Death finds most people unprepared, just as birth does. Many drop into the occupation called life without any particular prior training, and their exit is just as haphazard. Though life and death are polar opposites, they are also phenomena that presuppose each other. Because they are the ultimate questions of existence, they are very near and very far. Life is at once the simplest and the most splendid of things, and yet extraordinarily complex. Life is so natural and so everyday that most of the time we never stop to consider its sublimity. That is also why it would be so hard to define. The conceptual definition of the word tells us little about the miracle of life: the form of existence characterised by metabolism, growth and reproduction. Seen with the right eyes, everything is alive, everything pulses, and the universal principle of existence is made manifest in the many, many living things. On the night of a full moon it is enough to set a few small bowls of water on the ground, and the image of the Moon will be reflected in every one of them. Individual life is the reflection of universal existence. What universal kinship this signifies!
Of human life it is further said that it is the mode of existence that begins with birth, or more precisely with conception, and ends, or is transmuted, at death, and that it too is characterised by metabolism, growth and reproduction. If we take these features alone, ageing is not lifelike, for in ageing metabolism recedes, growth turns retrograde and ought rather to be called withering, and reproduction takes place, at most, in the field of wrinkles and furrows.
If life were merely metabolism, the saying would be true: we live to eat! But since we possess higher intellectual faculties, we much prefer to turn this maxim around: we eat to live. Yet once we know of prana-nourishment, or light-eating, even this formulation is questionable, for the biological life of the body can be sustained without taking in energy in the form of food.
It is more apt to understand life as an ultimate category. Being is the ultimate existential principle, which only very few call into question. This ultimate principle shows two aspects: on the one hand being, existence, life; on the other, reality, factual actuality. Existence is also the highest and ultimate general category, which holds together all that exists, and even the non-existent, for Aristotle too asserts: what does not exist also exists, as non-existent (Metaphysics, Book 4, ch. II). No one can slip out from under being; being compels us to live. According to the wise, goodness and excellence belong inseparably to being: being is splendid, and life is good.
At the same time, life is also a process, its irresistible current rolling onward. It is said that in life one thing is constant: change. Of the changes we experience in life, the first is birth, the drop into life, and then come growth and increase. Surviving and bringing forth offspring make up the outflowing, progressive cycle, and then withdrawal follows, in the form of decline and, finally, dissolution. That is why Schopenhauer said: ‘The aim of life is death.’ Are we to rest content with that, and is life no more than this?
Life, then, is at once incredibly self-evident and complex beyond compare. Even so, we are given rather few footholds for living it out. Precious little help comes here from education or family background, from success or information, for one may understand the mystery of life in another way: through initiation, and then a personal trial, in answer to which the Truth reveals itself. Fortunately, mysticism cannot be taught, only its technique, the guidance that leads towards mystical experiencing, and so this inner, exploratory way of first-hand experience never grows flat.