Overcoming Our Fear of Death
What’s our real fear of death? It is the fear of our nothingness. We are afraid that when we die, we, as a self, will be annihilated, gone from existence forever.
That fear lurks behind every fear and negative emotion we have.
The Buddha: Attachment Causes Suffering
Buddha talked about why we suffer. His first Noble Truth says Life is Suffering. The Second Noble Truth said the cause of our suffering was our attachment to the things of this world, be they our loved ones, friends, relatives, houses, cars, computers etc.
We know we are attached because when we lose them, we suffer. We feel their loss.
We are also attached to ourselves, our egos. We think this self-created entity we call “me” is who we are. We give it all kinds of importance, and if others don’t see us that way, we get upset.
We demand respect. Behind all this is the belief that the world is made up of things. I even view myself as just another thing in this world, so when I die, that’s it. I’m gone for good. I go into that dark void never to emerge again.
Our materialistic view of life causes our suffering, and it is all supported by our fear of the unknown. What will happen to me if a lose my loved one, my parents, my friend, my pet, my house, my car, and most importantly, myself?
We Fear We Are Ultimately Nothing and Nobody
We fear that if we travel deep inside to the center of our being we will find nothing and nobody there, only a black void.
That’s why we fear to take the journey inside. We are terrified of that truth.
It’s strange because that is partially correct. If we do travel inside we will find nothing and nobody, but framed slightly differently, what we will find is no-thing and no-body.
It’s not Nothing and Nobody, but No-Thing and No-Body
That means the person misunderstood the meaning of nothing and nobody. It doesn’t mean literally nothing and nobody is there, but rather that no-thing and no-body is there. The emptiness the materialist sees is the fullness the non-materialist sees. It’s empty of “thingness” or matter, but filled with spirit.
We go from the idea of no-thing and no-body to everything and everybody. In short, the emptiness that no-thing implies is a fullness that everything implies. The fullness is just not material, but non-material. The materialist believes if something is empty of objects, it’s empty. The non-materialist knows there something beyond the physical world that fills up the emptiness.
However, most of us don’t believe that. We believe that we are a thing, an ego tied to a body, so obviously we will be terrified of death. But it is not who we are as quantum physics tells us. We are not a thing, so we won’t disappear forever. We are the eternal pure awareness at the heart of creation.
Death is such a painful reality to a materialist that they decide, quite rightly from their perspective, to postpone any consideration of it until it hits them at the end of life.
The Ego is Already Dead
But, even that fear of death is just a secondary fear. The primary fear is that we are already dead, we just don’t know it yet. For a materialist, this is bad news. For a non-materialist, this is very good news.
One of the great feats of our ego is to suppress the reality that we are already dead.
The ego is terrified of that reality so it makes sure this knowledge is hidden away in our dark recesses, allowing us to live our “normal” lives.
Death Reveals Who We Are
But all death does is reveal our true nature to us, but this the ego cannot accept because it’s not included in this scenario. When we die we go from being ego-centered to cosmos-centered, and that change means the death of the ego. This is the terrifying fear of the ego, but it is not a real fear.
Since we will learn who we are, one way or the other, why not learn it now and eliminate a lot of the pain and fear in our lives, allowing us to live happy and fulfilled lives on a scale unimaginable to the ego.
Reverse Meditation
The question then becomes; how can we accomplish this? Andrew Holecek, who has researched this extensively in books, classes and himself, believes we have to employ something he calls, “reverse meditation”.
Many of us meditate to attain peaceful and blissful states of mind where we feel ourselves becoming a part of a bigger reality. There is nothing wrong with doing this. It’s an important aspect of meditation.
But, we must be careful. This type of meditation can also be used to escape the fear and pain we don’t want to face. In this case, we use meditation to avoid dealing with our deeper issues.
Holecek maintains that fear is the dominant emotion governing our lives, so when it pops up in our consciousness, we don’t want to run away from it in our meditation.
Rather, Holecek counsels that we need to bring it into our meditation practice and experience it fully. In doing this we must separate the feeling of fear from its cause, so we can experience the fear directly without all the mental baggage that accompanies it.
We are the Cause of All our Fears
What we perceive as the cause is not the real cause. That is just something our ego wants to blame for it.
The real cause is something deep inside us that was triggered by an event or a person in the outside world. They didn’t cause the feeling, they just brought to our conscious mind what had been hidden away in our unconscious. Rather than being the cause of our feeling, they are its revealers and our teachers.
We can now meditate on that feeling and see what it has to teach us about ourselves. However, if one has a dominating ego, it will stuff that fear back down into our unconscious and blame the person or the incident for our emotional turmoil, continuing the ego’s quest to keep us in the dark.
Learning How to Die Before We Die
The first step in facing our fear of death is to face all of our fears and other negative emotions. The more we do this, the more we lessen their hold on us. After a while, we will begin to sense our fear of death receding, and if we continue, it might just disappear altogether, paving the way for us to learn how to die before we die.
In this insane world in which everything around us is collapsing, many of us are searching for something deeper. The journey to die before we die could provide us with that something deeper.
To learn more: Click this link: The Magical Universe.
