The Transformative Power of Death
/Actor and Comedian Garry Shandling who practiced meditation for over 30 years once wrote, “The fact of death is as common as a tree.” This is such a simple yet profoundly deep and true statement, yet the fear of death or of one’s own mortality is something that many people dread and do not treat as common at all.
The fear of death is universal but has become more prevalent in Westernized societies. Someone once said that, “It is through a quicker understanding of death that one will gain a better understanding of life,” and yet one is quicker to ignore the reality of death hoping that will prolong the inevitable. If what one resists persists, then it might be futile for people to think if they don’t give attention to something that it will go away because the mere resistance of it keeps it in its place. “The less something is openly discussed, the scarier it becomes. While avoiding talking about death can reduce a little discomfort in the short term, it probably makes most of us much more anxious to die in the long term.”
Focusing on what you don’t want creates more of the same. What we fail to see in this context of Western society is that death is as natural, a part of life as birth is and one cannot exist without the other. People fear death more than the act of dying because they fear their life will be cut short before they are able to live a full life. Therefore, I believe that embracing death is the key to the possibility of living a life well lived.
Many people have a fear of death and do not know some anxiety problems actually create the fear of death on their own but the fear of death may be a phobia by itself and not related to any anxiety issues. In other words, although the fear of death is a common cause and effect of anxiety, one can have a fear of death without having an anxiety disorder.
Some people fear the unknown aspect of death. Looking into the great abyss and not knowing what will happen next is often too much for one to bear, while others are concerned with how it will affect their loved ones when they are gone. They also fear the thought of potentially never seeing their loved ones again and experience the ultimate Fear of Missing Out (F.O.M.O.).
Some fear the loss of control and therefore, opt to take their own lives with a final act of individual will, a final assertion of the power of the “I”. Some fear the idea of dying alone and/or forgotten and therefore, seek martyrdom, an “honorable death” or a “beautiful death” as their means to an end. Other's fear death because they think it will hurt and the thought of experiencing any pain at all puts them in a panic. Furthermore, others fear the way in which they will die and have long arguments over which method would be the least painful for their demise.
Our fear of death is often so deep that it is said to be ultimately responsible for all our fears. These fears include and are not limited to, the fear of pain, fear of heights, the fear of the unknown, the fear of losing loved ones, and the fear of the negative consequences. If fear of death is, in fact, as inevitable as the event itself – there’s one change we can make to help, “while in Western cultures we tend to pretend death doesn’t exist, research has indicated that the East Asian yin and yang philosophy of death – where life can’t exist without death – allows individuals to use death as a reminder to enjoy life.”
For centuries human beings have pondered this undeniable, yet elusive, aspect of life but the reason people fear death most is because they fear the idea of not having completed things, achieved the things they wanted or contributed in a way they deem as meaningful by the time they die. A well respected psychoanalyst named Otto Rank viewed “the fear of life and death as a fundamental human motivation, further accentuating that people fear death not because of death itself, but because they fear that their life will end before they have had the opportunity to live a full life.”
Many see death as a cold, dark and scary place and “the basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death,” so imagine the predicament that puts one in being that we are programmed for self-preservation at all costs. The feeling of not knowing what we will find in the great beyond is hard to bare and yet, in life one can never really know what lies in the next year or even around the next corner.
The practice of Buddhism approaches death differently, not only through their concepts of karma and reincarnation but also with the idea that if one has met someone in this life, it means they have met them in several lives before and will meet them in several lives to come so there is no fear of losing a loved one ever. Buddhism teaches that human beings come out of the world, not into it. In Christianity however, the ultimate goal after death is salvation for an eternity in heaven and they consider “life on earth is just a fragment of the existence of an eternal soul.” Finding oneself within the gap between these beliefs, directly challenges societal constructs of death as finite and can be revolutionary to one’s way of living. Once this veil is lifted, one finds themselves wondering how could it be that everything they believed until that moment could be untrue and begin seeing death differently.
Once this shift in perspective occurs, life is seen differently. It is at this moment that belief is revolutionized and a new perspective is created in the context of what was once believed about death. Pulitzer Prize winning author Ernest Becker, who’s quest was to understand human motivation in the context of mortality, stated that “the fear of death that humans experience, though, lies not so much in the death of the body but in the death of meaning, for it is meaning that defines the human self and society.” In his award winning book, “The Denial of Death” published in 1974 and for which he won the Pulitzer, he writes, “By successfully living under the terms of the immortality project, people feel they can become heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This, in turn, gives people the feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and are significant in the grand scheme of things.”
In an article written by New World Encyclopedia, contributors stated that Becker believed, “since human beings have a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we can transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving the symbolic half which he described as human pursuit of “immortality projects” (or causa sui), in which we create or become part of something that we feel will outlast our time on earth.”
Exploration into energy and scientific theories such as quantum mechanics, brings to the surface many parallels that one could draw between science and spirituality. Essentially, being free from the confines of the idea of a ‘finite’ death removes the anxiety and fear. One can now not only enjoy the whimsical idea of traveling through space and time as everlasting energy but can use their free energy in this life in the pursuit of meaningful projects instead of worrying about the unknown. Given Mark Twain’s experience, maybe traveling through space is not such a farfetched concept. Before he died, he is quoted as saying, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”
Twain was indeed born just after Halley’s Comet appearance in 1835, and died one day after it appeared in 1910. Not only is this an uncommon occurrence given that Halley’s comet only passes by the Earth approximately every 76 years but even more so that Twain predicted it. Imagining Mark Twain’s soul as an eternal form of energy flying through space in realistic terms is something that can be explained with science through Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (E = mc2), which states that energy or mass can never be created or destroyed.
Becker explored that, “every personality is formed within a particular culture and the symbols of that culture are incorporated within each person’s identity. Human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of mortality.” In Western cultures, primarily the US and UK for example, people experience death as a somber and morbid occasion as they sit dressed in black and silently weep. Up to years later, the mere mention of the deceased person’s name is avoided to prevent loved ones from breaking out into desperate cries. Death is primarily a topic that is avoided. What most fail to realize is that people tend not to be afraid of death itself but of what would happen as a result.
One avoids it because one is afraid of what they think might happen. The US and UK are believed to be two of the biggest death denying societies and it is no coincidence how similar they are in ritual. If other cultures such as Asia and India embrace death why do others fear it? In the West, when someone dies it is customary to say, “They are resting now.” Makes one wonder why life should be considered as something to rest from, when it can be one of the greatest adventures. Reflecting on what seems to be an impermanent nature of life can bring someone’s priorities into perspective. For example, shortly after his 21st birthday, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and given less than three years to live. This prognosis along with losing control of the use of his muscles took him into a severe depression riddled with nightmares about being executed. Despite of this, he still continued to walk short distances and perform simple tasks such as dressing and undressing and his condition stabilized. He began feeling a new sense of purpose. Hawking said, “When you are faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realize that life is worth living and that there are a lot of things you want to do.”
In Western cultures, maybe this is why martyrdom or honorable deaths are often revered and suicides generally shunned. In general, society cannot fathom someone giving up their life without any regard. It turns out we often find that the intent of the suicide was more so to escape, rather than to prove something. In cases where the person chooses to die by euthanasia, meaning terminating life in a painless manner to prevent suffering, it is looked upon with honor and dignity. In the US for example, talking to the elderly about death is no more unseemly than talking to teenagers about sex and yet both are important inevitabilities of life. It is not until recently in the US, that customs such as the proliferation of Green Funerals have emerged. There are also time honored traditions, such as in New Orleans where they celebrate a person’s death by marching band parade.
As mentioned previously, death is looked upon very differently in Eastern cultures around the world. A twelfth century monk known as Nichiren Daishonin once said, “to understand life one must first understand death.” In Tibet, for example, they believe that “the soul moves on, while the body becomes an empty vessel,” therefore, their custom is “to place the body on a mountaintop, which exposes it to the elements.” In the Balinese tradition, cremation releases the soul so it is free to inhabit a new body — and doing this is considered a sacred duty.
For families in Toraja, Sulawesi Indonesia, they hold onto the bodies of their deceased loved ones for indeterminate amounts of time, most often years, while continuing to treat them as members of the family. Then one day they invest in a lavish funeral which is nothing less than a victorious parade throughout the village.
In a recent poll conducted online, 73% of the participants said that their fear of death did not derive from the fear of death itself, but from the fear of not living life. This indicates that most people feel that they do not want to die before having lived a full life. In a study at the University of Sydney, they asked terminal patients to write blog posts about their experience. They also asked participants who were not terminally ill to imagine they were dying and write blog posts, as well. Lisa Iverach, a research fellow, explained that the “blog posts from the terminally ill were found to have considerably more positive words and fewer negative ones than those imagining they were dying – and their use of positive language increased as they got close to death.” The study highlights how the participants may have been less negative because the mystery around death was removed and they were focusing more on what makes life meaningful. “The healthy participants used "significantly" more negative language, words like fear, terror, and anxiety, while those actually dying used far more positive words like happiness and love.”
The last words of inmates on death row were also compared with a group of people tasked with imagining they were facing execution. “Again, there were fewer negative words from the prisoners. Overall, those facing death focused more on what makes life meaningful, including family and religion.” Kurt Gray, one of the researchers said, “We talk all the time about how physically adaptable we are, but we’re also mentally adaptable. We can be happy in prison, in hospital, and we can be happy at the edge of death as well. When we imagine our emotions as we approach death, we think mostly of sadness and terror but it turns out, dying is less sad and terrifying - and happier - than you think.” He also went on to say that “dying isn’t just part of the human condition, but central to it. Everyone dies, and most of us are afraid of it. Our study is important because it’s saying this isn’t as universally bad as we think it is.”
People of all types and backgrounds have grappled with the ephemeral nature of being a human being. Throughout history great minds have weighed in on the subject, demonstrating that a life well lived beats out fearing death. For example, Mark Twain said, "The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time." Martin Luther King Jr. said, “It doesn’t matter how long you live. It matters how well you live.” Peace Activist Mildred Norman, also known as the Peace Pilgrim said, “Could we just see a little deeper into life, we would grieve at birth and rejoice at death. If we but knew how short is the earth life in comparison to the whole, we would be less troubled with the difficulties of the earth life than we are troubled now with the difficulties of one of our days.” And Oscar Wilde put it beautifully when he wrote, “to live is the rarest thing in the world and most people just exist.”
Often times among the hustle and bustle of everyday life one tends to lose themselves in search of purpose, when in reality one fails to see that ‘living’ is the purpose. The founder of Analytical Psychology, Carl Jung, wrote, “Still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.” This quote which uses a metaphor to span over a person’s lifetime from birth to death is a poignant reference to how questioning what is, creates an opening for transformation in this life.
A famous writer named David Foster Wallace who died tragically by committing suicide, wrote an acclaimed commencement speech titled “This is Water.” In this story he tells the tale of two fish that are unaware of the water that they are swimming in. He said, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about....The fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: ‘This is water, this is water.’”
In an article about the speech, Jenna Krajeski writes, “In it, he argues, gorgeously, against unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” Embracing death leads one to appreciating life fully, and with this realization an urgency to live life fully is established.
The concept that the fear of death may prevent one from living life fully or that embracing death opens up a path to living a fulfilled life, is not to be interpreted as a definitive truth or an affirmation of any kind. Neither should it be perceived as the answer to existence. This work is limited to a subset of research pinpointed to revisit the concept that several thought leaders have shared throughout history; essentially that there is no purpose of life but that living is the purpose. This concept may be seen as true within the parameters discussed herein and may not be true for everyone. Furthermore, the findings in this study may or may not be true for those who have never experienced fear of any kind. And these findings, are not only limited to those who have had a fear of death.
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