THOUGHTS ON DEATH
The reasons I fear death are probably the same as
those of most people. The subject seems to divide itself into 5 main
elements.
- loneliness fear of losing those held dear
- Fear of pain and terror
- fear of the unknown/ lack of religious faith
- fear of annihilation/ destruction/ non-existence
- fear for one’s soul’s future and prospects
The loneliness
can be understood as a desire to keep what one has around one now. This
means friends and close relations, position in life, career and
possessions; none of which can be taken with you beyond the grave. This
inevitably leads one to realise that none of these things actually
define the person you are, or at least to question this idea. Also, the
actual importance we impute on these things is a lot less than it
appears to be. We cling to these aspects of our life out of a misguided
sense of security and a deluded sense of their importance for our
survival.
Because death is inevitable and because we cannot take
these things with us beyond the grave, so therefore, these things we
cannot take with us cannot contribute very greatly to our spiritual
make-up or our spiritual future; or in fact, have much bearing on our
future at all. They constitute ‘baggage’ with which we have become
encumbered along life’s path, but which we needs must surrender, abandon
and part-company with at death. Because we have to part company with it,
we must try to realign our perception of it and realise its relative
insignificance and thus this may help us to suppress our deep emotional
attachment to it. We wrongly ascribe these things to have much greater
power and importance than they truly possess.
Another line of argument relates to what we come to
this life with as a baby– pretty well nothing at all. We arrive with no
friends, no possessions, no language, intellect, personality, etc at
all. We arrive with no possessions except consciousness and a bundle of
desires and aversions, etc. But little babies are not locked into a
state of permanent despair and panic –far from it, mostly. Thus the
loneliness and fear of losing possessions is shown to not really be
justified through reasoning and careful analysis. It is quite clearly a
false fear, which can be successfully annulled through thinking along
these lines. We can see therefore that like that of a little baby, our
inner happiness is not dependent upon the folks we hold dear nor upon
our possessions, as we have come to think.
Also, we have left loved ones behind in previous lives
many times and yet survived OK and no doubt met up with them again and
again. So why worry? Trust to our inner heart!
The fear and terror
we have of death arises from our knowledge that pain and hurt, physical
and mental exist and are often involved in the events of dying. People
who die violent deaths experience this type of thing, as do their loved
ones around them. Thus we assume that it is how everyone dies and how we
shall die. These elements of fear and terror are also compounded by our
certain knowledge that the time of arrival of our death in entirely
unknown to us. This creates two problems –one of fear and panic and the
other is a form of complacency. We do not know the time we are to die
and thus as each day of our life flows on undisturbed, so we are apt to
become complacent and think that death is ‘such a long way off that I
needn’t worry about it’. This creates an ignorance about it — which
stems from never thinking about it or preparing for its arrival. This in
turn generates a great fear about it, so we avoid the subject most of
the time.
Because we also know fear and grief when anyone near
to us dies, so we avoid the pain the subject evokes; by such events we
become reminded of our own impending death, our own mortality, which we
prefer not to confront. We are now and then reminded, through sad
events, that we are no different from other folks and that we too shall
also die. But not knowing when it will happen increases our uncertainty,
and as we recover, so also our complacency and ignorance of it return
and become compounded to comfort us. Yet both the fear and the comfort
are misplaced responses to it.
Fear of the unknown
is related both to the lack of knowledge of when it will come, and also
the fear of terror and pain at death itself. It is also related to our
fear of the future of our soul and its prospects. We fear death like an
unknown land or region which we must someday reluctantly visit, and
which contains unknown and hostile forces and elements. Not knowing what
death involves or how it takes place, we fear it like a painful and
destructive event and one surrounded by mystery and the fear of unknown.
Fear of annihilation and
destruction assumes we exist in the way we
assume anyway. Yet we know that we only exist as a consciousness plus a
bundle of desires and aversions. That is the bottom line. And that is
all we will take with us from this world. Thus this topic relates to
self and the world as illusions and the nature of self and ego. In any
case we can take comfort from the fact that we are indestructible, no
matter what happens to us. In any religion, the soul or ‘spark of life’
is not destroyed by death, but passes on into definite futures. We know
also through direct personal experience that this spark of life can
disappear and then safely return, thru sleep every day. Thus we can take
heart that death is but a change exactly like sleep, from which we will
certainly re-emerge.
Fear for the future of the soul
relates to our fears about our moral conduct in this life and any
retributions that we feel might be due to us. We must face these with
honesty, remorse and a desire for self-improvement. But we must also not
dwell too deeply upon past negative events, but appeal for forgiveness
from ourselves and the wider world itself to give us renewed hope for
the future of our soul. We must try and adopt a positive attitude
towards our future and the good it can create.