What do you think your birth certificate is? It’s an apology letter to your parents from the condom factory…
Today while waiting in the Doctors lounge with my little bro as we prepared to get out post-travel checkups, everything seemed to go well at first, I was amusing myself with the other patients by asking them if they found the idea of the whole place being called a Medical PRACTISE a bit unsettling when you’d imagine they’d already have practised enough at Medical School, needles to say I think I was the life of the “sick party”, but on our way to the Doctors office I looked outside the window, and what I saw was a luxurious car that had a bumper sticker which read “Death is Hereditary”, “Can it be my doctors car?” I asked myself, and if so, “should I leave my brothers and my own life in this genetically pessimistic conformist of an individual?” I’m known for my personal distrust with Doctors and medicines so I think the face I had throughout the whole consult speaks for itself…
Why is there such a fear of death?
The Irrational Fear Of Death
I believe we all fear death because we associate it with bad things, Whats the first thing that comes to mind when you think of death? you imagine a hospital, physical pain, emotional pain by the loved ones, crying, screaming, black depressing clothes, a dead body…they are all preconceived thoughts that are in our heads when hearing the word “death”, but all those things are moments that lead to the death or are after death…it has nothing to do with the act of death itself.
Our brains are very inquisitive and seek conclusions to feel at ease (I’m the perfect example right now writing this), even a wrong answer will do it, because how can you give a “right” answer for something that is unknown to us? the only right answers that exist are the questions we have created, take mathematics, we have created them therefore we can have the right answers to everything, “What’s the distance/weight/height/speed/diameter/capital city/animal name/historic battle day of ___?” “It is ___” “Bravo Matty, here’s a lollipop!”, there you go…we have used a formula we have created to find out the right answer of a question we have also created, but how can we answer the question we have created using a formula we haven’t?
We rationalized our fears…we attempt to built some type of resistance and create comfort, some choose the easy way of joining religions that offer “life after death” or an infinite amount of theories, the more logical of us choose the procrastination method of postponing/avoiding thinking about it for as long as possible, the first choose to treat life as an exam for acceptance in the afterlife and the second try to trick themselves thinking they can ignore something they don’t want to deal with right now…kind of like that annoying due essay for your history class that we procrastinate till the last moment, the only problem with that is that we all have a memory and as much as you can ignore the due paper, you’re always aware that it is there waiting for you, we’ll always live frighted of death because we’ve postponed it.
But how can we live afraid of something we don’t know? we know death may require pain, but pain can still come without dying.It’s the security of the known that makes us fearful of death because dying will take you somewhere unknown, clinging to the things we have gathered in this life from loved ones to material objects is what creates a fear of death, because the unknown is most likely something good…why do we celebrate the birth of babies but not the death of our loved ones? if something so magical like a baby comes from that ‘unknown’ location then it has to be a beautiful place doesn’t it?, why should letting our loved one return to that beautiful unknown place be so dramatic then? unless we want to keep them with us from our own selfishness of their company…
We can’t perceive the unknown with the known (because if we could…then it wouldn’t be unknown), and what do we consider the “known”? Our brains…our minds are what perceive everything we see, memorize and analyze, since our minds are made/composed of the known they’ll constantly keep repeating “I’m going to disappear soon” and therefore we’ll always be frightened.
Death, Source Of ALL Our Fears
A couple weeks ago, my granddad told me this myth he had heard when he was younger, he said if you go to a cemetery on a night with a bright moon in the sky, you will see a blue glow coming from on top of some graves, apparently our bones contain a certain amount of calcium phosphate and with the light of the moon it creates a blue glow, of course I couldn’t resist the temptation of finding out if such thing is true and went to a fairly big cemetery here in Perth called Karrakatta Cemetery (actually here’s a picture, that creepy statue was my lovely adventure companion), I lasted about an hour and 42 minutes (80 minutes of those in pre total darkness) and after 20 odd minutes of imagining all types of noises I got the hell out of there.I never found out if the myth was true (still on my todo list) but in those moments of solitary fear, I came to one conclusion.
All our fears can be traced back to death…they all have some type of pattern either psychological or rational, fear of spiders, sharks, germs, heights, drowning are obvious, but what about public speaking? Can we really die of embarrassment? maybe it’s the fear ridicule that gives us the idea that everyone will make fun of us afterwards and nobody will like us, if nobody will like us we’ll become outcasts and live in solitude and solitude is one of the biggest unrecognized phobias we all seem to have, dying alone, because nobody will be there to take care of us when we are sick, to worry for us and give us comfort, to call the ambulance when they find our unconscious body on the bathroom floor.
Burn Your Candle At/From Both Ends
I like stories…from fairy tales to folk tales, the way I see it is life is like a story, you have the beginning (birth) and the ending (death), but how can you understand the whole story if you haven’t read the ending? how can you understand your present life if you haven’t experienced death?
To understand death we have to die and experience it, to understand life we have to live and experience it…we all know we live but there’s different types of living, Zen Masters all tell you to live in the present, you know…not worrying about tomorrow or the passed, being aware of every present moment like not multi tasking but actually concentrating on what your doing, eg: If you eating an apple keep repeating in your head “I’m eating this red apple, I’m eating this red apple, I’m eating this red apple…look it has a hole in it with a black spot…wait, what is that, a worm!?”, it’s a very effective technique and true, but sometimes some of us find it a tad harder than others maybe out of lazyness or a hyperactive mind, I’ll admit I’m one of them.
Instead I say you should try another approach to present living, there’s different types of living as I mentioned above, most people choose the barely getting by way…you know, monotonous sedentary lifestyle spiced up by a few quick thrills every now and again, American’s are considered one of the most efficient nations in the world which explains why 87% of the population don’t have a passport or have ever traveled, why on average they change residents every 3 years (change = quick thrills), why they change relationship partners so frequently and jobs, the less efficient countries travel more for the temporary thrill the change of scenery brings….thats one lifestyle you can choose, the other, and I’ll have to say my favorite, would be to live life intensely! =)
Intensely is interpreted differently by everyone so I’m not saying go bungee jumping everyday or anything, intensely as in find something you really like and once found…burn that candle at both ends, because if you live intensely you’ll therefore die intensely, intensity can penetrate anything even your soul…it’s like perseverance, a drop of water falling over a stone for centuries will eventually make a hole in it, think of your body as a racing motorbike entering the tunnel of life (eww…baby birth mental images) that you know the other end of it has a precipice (aka death), if you go slow and steady you’ll eventually get to the other side and slip off the precipice with no major excitements along the way, BUT, if you go full speed/intensely you might arrive faster yet you will have experienced so much more emotions in that ride and once you reach the precipice you won’t just slip off like the slow and steady, you’ll fly off leaving your motorbike/body behind and fall head first into that unknown mystery we all have mistakenly feared so much.
P.S: One of the things that always stands out in my head when I think of death is this guru I met in India when I was little, he told me if I ever wanted to know if I was about to die soon I should look at the tip of my nose, according to him 6 months before dying of natural causes you body starts preparing and one of the symptoms is it tenses your eye muscles (superior rectus specifically) therefore making it impossible to look at the tip of your nose…of course this comes from the same guy that tried to touch my Aura for 20 minutes but it’s an interesting concept =P
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