Why do we live in such terror of death? Because our
instinctive desire is to live and to go on living, and death is a
savage end to everything we hold familiar. We feel that when
it comes we will be plunged into something quite unknown,
or become someone totally different. We imagine we will find
ourselves lost and bewildered, in surroundings that are terrify -
ingly unfamiliar. We imagine it will be like waking up alone,
in a torment of anxiety, in a foreign country, with no knowledge
of the land or language, no money, no contacts, no passport,
no friends . ..
Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is
because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal,
unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine
it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless
collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography,"
our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards . . . It is on
their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security.
So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of
who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves,
a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with
whom we have been living all the time but we never really
wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every
moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or
trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this
stranger on our own?
...
Most of us do live like that; we live according to a preordained
plan. We spend our youth being educated. Then we
find a job, and meet someone, marry, and have children. We
buy a house, try to make a success of our business, aim for
dreams like a country house or a second car. We go away on
holiday with our friends. We plan for retirement. The biggest
dilemmas some of us ever have to face are where to take our
next holiday or whom to invite at Christmas. Our lives are
monotonous, petty, and repetitive, wasted in the pursuit of the
trivial, because we seem to know of nothing better.
The pace of our lives is so hectic that the last thing we
have time to think of is death. We smother our secret fears of
impermanence by surrounding ourselves with more and more
goods, more and more things, more and more comforts, only
to find ourselves their slaves. All our time and energy is
exhausted simply maintaining them. Our only aim in life soon
becomes to keep everything as safe and secure as possible.
When changes do happen, we find the quickest remedy, some
slick and temporary solution. And so our lives drift on, unless
a serious illness or disaster shakes us out of our stupor.
It is not as if we even spare much time or thought for this
life either. Think of those people who work for years and then
have to retire, only to find that they don't know what to do
with themselves as they age and approach death. Despite all
our chatter about being practical, to be practical in the West
means to be ignorantly and often selfishly short-sighted. Our
myopic focus on this life, and this life only, is the great deception,
the source of the modern world's bleak and destructive
materialism. No one talks about death and no one talks about
the afterlife, because people are made to believe that such talk
will only thwart our so-called "progress" in the world.
