death when she awakened and realized what there is in the afterlife.

Death is something that seems to be feared by many. However to some death is not anything to be scared of at all. This is mostly with those who have faith in an afterlife that is better than anything that could be on this Earth. Those who are in American culture fear death and what lies in the afterlife because it is the unknown and most people need proof to understand what is really the truth. Many people need to die in order to realize what they want in life and how they decide to live life. It takes someone’s death sentence for them to live their life as they have always wanted to. They realize that death is imminent and they accept their fate and death as it is. There is no point in fearing death because it will happen no matter what. There is nothing anyone can do in order to cheat death. Those who already know they are dying become peaceful when death arrives and then, instead of feeling sorry for themselves, they begin to feel sorry for their friends and family instead of them for their family are the ones who must live without them.