Dying before dying

If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. -Inscription at St. Paul's Monastery on Mt. Athos

After hearing these words the first time thanks to Brian Muraresku, I find myself repeating them on multiple occasions since they remind me of my own faith. For this reason, I wanted to know what Muraresku had to say about them in his book “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” What a remarkable and inspiring book! Muraresku's analysis and research shows an intellectual approach to information that can only be obtained by experience.

The path to freedom: "If you die before you die..."

To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. -Michel de Montaigne.

So long as we do not die to ourselves, and so long as we identify with someone or something, we shall never be free. The spiritual way is not for those wrapped up in exterior life. -Attar.

If you die before you die, you won't die when you die, this is the essence of Christianity and it also refers to what some traditions call the “ego death”. To die in this sense or “to practice death” is a recognition of one’s true nature. According to christians, this is the miracle of “being born again not in the flesh but in the spirit”.

Muraresku shows that this is the “immortality key” and such profound wisdom might come from the Greeks and their use of mind altering drugs during rituals. Also, it is possible that early christians used psychedelic substances. The author explores this hypothesis throughout his work. You should read this book (and I highly encourage you to do it) if you want to take a look at the relationship of the rituals performed in The Sanctuary of Eleusis and the psychedelic brew called the “kukeon” with the Eucharist. Muraresku expresses this idea in a succinct manner as follows: when we look at The Last Supper, maybe we’re not looking at Christianity’s founding event. Maybe we’re getting a glimpse of the mysterious religion that was practiced by Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, and the rest of the Athenian gang. And just maybe this is how our identity crisis comes to a dramatic end: with a psychedelic plot twist (page 36).

One of the most interesting parts of the book that prepares the reader for the fascinating exploration of ideas is the following: …the oldest unsolved riddle in the history of Western civilization has a way of getting inside your bones. When so much of their genius has survived, it just doesn’t make sense for the religion of the people who created Western culture to simply vanish into thin air. There has to be more to the Mysteries of Eleusis, the longest and most prominent spiritual tradition in Ancient Greece… Aristotle once said the initiates came to Eleusis not to learn something but to experience something. Whatever that experience was, it has successfully eluded scholars for centuries… Year after year, how were the Mysteries able to consistently deliver on an impossible promise? If you come to Eleusis you will never die. A bold claim for sure. Hard to believe nowadays. But for some reason, our ancestors believed it. In fact, they couldn’t imagine a world without the exceptional landmark. The Mysteries were said to hold “the entire human race together” (page 26).

Muraresku explains what the Phocaeans meant by dying before dying: [it] was the only way to get in touch with the true nature, underlying structure of the cosmos. According to the scholar Peter Kingsley, cited in Muraresku’s work: waking is a form of consciousness, dreaming is another. And yet this is what we can live for a thousand years but never discover, what we can theorize or speculate about and never even come close to -consciousness itself. It’s what holds everything together and doesn’t change. Once you experience consciousness you know what it is to be neither asleep or awake, neither alive nor dead, and to be at home not only in this world of the senses but in another reality as well (page 321). This is a beautiful way to describe what many refer to as a mystical experience or “seeing God”.

It is also important to point out that dying before dying can also be achieved without the use of psychedelics. Muraresku refers to a technique called “incubation” practiced in Charonium, a cave in Charia dedicated to Pluto and Persephone (page 321). For the incubation, the participants entered the cave and remained still without water and food for days. Interestingly, in the Christian tradition, Jesus was determined to fulfill his mission on Earth after his time in the desert. He fasted for forty days and was tempted by the devil. Perhaps Jesus practiced dying before dying in preparation of what was to come.

There are three ways of dying before dying. The experiences can be classified as: psychedelic, mystical or religious (through meditation, chanting, praying and sensory deprivation) and near death (NDE).

The mystery: "... you won't die when you die"

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. -John 8:32.

What happens when we die?

Muraresku states that the word “mystery” means “to shut one's eyes”. Later on, he mentions how the initiates had access to the “holiest of Mysteries”, the “Mysteries of Eleusis”. Muraresku explains: following their sip of an unusual elixir called kukeon and a night of spectacles in the temple, each pilgrim earned the honorary title epoptes, which means something like “the one who has seen it all” (page 27). What happened in Eleusis remains secret but it is fair to assume that the experience of death and rebirth was involved. Similarly, Jesus expressed that his mission was “to give sight to the blind” (John 9:39). He also said “very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3). Jesus was unveiling the mystery. According to Muraresku, the initiates of the Mysteries of Eleusis and the early christians by dying before dying found the immortality key. And now you know the secret.

Conclusion

We are species with amnesia. We have forgotten so much more about ourselves than we remember, and what the process of history and archaeology should really be about is remembering. -Graham Hancock.

I want to finish with some of the most profound paragraphs of the book that show why remembering this information is relevant and why this work by Muraresku is so important:

Perhaps the founder of the National Resources Defense Council, Gus Speth, said it best: “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation and ecosystem collapse, and that we scientists could fix those problems with enough science. But I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” But maybe the Greeks did. Maybe the momentary annihilation of the ego that Praetextatus and his fellow initiates experienced at Eleusis, or the maenads found in the ecstasy of drugged wine, was enough to glimpse the big picture. To understand that the Earth is our solitary home for the moment. That we are all in this together. And that mistreating Mother Nature is more suicide than murder (page 80).

Because the initiate will have transcended the very concepts of past, present, and future. Or life and death. Where “every moment is an eternity of its own,” as an atheist once described it to me. Why wait for death itself to experience that? If you experience it while still alive, even once, then the last moment of your life is a return to something familiar. Practice dying, the philosophers have been telling us for twenty-five hundred years. So that when your time comes, you won’t even feel the flames that engulf everything you ever knew. This has happened before, you’ll remember. This is not dying. This is becoming God. The God you've always been (page 374).

Big thanks to Brian C. Muraresku!

---

This is a great conversation between Brian Muraresku and Lex Fridman: