WHAT ABOUT DEATH?
Why Modern People Fear It
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Our time on earth is limited. Without exuberance, we each face that fact. Many people try to avoid the pain of that knowledge, by conducting their daily lives as if death didn’t exist. Some take comfort in the belief that their creator will reward them with an ideal afterlife, for good behavior. Others salve their fear of death, by believing in reincarnation, karma, or other transcendental principles. But, the real question is why—why is something as natural as death so difficult for the modern mind to accept?
Our modern way of life has disconnected us from our innate feelings, which arise from our souls, and through which all humans once instinctively knew what life is about. But, in modern life, humanity is ruled by monetary and legal systems, not by the feelings, through which evolution governs the life of every other species on earth. Our dependency on monetary systems has entirely severed the connections of interdependence, mutual trust, and love, through which earlier humans once took care of life, by serving the people around them.
We moderns now depend on money for survival and function as agents of the state—each of us an isolated entity carrying full responsibility for our own wellbeing, and forever living under the crushing spiritual insult of a state that tells us what we can and cannot do. Equally insulting to the human spirit is the necessity of surviving without the natural support of sisterhoods and brotherhoods—the safe harbors that our distant ancestors once took for granted. Despite the spiritual insult inherent to depending on money, for survival, we moderns continue to love money. How could we not, when everything we need to survive, including a place to live, has a price on it? Personal wealth is the only security blanket we have. Failure to accumulate it, in some ways, is worse than committing a crime. The state, at least, provides convicted criminals with food and shelter.
Evolution, alone governed Homo sapiens, before the invention of monetary and legal systems. People survived in interdependent social groups, bonded by their need for one another. Instead of living for the future, by accumulating personal wealth, people lived in the moment, by spending their time attending to one another’s real and present needs. People loved placing the needs of others above their own, because, by serving the people they loved, they were simultaneously providing for their own wellbeing.
More significantly, by attending to the needs of others, they supported the survival of their species, thus functioning as agents of Life. In truth, no social species can long endure, unless its members are predisposed, by evolution, to place the needs of their species above their own. Likewise, no empire can exist, without its subjects placing the state’s needs above their own. Modern people are so dependent on the services provided by the state, that they have virtually no choice, other than to honor the laws of their state, as sovereign. Our dependency is such that honoring the state as sovereign continues long after it has become obvious that the emperor has no clothes, i.e. he can’t make good on providing his subjects with the peaceful and just future he promised.
Having been indoctrinated to function as agents of the state, we are no longer free to be the agents of life we were born to be. Thus, we are understandably uncomfortable with the reality of our own deaths. It’s difficult for us to approach the end of our time here, because our souls know that we’ve never served our purpose for being: Evolution instilled our souls with the need to serve the species that gifted us with life. Yet, we must do the opposite, by complying with the state’s laws, and the state, in turn, rewards us with wealth and privilege. Both, however, are meaningless to our souls, because realizing personal ambitions does not serve our species. Evolution informs us that we are serving our purpose through the intimacy that is intrinsic to needing, loving, and caring for our fellow man.
Modern society ignores it, but, as individuals, we would do well to keep in mind that evolution has been genetically programming the feelings of animate beings, since the first stirrings of life on earth. As a result of that programming, simply by doing what’s natural—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain—all animate beings serve life, without knowing it. For humans, to once again, realize our purpose for being requires that we again be true to our inborn feelings, not to our plans. Only by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain do we honor our emotional intelligence, thus serve the life of our species. Evolution always rewards us with feelings of intimacy, for being true to life. Through this intimacy, we become as-one with all existence, by losing ourselves in our relationships with the people, and the world, around us.
The fact of death is not the problem. How we feel about it is the problem. Death is, perforce, incomprehensible to people who believe life’s meaning comes from realizing future objectives. But, people who live natural human lives experience the intimacy of interdependent relationships, through which each individual feels eternally as-one with all there is. In this natural world, death is hardly any problem, at all, except, of course, for those who loved the individual who is no longer with us.
Copyright © 2022 by Chet Shupe
