In my 35 years of life, which is not terribly long, I have twice experienced the existence of death and the threat of a loss of life. It is not the kind of experience one has to cope with while struggling through some incurable disease, for such is merely a confrontation between life and death and is the human anxiety of life when death approaches. The consciousness of death I went through was purely spiritual, purely intellectual and purely psychological. It was an intellectual caressing of death by the living and a spiritual deadly impact on life (Please excuse me for such strong wording, without which I wouldn't be able to express myself accurately).

The first shock wave of death came when I was in college. I stepped into college with a lot of confusion at the age of 17. It was the time when China just started to open up and yet we were still used to living in total apathy. It was the era when people couldn't quite tell between life and death, and as a youngster, it would seem impossible for me to raise such philosophical questions as the meaning of life. For some odd reason, however, I was once deeply touched by a Japanese movie called Masterpiece. Not that the love story in the movie impressed me in any way, but the kind of courage the hero and the heroine had demonstrated in the face of death greatly shocked me. I abruptly questioned myself how I would react if death were to fall upon me? Frankly, this was the first time in my life that I became conscious of death. I was not aware that there had been many, many sayings about death far more philosophical and far more valuable before my time. Instead I struggled in vain to ask why life had boundaries, where I had been before I was born, and where I would end up to be when life was ready to leave me.

Science has since taught me that the emergence or termination of an individual life is but incidental and natural. Science, however, has failed to reveal to me whether life consciousness, intellectual meditation and psychological activities are unlimited or they will also disappear as physical life comes to an end. I have obtained knowledge from science about the substance of the natural world, but I am not able to obtain knowledge about the spiritual world. While physical substance may be shared among people, the human soul is absolutely an individual property irreplaceable by any others. Just as any spiritual awareness or search is an individual act, so is consciousness of death.

In fact, it was not until I started to be aware of death did I suddenly become aware of the huge difference between my individual self and others. And it was not until then did I really feel the existence of individual consciousness and individual behavior. Furthermore, I no longer lived in confusion as the consciousness of death fundamentally enlightened my anxiety of life and became a constant reminder to me of the meaning of life. This was a kind of spiritual transcendence in which death brought awakening of life and its threat was transformed into motivation.

The second shock wave from death came to me when I was visiting Oxford University last year. A friend of mine in China told me through e-mail that a good friend of mine surprisingly committed suicide. I was greatly shocked at this sad news. Shortly before I went abroad, this friend and I had been coeditor of a big book. The book had yet to be published and I was still full of memories of our pleasant discussions and mutual understanding. How could he have abandoned his life overnight, and how could he have courageously taken his own life at the age of 50? The sudden impact on me was not only because I lost a good friend, but more importantly I became deeply puzzled at the fragility of life. If death overpowered an individual through an incurable disease or through an accident, then the individual was simply destined to depart from this world. But if one took his life with his own hands, then this person would need a tremendous amount of courage and guts. As life was a treasure to each one of us, only a very special person would be able to voluntarily give up the invaluable life.

When I told my academic advisor the story of my friend's suicide, he in turn told me the story of how his academic advisor committed suicide. He said that one would choose to end his own life only if he believed life was no longer important to him, and that philosophers were often this type of people because they often dreamed of overcoming the limitation of life and of breaking through the boundaries of time and space. Sentimentally I was not able to accept the reality of losing a good friend, but intellectually I was able to understand my advisor's philosophy. Certainly not all philosophers would choose to end their lives, but for those who did, they at least demonstrated that, on such important philosophical issues as life and death, they had already made their judgment and selection. This friend of mine should be credited as a philosopher although I had no idea what was in his mind when he chose to kill himself. It was certainly true that, as a philosopher, his consciousness rested on not only the limitation of an individual's life but how with a limited life he could manage to drive himself toward the infinity of soul.

Having experienced the consciousness of death twice, I seemed to start to understand the true meaning of life. The first death awareness made me start to search the significance of living. To live for others was only to prove the existence of the self, and to live for the self was only to be limited within the boundaries of life. I was deeply troubled by these thoughts and I even fantasized about falling back into the apathetic past, in which I at least did not have to go through such bitter thinking and hesitation. Nevertheless, once Pandora's box was opened, nothing could be turned back to where it had used to be. The only way leading to a transcendental perception of life was to go through such hellish mental struggle.

The spiritual shock wave from the second death awareness seems to make me realize that my life does not belong to others nor to the self, but to a spiritual world that transcends our physical world. It belongs to a divine being that empowers such a spiritual world. It seems to me that this spiritual world is the habitat of every soul where worldliness do not belong. And the governor of this Utopia can be no other than the invisible divine being. But it must not be the kind of god with a name or a shape. What exactly is He I do not know, but I can feel His existence and I can feel his guidance with profundity. Maybe I will never see His face in my short life, but I will be more than satisfied and happy if I continue to receive His continual guidance. Perhaps such is a revelation from my consciousness of death.

*****

Abridged from page 22-23, December 1996 issue of Overseas Campus Magazine.