askchapo

yeah, i agree with the comparison to sleep.

i'm not on like some death drive, there's still things i would like to see and do, even holding space for life to surprise me, but when it comes it comes. i would certainly not jump into danger or let the cement truck hit me, i will try to avoid the hunter as i can but i know one day he will catch me.

but i think of it is as a sleep, one that is truly restful. to finally stop, become still, decay, and be reconfigured, maybe even into new life, is our only required mission and we all succeed. except those cryo people i guess, but i think that's some really grasping pseudo-immortality b.s. that doesn't appeal to me. the emperor would promise a mountain of gold to the one who makes him immortal.

i don't think you're alone in being unnerved by it, though. quite the opposite. i read some eastern philosophy book a long ass time ago--that is a book by a western-born student of eastern philosophy--and his take was that western culture in modernity was too fearful about death, afraid to contemplate it, to name it, and consider it, exacerbating this fear and compounding it. he characterized western institutions and society as expending great effort to provide our minds with distractions from the notion of death, to push these thoughts away so we need not face them. orthodox christianity gave westerners and colonial subjects an easy answer to give kids, and for millenia, the general cosmology of your average westerner still accepts the easy answer, rather than surrendering to mystery and awe by letting a mind try to contemplate nonexistence.

it's almost like a riddle/koan, to try and touch the impossibly eternal stillness of a completely quiet mind. [you mentioning your therapist going out into the wilderness or some place where nature's forms are abundant... reading that, i thought, "yeah, totally lol", because nature is one of those inspirations for me, seeing the ever present struggle to survive, the decay, the rebirth all happening at once. realizing i am part of it, interconnected. ecological interpretation is the primary key i use to unlock that part of my mind. i could sit somewhere comfortably and quietly listen to the sound of a gentle wind moving through the leaves of a cluster of trees for hours.] anyway, in the west, we get total avoidance. and the twin head of the same fearful snake: the kind of death drive/cult of pretending to laugh with bravado in the face of annihilation, because only the sinful and the heretic should fear death, christian soldier. join christ in valhala. talk about living in fear, these people... jesus.

i wish i could tell you what book it was, but we're talking like 20+ year ago. it may have been a Stephen Batchelor translation of some buddhist text or possibly an annotated translation of the tao te ching and/or the huahujing. my gut says it was some taoist thing, rather than buddhist. i had this whole unstoppable interest in eastern thought when i got out of high school, and i can't really parse where some ideas i picked up came from exactly. and i don't even know if you would find anything of value in those texts or ideas, but i found the ideas personally transformative.

no idea if this will help anyone. most of my family is all scared shitless of death and i'm the weird one for being "morbid" in that i can talk about my post-mortem wishes easily, and i'm pretty casual about the topic and happy to engage with it at any time, because no matter how much people avoid this topic, it tends to surface in ways that cannot be immediately pushed back down. and none of the answers i give them when they ask seem to bring any long term peace. whoops. :0

to be clear i wouldn't call myself a taoist or a buddhist or a jain or a hindu or anything but a DIY fool, but i do think engaging with this question, "how do i not fear death?" is like in the general neighborhood of religious cosmology/divinity, philosphy, spirituality, and all the other designations used to try and categorize the extremely ancient, universal phenomenon of people thinking about unknowable stuff and making note of the ideas and feelings that bubble up. and we live a unique time where you can find pretty much any ancient book of those sorts of thoughts translated into your a mother tongue, which is kind of a deep vein of long-maintained lines of sacred stories and libraries of wisdom that many people just kinda sleep on.