This is the second part, which deals with the beautiful death. In the first part I showed that Epicurus, as often as he is quoted with his famous statement that death is none of our business, in truth does not free us from the fear of death, but cynicism achieves that. In this part, I show how it is possible not only to leave behind the fear of death, but also to how to make death your best friend.
In fact, hedonism fails all along the line with the non-achievement of its promise to realize maximum pleasure in life. Cynicism and even the Stoa, on the other hand, not only show the way out of the fear of death, but in truth, even if most teachers of philosophy at schools and universities present it differently, they teach precisely the art of living that actually achieves maximum pleasure in life, even if, or rather precisely because, they do not claim this as their goal.
In the first part on euthanasia, the beautiful death, as the self-determined death, I did not succeed in showing the way that leads not only to the maximum overcoming of fear of death, but even to the desire to die. This I now want to make up for in this second part.
How to increase your joy of life through lust for death
For most people, dealing with death is not exactly a pleasant topic. The famous admonition: Memento mori!, remember that you are mortal, may seem sensible to us, but rather not as a method to increase the joy of life.
But that is exactly the promise we cynics can make. The thought of your mortality should not drive you to live faster, because life is so short and therefore you should not waste a minute of your precious time. On the contrary, it should fill you with love and gratitude. The thought that you will soon die should give you serenity and the feeling of power and the awareness of being the hero, the owner, of your life.
The secret to achieving this maximum of power, eudaimonia, is hidden in just one word: love!
The cynic Jesus expressed it with the famous sentence, which is usually misunderstood as a moral demand (so also by Nietzsche), instead of a magic incantation.
The magic formula is:
“Love your neighbor as yourself“.
Keep reading: About the gods of the cynics
And in a state of ecstasy, no one doubts who has experienced it for himself in this or a similar way, Jesus hands bread to his disciples. And they are to eat it, imagining that it is his flesh they are eating. And they are to drink the wine, imagining that it is his blood that they drink.
Now the idea of eating the flesh of a human being, even a beloved friend, and drinking his blood is so outlandish that churches have long understood it only as a mere symbol, and recently young theologians have even wanted to understand it only as a metaphor for something quite different, namely unification within the church.
But in fact this tradition has always been misunderstood in a much more fundamental way. It is not to be repeated symbolically. But Jesus called again and again to follow him. So it is not about imagining to eat the beloved, but it is about imagining to be even this beloved who wants to be eaten. And this is not in order to take upon myself the sins of my friends, but to gain the greatest possible power over my own life, namely in surrender, not out of a sense of duty, but out of full and that includes erotic, love and maximum pleasure.
Who has experienced this pleasure of total devotion only once in full intensity, to us probably mostly only possible with the use of intoxicants, is initiated for life.
You don’t have to repeat such an experience every few months. Because you are an “initiate” after that. You belong to those who have attained eternal life. Not after death, but immediately here and now. It is, to put it profanely, like knowing how to swim or how to ride a bicycle. Once learned, you never forget it in your life.
You have become immortal then.
Keep reading: Go cannibal