Carlos Castaneda wrote many pages on the subject, as he transcribed the thoughts of Don Juan and others onto paper. Castaneda wrote with much passion about being intimate with ones own death. The Marine Corps alludes to this in every commercial, as does the Army, probably the Air Force and Navy to a lesser extent.
The Marine Corps is not satisfied with a hot body to mindlessly charge a machine gun nest. The Marine Corps wants people who are intimately aware of their own death. People who are intimate with their own death are more aware than other people, and generally, when they do something it is for the right reasons. That may sound silly, but it is not. If the Marine Core just wanted cannon fodder, they would not be focused on the extreme, and intensive training each recruit goes through before he or she is entitled to call themselves a Marine.
When I first read Castaneda, I thought to myself, he was being silly and overly dramatic. We are all going to die someday, so who cares? That is exactly what Castaneda and the Marine Corps care about. Most people walking the earth today simply do not care about their pending death. They are either scared of the thought, or they push it out into that place we put everything that will occur sometime, but not soon.
If I wished to waste your time, I could list thousands of examples of people who never considered their death in any fashion, and without warning they ceased to exist. I can name only a few people that I know personally who have really taken the time to contemplate their death and have become intimate with it.
Those folks that are intimate with their own deaths know their is no time to waste. Wasting time is not the same as doing nothing. Wasting time is not caring about your own individual actions or their effects on others and the world around you. Wasting time because there is always a time in the future to make things right.
People who are intimate with their death know that that future may end in the next instant, and they do not have a guarantee of any future time. When I began to have an understanding of this concept it seemed sort of silly. Of course I have plenty of time. I have tomorrow, probably next month, most likely next year, and so on, and so forth.
People who are intimate with their own death live with a different thinking about time. They understand that they may not be here tomorrow, so they do everything in a right now time. They know they do not have time to ignore their children, their spouse, or themselves. Ten minutes from now may be too late for them to come back and correct any mistakes, apologize, or decide to pay attention.
This does not mean that people who are intimate with their own deaths are morbid, or fixated on the end of their lives, because they are not. What they are is more mindful, aware of their actions, and how they affect those around them. They are generally less prone to quick bursts of anger. They are more open with their feelings, and appear to have thicker skins than others in their social group. They are also more comfortable with themselves because they are intimate with their own deaths.
Like anyone else, they do not know when their death is going to happen, or how it will happen, but they know it could be in the next five minutes. Because of this knowledge they are more careful to make this minute count. As uncomfortable as it may sound, try to contemplate your own death, and become friends with it. It will change your life for the better in ways you never thought possible. You will begin to understand how precious and brief your life, and the lives of those around you really are.
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