The Hidden Costs of Your Fear of Death - How the Western Taboo Around Death and Dying Keeps you From Fully Living.
I'm taking a break this week from my regularly scheduled posts about mythology and how they shape our views of death and dying. For those of you who are just tuning in, you can take a look at these posts here - and I'll get back to them in the coming weeks. For now, though, given all that is happening around the globe and the ever-escalating climate around politics here in the US, I wanted to speak directly to some points that have been incubating in my thought processes over the last few months related to our ongoing discussion around the fear of death and what it means to truly live.
We've taken a look becore at how the westernized taboo of death - and the marginalize of the biomechanical death processes - have led to a denial of sorts: death is something we look at only when we must, which is generally right before it happens to us. We've ceased to view death as a natural (and accepted) part of the cycles of life, and instead view it as a moment of unavoidable - but definitely unwated - suffering and grief. These views have solidified our "removal" as it were from the processes and cycles of nature, and we no longer understand our place in the natural order of things.
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| Our fear of death keeps us caged; separate from fully living. |
Currently, if you speak to someone in the West (and probably in a lot of other "westernized" places around the globe) about nature, they will respond with pleasantries that envoke images of long, leisurely walks, or hikes, or nature sanctuaries, or something form of this. These are all nonsense. Nature isn't any of those things: it is all of those things, and much much more. Nature encapsulates everything experience all the time - our breathing, our dreaming, our food, the heating of our homes, and much much more. To veiw ourselves as separate, as to see nature as something we "spend time" in, is an error that creates an unreasonable and unconscionable divide whose existence forms barriers between us and life.
Let's take a look at the typical western lifestyle in a microcosmic veiw for just a moment. And by western, I'm referring here specifically to the culture and lifestyle that is perpetuated by the ideologies of the United States (and a great many of her allies). Please understand that I'm speaking in vague generalities here, and I understand there are ever-increasing numbers of the population of my country that do not enjoy (or even subscribe to) these values. However, these values are still the driving force behind our politics and our economy, and so for now, they are at the forefront of everything that happens here.
In the US, the homogenized approach to education has created a high demand for worker mindsets: accountants, clerks, bankers, attorneys, insurance agents, actuaries, and more all attend unviversities at an ever-increasing cost to themselves and their future all to acheive what is promoted as a level of living that is essentially unattainable to all but a very few. The mere promise, however, that one might potentially acheive this very high standard and mode of living is enough to continue to drive this machine, enough to so that it motivates enough people to continue to feed the process. The fear of missing out on these gradiose potentialities drives people to seek jobs they don't like, often in industries in which they do not excel, in hopes of obtaining more and more money. A smiliar fear prevents these same people from develping a deeper connection to the modalities of trust and security found by resting in the abudnance of nature. If you were to survey most of the suburbanites of the United States, and ask them how they felt about food scarcity, for instance, a great many of them would agree that it would pose a significant problem if food becomes unaffordable. But further questioning would quickly demonstrate that their solution for food scarcity is simple: promote higher wages for workers so more people can have greater access to industrialized food. This scarcity mindset - which promotes more over better - drives the continued separation of us from nature. That very separation - a deep divide which we have been programmed to maintain - keeps us from truly realizing the abundance of resources on this planet available to us. Our separation from nature - from ourselves, and each other - keeps us locked in cycles of fear and "othering." And otherings, as we can all see, destroys everything we hold dear.
This othering - the attempt to define all that exists in terms of how it realtes to me - also props up our fear of death and dying. If my position in the world isn't secure, then I must be afraid: I may not have enough, do enough, be enough. If I can't have/do/be enough, what will be come of me? Ergo, I must continue my competitive advance toward acheiving something. But that elusive something is always just out of reach. This fear of not enough, of lack, and ultimately of dying cripples our ability to rest in this present moment, to truly feel empathy for all conscious beings - regardless of species - and further reduces our ability to intuit important details about living from the Earth our mother. If we were able to listen, we might hear her saying "lean in close, child, I've got you." But we can't listen. Our ears no longer hear her voice.
This, then, is the hidden cost of our fear of death and dying. We sacrifice true living - and the great experience of life itself - for the sake of the pretense of security. We cannot experience happiness now, because our cultural programming tells us it lies far off out there somewhere - something to which we must aspire. But we've traded our life for this; and instead we are given a fictional narrative if security and sameness, wherein we will literally wither away nestled quietly out of the sight of our fears.
But not facing the fearful thing - in this case the cycle of life and death - coccoons us in a fictitious worldview where we push ever forward toward and elusive and unattainable goal.
Before anyone writes me an email, I know it seems like a jump between food insecurity and the fear of death. But I'll try to tie it up nicely in a post next week before I get back to my other submittals.
