What’s to stop us from jumping off the cliff, then? He asks. Nothing is the answer and the undeniable truth, because in the end it really doesn’t matter if you die or not, and man’s deep, deep egocentric disease refuses to allow him to believe that he is really that unimportant. It’s painful and bleak, but who said anything had to be otherwise.
When people talk of God and religion, it is almost comical (as a somewhat wise man [he is on his way] once told me) to see. “It is just like when parents say to a three-year old, “Don’t do this, I’m watching you, you will get punished if you do. That is BAD. Don’t do BAD things because you will be punish” People do the same thing with religion. God is watching you, don’t steal, and don’t kill, because you will be judge…” Ha, there isn’t really anything to judge us, we came up with God and Satan and the forces of good vs. evil, so we could commit ourselves to some precious quest which not only gives us meaning, but in some way helps with inevitable coming of death.”
And not wanting the truth, he protects himself with these concepts and ideas, to provide the stable base from which we so badly yearn.
Quoted from Yalom’s Love’s Executioner:
“This basic anxiety emerges from a person’s endeavors, conscious and unconscious, to cope with the harsh fact of life, the “givens” of existence. Four givens are particularly evident:
- The inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love
- The freedom to make our lives as we will
- Our ultimate aloneness
- The absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.
OF these facts of life, death is the most obvious, most intuitively apparent. We learn that death will come, and that from it there is no escape. Nonetheless ‘everything,’ in Spinoza’s words, ‘endeavors to persist in its own being.’ At one’s core there is an ever- present conflict between the wish to continue to exist and the awareness of inevitable death. To adapt to the reality of death, we are endlessly ingenious in devising ways to deny or escape it. When we are young, we deny death with the help of parental reassurances and religious myths; later, we personify it by transforming it into an entity, a monster, a sandman, a demon. After all, if death is some pursuing entity, then one may yet find a way to elude it, besides, frightening as death-bearing monster may be, it is less frightening than the truth – that one carries within the spores of one’s own death.
As we grow older, we learn to put death out of mind; we distract ourselves; we transform it into something positive (passing on, going home, rejoining God, peace at last); we deny it with sustaining myths; we strive for immortality through imperishable works, by projecting our seed into the future through our children, or by embracing a religious system that offers spiritual perpetuation.
Many people take issue with this description of death denial. “Nonsense!” they say, “we don’t deny death. Everyone’s going to die. We know that. The facts are obvious. But is there any point to dwelling on it?”
The truth is that we know but we do not know. We know about death, intellectually we know the facts, but we– that is, the unconscious portion of the mind that protects us from overwhelming anxiety- have split off, or dissociated, the terror associated with death. I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs, or delusions, which afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer. While these are delusions in that they represent ‘fixed false beliefs,’ I do not employ the term elusion in a pejorative sense: these are universal beliefs which, at some level of consciousness, exist in all of us.
Specialness is the belief that one is invulnerable, inviolable- beyond the ordinary laws of human biology and destiny. At some point in life, each of us will face some crisis: it may be serious illness, career failure, or divorce, which suddenly lays bare one’s ordinariness and challenges the common assumption that life will always be an eternal upward spiral.
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
While the belief in personal specialness provides a sense of safety form within, (who ever said you were safe?????) the other major mechanism of death denial- belief in an ultimate rescuer- permits us to feel forever watched and protected by an outside force (GOD). Though we may falter, grow ill, though we may arrive at the very edge of life, there is, we are convinced, a looming, omnipotent servant who will always bring us back.
Now, if death is inevitable, if all of our accomplishments, indeed our entire solar system, shall one day lie in ruins, if the world is contingent (that is, everything could as well have been otherwise), if human beings must construct the world and the human design within that world, then what enduring meaning can there be in like?
This question plagues contemporary men and women, and many seek therapy because they feel their lives to be senseless and aimless. (Which it is) We are meaning-seeking creatures. Meaning provides a sense of mastery: feeling helpless and confused in the face of random, unpatterned events, we seek to order them and, in so doing, gain a sense of control over them. Even more important, meaning gives birth to values and hence, t a code of behavior: thus the answer to why questions (why do I live?) supplies an answer to how questions. (How do I live?).”
