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| Fear of Death or Fear of Life |
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Fear of Death or Fear of Life
People take birth. They grow. And then they die. They celebrate their birth but they mourn their death. They are receptive of their new births and scared of their coming deaths. They treat these two poles of life differently. When they are confronted with their death they want to do something different what they were not doing before that. When they bring others to death (by judicial hangings etc.) they want to know their last wish. When someone is brought to death they are shocked. After birth a human being weaves a web of relations around him. He becomes a son or a daughter. Then he starts acquiring his identifications – his gender, his name, his qualification and so many other things. He starts identifying himself against this background of relations and identifications. This places him in a state of convenience. Being a boy or a girl allows him / her to some prerogatives which are not available to the other sex. His being a Christian or a Buddhist places him in some other privileged state where other religions do not sooth. His education and other attributes also allow him to have some privileges and conveniences. He starts identifying himself amongst these privileges and identities. A professor many a time is antagonized with his new transferred postings despite the same service benefits. He finds himself more convenient in the earlier situation. At the end of life when one is habitual of wives, children, status and money - the idea to leave this all and that too at once frightens him. He wants to have all while the death is allowing him nothing. So when one is confronted with the idea of one’s imminent and inescapable death he is in a fix. He wants to do something to avoid it, something to flee from it but he cannot. His this helplessness appears on the outermost layer of his existence. He wants to release that energy. So many a times whenever you are aware of your imminent death you want to do something.
When you hear of your imminent death you find yourself in a position to counter it. You want to stand against your death. You want to start a battle with the death and want to win over it. It is your passion which makes you feel doing something. When you realize the comparative strengths of yourself and the death and realize the inequality then you come a stage down and say ok let me do something which I could not do earlier. For this reason a lot many people want to express something as their last wish. This last wish is an expression of a defeated ego; the ego which wanted to do a lot but could not do because of its limitations. The only way out of this fear of death is to know the death. A death is the preface of new life. have you ever imagined if there were no death how much dull this life would have been? The same faces, the same places and the same paces – all this would have made this world much more boring. The death is an act of cleaning by nature. The death is a tool for new things to develop. Without death the life would have been quite incomplete. Death is only an incident. It is not an end. It is an incident along the path of journey. In the Zen branch of Buddhism they ask one another small koans (riddles) to induce enlightenment – the satori. One famous Zen koan asks the seeker if he knows his face prior to the birth of his grandfather. The science says that before its birth a child is present in his parents. He is present there in their chromosomes. These parents were also present in their parents before their birth. You were present before your birth in your parents. When your parents are dead they will be present in you because you are made out of them. You were present before your birth and your parents are present after their death then where is that fear of death that it eliminates altogether. You may take it the other way also. Socrates was punished to death. One of his disciples asked him to facilitate an escape. Socrates refused to escape. He told the disciple that he was not afraid of death then why to try for an escape. He said that either there would be a life after death as many people used to say. He explained that if he was going to reborn again after the death then where is the question of repentance or fear. He said that he would also be reborn. He further said if there was no life after death then also there was no ground to be worried. If there is no life again then he ought not to have been worried because this death would take him where he was before his birth. After death – life or no life, in both the situations there was no reason to being afraid. Death is just death. . .
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