death anxiety

We got used to the smoke from the chimneys and to the smell, but never to the fear that we would be burned next.

Fear of death had been described as worse than death itself, and fear of pain as worse than pain itself.

Fear was the imagination of what could happen to a person, and that imagination was propelled by hearing the cries and other sounds of others being beaten and tortured, by seeing the effects of inflicted pain, by seeing death itself.

All these elements were integrated by fear within one's imagination, and this, as many survivors concurred, was worse than what was actually experienced.

Every time I passed through the camp gate, I trembled that my bandaged head would cause one of the SS men to call me out and send me to be killed in the gas chamber.

At the time, there were constant selections of Muselmaner, who were then sent to the gas chambers.

Fear of death was ubiquitous as death itself.

It affected every prisoner.

But one of the main subjects of meditation in every religion I've studied, whether it's Christianity or Buddhism or others, have all made the central meditation on death.

And no doubt one of the reasons is to help the monk or the seeker of peace to overcome the fear of death.

because the fear of death is endemic to the ego.

As long as you are identified with a body that is mortal and that feels pain and that gradually loses its ability to function, on the way to death, it is very difficult if not impossible at that level of consciousness to remain at peace in the face of one's fate.

And so the practice of yoga, whether it's again, as I say, Buddhist or Hindu or Christian or Jewish or Taoist, is to pass through the illusion that there is death in the sense of a cessation of consciousness.

Your consciousness has projected itself into the body and at the death of the body will bring yourself back into your real nature, but you can be in that real nature while the body is alive.

And that is a great gift, probably the greatest gift you could give yourself.

to be free of that fear of death and of pain and of sorrow at the death of others.

And so naturally the mind constrains itself or creates these afflictions.

And the final one of these five is something called abhinivesha, which is to put it lightly, the fear of death or the fear of impermanence, which is directly associated to the first of the kleshas, which is ignorance, ignorance of who you truly are.

And he mentions, he goes on to mention that this is present even in the wise.

And I think here he means even in people that have awareness around this kind of concept or even, even enlightened, um, it seems to be.

impart a very necessary function of the body itself.

If the body didn't have a fear of death or a fear of it ending, then it would have no impetus to further itself, to stay alive.

Like if I just, if my body felt like it was just a one, a singular part of the ether itself and everything's connected, We have no reason to carry on as a body.

So what's interesting here I think is a balance of recognition that you're simultaneously a body and a mind but also something that's deeper.

It is a mainspring of human activity." In this two-part mini-series, we are going to examine the ideas of Ernest Becker.

In this first lecture, we will investigate Becker's ideas regarding the fear of death and how it influences our experience of reality.

In the second lecture, we will explore Becker's ideas regarding how the fear of death drives human behavior, giving rise to what he called the universal urge to heroism.

Like many thinkers, Becker proposed that the capacity for abstract conceptual thought, which enables one to contemplate objects and events divorced from the here and now, is responsible for transforming human beings into the most adaptable and advanced species ever to roam the earth.

Becker even went so far as to state that such an ability qualifies the human animal for the title of a small god.

It seems like a hoax.

Becker maintained that if one were to grasp the full significance of their impending death, it would thrust them into a state of paralyzing anxiety.

Therefore, he proposed that in order to act in this world with relative composure, human beings alleviate the fear of death by striving to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.

Now what are we talking about?

The fear of death.

[laughs] Fear of death.

There you go.

So fear of death, I think, motivates us and changes us, and I think a lot of times as you age, one of the reasons that you change things about the way that you're living is because you start to realize, "I may not be here forever."

Yeah, there's a tipping point where you are no longer young, where you're, where you feel that you're growing towards something, and now you are on the down-

[laughs] Down

And then you're thinking like, this kid is here, and their parent is gripped with pain, cowered over, and this kid is there, and who's attending to the child? And this child is just sort of magically shows up in this circumstance, in this time and day, in this year, in this hour, and then they're here.

What happens when we die, and why does the fear of it grip us so tightly? In today's episode, Kara and I will go somewhere where I think a lot of you will recognize.

She shares how grief cracked her open and became a doorway into transformation, and how her own lifelong fear of death, something she's actively working to change her relationship with, turned out to be the hidden engine behind her spiritual curiosity.

She takes us into experiences that sound remarkably like near-death experiences, except she never died.

The messages came through, she's going to share with us, and she described something extraordinary, encountering what she calls her creator self, a vast sphere of light that communicated directly with the human self.

So if you've ever felt like your fear of death was something to hide or manage, rather than something that might be actually pointing you toward a bigger truth, this conversation is for you.

If you've ever had an experience you couldn't quite explain, a moment of light or knowing that didn't fit in any box that you've been handed, You're going to feel very at home in this episode.

And if you want to continue the conversation afterwards, head over to grief2growth.substack.com. You'll find an article there about today's episode, and you can continue the conversation with me and other listeners.

Yes.

But over the years of posting on this channel, Daniel would occasionally let his guard down, and he would talk about something that was really close to him that pervaded his thoughts at all times and would ultimately be his downfall.

And that was his extreme fear of death.

Daniel's isolation looks like it might come to an end in two thousand and ten when he enrolled at the University of Illinois to study computer science and electrical engineering.

His parents dropped him off at the Amtrak train station with all of his stuff for college.

In the comments, when people wrote something else, I asked them to put their, you know, the details in the comments.

Uh, multiple people put, uh, thanatophobia.

Thanatophobia, which is the fear of dying.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.