You Only Live Twice

In an informal conversation with the head of the Japanese secret service on the subject of life, British agent James Bond recites a Haiku, which is a poetic form of verse: ‘You only live twice – once when you are born and once when you look death in the face’. As a teenager, when I read this passage in the Ian Fleming spy book ‘You Only Live Twice’, I can recall the words resonated with some kind of deeper truth as yet to be made real.

It’s been a recurring theme with mystics and sages over the millennia of living only twice in one lifetime. Firstly the moment of birth. The impact of shock of being ejected from the warmth and congeniality of nine months’ gestation in the womb is never forgotten. Love (from the mother and the natural inflow of the purity of the psyche) cushions the gap between the inner and outer realms to a degree. But from that moment onwards, everybody alive seeks to replicate the embryonic state of the womb in their experience of life in one way or another.

Looking death in the face is identical in intensity of the immediacy of the moment to being born. Only now it is a confrontation with the energetic experience of having lived in time on the earth. In my own experience of facing death (the moment of psychic death of the self), there were two things that I immediately perceived. Firstly, that no mind could possibly know or prepare someone for the reality of death. The impact is too real and all pervasive as to be conceivable beyond the actuality of such a happening. Secondly, the love that had arisen to cushion the shock at birth is similarly present – only this time it’s the virtue of the love made conscious throughout the living life.

Although all hope is now gone (was there any to begin with?) the earth is perceived and know to be the source of all beauty as a merging of the purity of life without form. Death and birth unite as the bookends of life – for you only live twice.