The Fear of Death
Will Teach Us How to Live
Maybe more than most things, the fear of death can be a huge driving and motivational state of mind that pushes us toward our own spirituality if we let it. It is the fear of death that forces us to confront our own mortality and it becomes a reaction to what we comprehend when we do that, which leads us to seek comfort and understanding within the mystical and spiritual realms that we try to discover around us. While it is not an entirely bad thing to be driven to God and our own spirituality by the fear of death, fear of any type as a motivational aspect becomes problematic and can lead to a much longer and more complicated route toward the destination we seek. Fear has a certain destructive effect on our awareness and can create obstruction in certain aspects of our human condition. When these aspects of our nature are blocked, it allows for a disunity of our spiritual ability to harmonize with God.
It is important for us to try and understand our fear of death and where it comes from so that we may better attempt to disarm it. Our innate fear of death comes from our primordial beginnings, before we even had cognitive ability. The fear of death is very much the same sensation as having a fear of the dark. It comes from deep in our psyche where we learn to fear the unknown because we cannot control it nor can we really understand it. We have come to see death as the end of us and what we are and we fear this thought of finality because we cannot understand not having life or the future of life. The fear of death is the thought of nothingness and the realization that upon our death, there will be nothing left of us or what we once were and there will be nothing left for us to become. Humans tend to live life with a hopeful eye to the future and the promise of better days ahead, and it is death that takes this from us. These concepts of death have been ingrained in us since our beginning and it is nearly impossible to dismantle these concepts and notions without confronting ourselves and our thought processes.
From a very early age we are taught to think and understand the world around us in certain ways. Whatever we cannot readily fit into the parameters of our conscious thought is left as unanswered and not understood, and as this occurs throughout our lives, we compile this collection of the abstract that has never fit anywhere in our conscious comprehension, so gradually it shifts into the realm of our subconscious where these unexplained elements of ourselves become reactionary and force us to experience them without the benefit of our conscious thought, but with elemental and primitive emotional reactions that become fearful to us. It is the things that we learn to ignore and banish from us because we cannot understand them, that rebel against this type of exile and instead of becoming a part of us, they become an element of ourselves to be afraid of. We cannot see in the dark and we cannot see what might lurk within it, and even if we know there is nothing there, there is the fear that there might be because we cannot see to verify it. So we develop a fear of the dark, not because of what we know about it but because of what we can't know since we cannot see through it, thus we cannot fully understand or comprehend it. The same applies to our fear of death because we cannot know what it holds for us without going there. We cannot see what it is to be dead, we can only guess from what others might tell us. This can be applied to all conditions of humanity where there is a lack of total understanding and this gap is filled with base reaction and sometimes violence rather than patience or reasoned thought. So the things that cause our fear of death are built into our thought structures as we learn to think, and these pervasive constraints keep us from achieving our freedom from fear even as we grow old and die, sometimes still afraid of the same things that frightened us when we were children.
So how do we learn to dispel this fear of death that haunts us, or any other crippling fear that we might have? The answers are not simple, but we can begin the process by understanding some steps that we can follow that will guide us toward assimilating our fears back into acceptance within ourselves. First and foremost, we must not seek to conquer our fears or defeat them, because this cannot be done with any permanence or without repercussion, and the mere folly of it actually empowers that which we fear. The fact of the matter is that our fears are a part of us that calls out for us to try and understand, and in doing so, moves us along to the next step in our evolution. Our fears are like voices on the other side of a door and we must open those doors and discover what these voices are trying to tell us, and from that interaction, we grow emotionally, spiritually and physiologically.
The voices of our fears can be different for everyone, but the fact remains that if you try to understand the truth of your fears and the real reasons behind why you are afraid, you've completed a massive step forward in your spiritual evolution that a majority of people will never take in their lives. Many people have a fear of death because they don't understand what it is to be alive. They go to work, they raise families, they have friends and possessions and they socialize on the weekend, and this is all very normal and fine. But many people find something lacking in their everyday lives. They feel incomplete or as if something were missing. They feel an indescribable tug upon them that yearns for them to do something more, and this makes them afraid because they are stuck in their rut and they feel as if they are wasting their lives and time is running out because death is out there waiting for them. Other people are afraid that their lives will not have amounted to anything and they will have no one to remember them or nothing to be remembered for. They yearn for that elusive payoff that never seems to come, and as the years pass by, their apprehension grows. These types of fears are fairly common and can affect us all at one time or another. The trick is to understand that this fear of not living or not living well creates our fear of death, and if we can learn to appreciate and be grateful for the lives that we have, and learn to enjoy what each day brings, it immediately changes your psychology into loving what you have today and wanting more of it for tomorrow. This process change will eventually dispel any fear you have of not living right and replace it with the joy of being alive. When you get to that point, you can use other tools that you will learn here to understand what life truly is and you will understand that death is not the end of life or what you are.
This is the most difficult hurdle for most people because they simply envision that death is the end of all that is and there is nothing beyond it. Those who believe this need to try to understand that each of us came from somewhere or something. Life was breathed into us from some unseen and unknown place and we always existed in one form or another there. We are spiritual beings and the energy that holds our form together also flows in and throughout all things that live, have lived, and will live; and that makes us a part of eternity, which means that we can never truly die. Our souls have always been a part of God, and thus we have always existed to one extent or another and we always will. Death is not the end of us or what we are, it is merely a transition from what we just were to what we are now to become. There is no end of the road, there is only another turn of the page and for people who can grasp this notion and make it a part of their beliefs - make it a part of who they are - there will never be any fear of death because they will understand that it is merely a voice from behind a door calling us to a new place.
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