June 1, 2007
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death is not an illusion
Sometimes in my melancholy I think about the nature of death. Actually those thoughts don’t last very long since I have very little data upon which to base my thoughts. I can think a lot about what happens in the world after you die, what your legacy will be, what the significance of your life is, how people will react to your passing, but honestly those topics don’t interest me as much. They are important and interesting, yes, but also not in my not so humble opinion particularly difficult to understand.
No, when I think about death, I think primarily about the mythos surrounding it. What we think about what happens after our death despite our lack of evidence in support of any particular imagination and more importantly why we think it is a fascinating topic. Why think that there is an afterlife be it heaven or hell? Why suspect reincarnation? Why imagine that your consciousness might merge with the Universe or God and bring you ultimate awareness and universal peace? Why create a creepy scenario where you are alive within your own corpse fully conscious but everyone being unaware of it? Why suppose that some time in the far future someone might build a device that brings all dead people’s consciousness back to existence so that you can exist forever in a vast computer network spanning the entirety of the universe, but you’d exist as a separate computerized life form like a character from the sims? Ok, maybe that last one is just me, but you get the idea. We seem to have a huge interest in not believing that there is a simple nothingness after death. We flee from the idea that all that we are doing here and now could vanish in an instance in some indeterminate future.
The simplest explanation is that we are afraid and not just a little. Even a eternity of torture and suffering is more palatable to us than this alternative for at least then while being tortured at least there is a “me” that is being tortured. Emptiness, nothingness these are the real nightmare scenarios. And we fear them being the case for others as much as we fear them for ourselves. No, that’s not right. We fear it more for others. The thought that someone we knew could simply be truly “gone” is too incomprehensible to face. How could anyone be so real, so important now and then become… just nothing at all.
Of course on some level we must be aware of how very unlikely most afterlife scenarios really are. Well really I shouldn’t say unlikely, rather simply unknown is the truth of it. Picking any one is as good as any other because we just have so very little data upon which to base a hypothesis. The very thing we are discussing, our consciousness, is an annoyingly intractable thing. It’s just hard to make true statements about it, harder still to make statements that can be verified through experience. Beyond “cogito, ergo sum”, there’s just not much to say about it in the world of facts and reasoning.
So instead we embrace faith in this matter. We say “I believe in the afterlife” or like statements and we grip them tightly refusing to let them go. “There is a heaven”. “God exists.” “The bible is the word of god.” And there are like phrases in other religions that those who are more familiar with them can easily bring to bear. In a very real sense these are magical words. I have spoken of magical words before, but in this case I think they have a slightly darker aspect. Magic words are what I define as the language we use that has the astounding capacity to help us ward off deep seated fears. In this case they do so by letting us forget the terror we all face for a moment and instead focus on our devotion to our certainty about ideas that have no basis in facts or reasoning. It’s a lot easier to argue endlessly about the existence of God then it is to have to think deeply about what it might mean if there is nothing after the present. You can always drown yourself in imagining endless details of your just rewards that might be coming to you in the hear after. When you do this you can exercise creativity, wonder, imagination, and hope but very little do you engage in deductive reasoning or evaluation. In other words its just a lot more pleasant to believe in something rather than nothing. It’s easier. It can even be fun. At the very least it is rarely scary.
But do we really need to engage in self-deception in order to banish our fear? I’ve always hated that aspect of many things in the world. Far too often we pretend that someone or something will make the world a better place so we don’t have to be afraid. We purposefully ignore relevant details and close our minds to alternative perspectives and we do this fully believing that we are actually being fully reasonable and rational beings. We deceive ourselves and 99 times out of a hundred we do so for the underlying reason that we are too afraid not to. And I believe 100 times out of 100 that self-deception hurts us both as a society and as individuals. It erodes our self-esteem, makes us feel worse about ourselves and makes us make terrible terrible decisions time and again. Only when we abandon self-decision and embrace facts do we manage to make progress.
If forcing yourself to reason about the underlying facts of a thing is the antidote most of the time to self-deception in the world of verifiable facts, how can we cure our self-deception about an afterlife where we have no facts to verify? The answer is that it isn’t that easy. To do it we have to make a great leap in conviction to begin to bypass the middle man of self deception.
You see when we adopt a faith in the afterlife, we apply our capacity for non-fact driven belief to a most likely made up or imagined scenario in order that we might have reasons based on our most likely made up or imagined scenario to be not afraid. That’s awfully convoluted. There’s an easier way albeit one that is not at all obvious to most people. You see as long as we are choosing on a basis of no facts, why don’t we simply directly choose to be not afraid on the basis of no facts. Simply do not fear. Refuse to fear. Why not be afraid? No reason. None at all. Certainly not because there is a god or there is an afterlife or because my consciousness will be preserved in the great Universal computer network. Just don’t be afraid. Declare. Assert. Say, I am not afraid! Why? Because I said so!
There is good reason to do this. Every moment of your life you spend with even the smallest of fears is a lesser moment. And we don’t have to. We cannot say what those who have passed on before us want now since we don’t know if they even want anything or care or even exist, but we certainly *can* say that the people we know who cared about us and have become deceased probably did want while they were alive for us to live without fear and certainly not to be burdened by it after their death. I know this because this is what I want for everyone who I know and care about. I don’t want them to feel one iota of fear after I leave. There lives will be better and they’ll be happier if they don’t. But there’s nothing I can say that will eliminate those fears. I refuse to lie to them or left them deceive themselves. I can only implore them that they not be afraid. Simply choose to abandon fear because you understand the nature of fear and reject it. That is what I want myself, for my family, for my friends, and for the world.
After the fear is rejected completely and totally on the basis of our simplest sincerest convictions, then I believe it can be a good thing and even a valuable thing to embrace the mythos. You have to have an open mind of course, and you should not try to impose one imagination of the afterlife upon another or support one over another. Certainly we should probably abandon mythos that are predicated on asserting value of certain people or peoples over others for the simple practical reason that most of those tend to cause a great deal of harm. No, we can I think embrace the lighter side of the unlikely imaginings about death because they bring us pleasure, because they can bring laughter and joy and release. Death should always have been a much lighter affair than it is now. It is just enjoyable to imagine a person rolling around in there grave after hearing something said that would have offended them in life. Or to say that a person might float down from heaven just to smack you upside the head for doing something wrong. These kinds of things can make fine jokes and can be great tributes to the persons memories and bring the survivors great comfort. We can only joke and laugh and play around with death if we imagine
facts or scenarios or myths about death with which to base our
laughter. Nothingness is certainly far more intractable.So that’s the sum total of my current advice to people about how to think and deal with death. I can sum it up like this: Don’t be afraid. Why? Because. What should you do now? Laugh.
