Fear of death while living in a pandemic
The truth is not, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” The truth is, “Fear is nothing left to fear”!
This brings us to the ultimate truth: there is nothing to fear!
However, this does not imply that we should not fear.
Fear is a messenger in the same way that pain is a messenger that invites us to investigate and find out what is wrong.
Fear appears when we ignore what is true, real, substantial, essential, permanent about us and the world.
Fear is our healthy resistance to what we don’t want: discomfort, damage, pain, suffering, illness and death.
However, these are unavoidable in our human experience. These are experiences that we have all had countless times (except death), that we have survived and learned from and will continue to survive and learn from until we die. We are not to fear them, but we are to resist and avoid them, and fear is the form our resistance takes.
Now we come to the one experience that we have never experienced, but that we all fear: death. Our existential fear of death is our resistance to our death. Why resist it when it’s inevitable? This is not to say that we don’t do everything we can to avoid and resist dangerous and unhealthy situations by taking care of ourselves and acting in ways that make us feel safe. But why resist death?
Our resistance to death leads us to imagine crazy things like: “There is a right time and a right way to die, and a wrong time and a wrong way to die.” Actually, death appears at all times in all forms. For many it has been and will be the COVID-19 virus. For many, some 20,000 this year alone, it has been the flu. For 3.1 million children each year according to UNCIEF (1.03 million this year alone) it is malnutrition.
We can learn, gradually or suddenly, to live our life without resistance to death, our own and that of our loved ones. Imagine what it would be like to live our lives that way, without resisting the fact that one day we will die without knowing when or how; and not resist the pain of loss, which is made of love for our loved ones. Since death is inevitable, we can come to savor the fact that we were born and are still here and savor every moment we have left. This is what we come to when we accept our fear of death, we discover that fear is nothing to fear, and that in reality there is nothing to fear.
While this implies that we should not be afraid, it does not suggest that we should no longer experience fear. Again, fear, like pain, is a messenger that invites us to explore what is wrong and exposes our resistance to something. There are many things that we should resisting for the sake of health and safety, such as resisting being around other people during this pandemic.
We know that the body will die, and we believe that when the body dies, we die because we believe that all we are is the body. We assume for a fact that the body is the source of consciousness, the consciousness with which we are aware of all experience and of ourselves. Actually, it is an assumption, not a fact. No one has ever seen consciousness leave the brain or sensations leave the body. That is a fact of our experience that we are aware of and that we feel and perceive; but it is a theory that the body is the source of these.
This theory, which is presumed to be fact, stems from the undeniable correlation between the brain and experience. It affects the brain and we affect the experience. Kill the body and there is no more experience for this person. (There is no experience for any person in deep sleep, but we do not say that the Self has disappeared/died). However, this is not unlike affecting our computers and monitors and affecting the information that is experienced, and then concluding that the monitor and computer are the source or cause of the information. Could it be that the body is like the laptop, a local, “personal” medium through which we access the universal and impersonal information bandwidth that is available to all computers; and just as that information bandwidth remains when the laptop dies, so does the Being, the Consciousness, the “I” remain?
The fact that all of us as “people” long for eternal life and most of us believe in life after death or reincarnation may be a clue in our minds and feelings that we are not simply the body, that the body it is not the source of consciousness, and that when the body dies us, consciousness disappears no more than information bandwidth disappears when a laptop, computer, tablet or smartphone dies.
Consciousness is the source of all experience. This is easy to prove. Remove awareness of any experience and where it is there. some experience? Our experience of what thought labels the body, mind, and world is our experience of feeling, sensing, thinking, imagining, and perceiving. Withdraw awareness and where is the experience of feeling, sensing, thinking, imagining and perceiving? Experience tells us that consciousness is the source of all experience, which thought then labels as body, mind, and world.
Nothing in experience indicates that the body is the source of consciousness. This is a universally shared idea that is supposed to be a fact. It is not our real, immediate and intimate experience. That the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the earth were also universally shared ideas taken as facts (some still do). Our conviction that something is true does not make it true, although it makes it seem real just as our dreams do until we wake up.
No one has experienced or could experience the appearance or disappearance of consciousness: our Being. Thought imagines that consciousness appears and disappears. However, when we do not refer to thought, but stick to our real, lived, intimate and immediate experience, we recognize that we have never experienced and could never experience the appearance and disappearance of consciousness itself. What would have to be present to pretend to experience the appearance and disappearance of consciousness? Why, conscience, of course!
Thought imagines that everything must have a cause, and this is true except for the “original cause.” If matter “caused” consciousness, what caused matter? If the Big Bang caused matter, what caused the Big Bang? Staying true to our real, immediate and intimate experience, we know that consciousness simply is and has no cause; it simply is. We have never experienced its appearance, and we have never experienced its disappearance. It is only thought that imagines consciousness appearing and disappearing, not our actual experience. We can think of this as a causeless cause. If we want to think religiously we can ask, “What caused God?”
In short, we have no evidence in our actual experience that when the body dies, we, the Self, the consciousness die. Even if we cease to exist when we die, what is there to fear? According to that model, we didn’t exist before conception, and that wasn’t a problem or scary. Why would ceasing to exist then be terrifying? We come back to realize that death is nothing to fear, either because there is no death or because ceasing to exist is no more problematic than not existing before conception.
To summarize, the reality is that we have nothing to fear, and fear is nothing to fear. however, fear is a healthy response in the same way that pain is. Bring it to our attention so that we can investigate and cure what is wrong where possible. When it comes to our emotional distress, what is wrong is that we are overlooking our true nature, the one that is aware of our experience. When we explore the nature of this awareness that we are of our intimate and immediate experience, we notice that it is always present, having been present since our first experience, being present reading these words, and will be present in our last experience. We note that it is not an object with shape and location. In other words, it is eternal and infinite. We realize that no experience can diminish or improve it, that is, it is immutable. Nothing can harm it. You don’t need anything knowing everything. It is free from all experience while being intimately related to all experience. Thus, to characterize consciousness, it is safe, at peace, secure, and self-actualized. This is actually our true nature.
When we ignore our true Self, consciousness, we believe and feel that we are limited, vulnerable, lacking, separate and needy people and we seek to find peace, happiness, security, comfort and satisfaction in things outside of ourselves, such as relationships, objects, situations. . , activities, substances, achievements, status, etc. No wonder fear appears! Remember, fear is a messenger. When we believe and feel that security, peace and happiness are lacking, we need to look for them, but we need to look in the right direction. Nobody is interested in temporary security, happiness and fulfillment, we already experience this. What we long for is lasting, permanent peace, security, comfort, happiness, fulfillment.=. Looking for the permanent from the temporary is, well, you fill in the blank.
Welcome fear and seek freedom from fear by first accepting and embracing it, and then investigating its source.
There’s really nothing to fear, which doesn’t mean “Don’t fear.” It means, “Investigate to find out what is true.”
#Know yourself