The fear of death is useless anxiety but can be understood if placed in the context of the fear of the unknown. Life is the only experience the so-called living knows, and death is as unfamiliar as living without aging. Death may well be a much more rewarding experience than life, but there are very few people who want to find out.
Under the suffocating influences of Western culture, most of the peoples of the world are as dead as the concept of death can get. Yet those same peoples fear the transition into a state that they already exist.
Some want death, but the anxiety of the unknown is a cause of much concern for them, causing them to waver between what they want and that which they fear. You feel trapped within a question mark that has no rational form when you hear a sound that you do not at once recognize.
The beating of your heart in the stillness of the night becomes a vivid awareness of how fragile life is. If you are lying in bed, fear causes you to get up, when only moments before you thought of the serenity and tranquility of transitioning into forever during sleep.
With a lack of enthusiasm, you take your medications because you want to live with as little suffering, hospital and doctor bills as possible. You think of the people whom you knew who have transitioned beyond your realm of consciousness, and you think of how death is only one step from the last.
Nothing mystical or magical has happened to them as they have merely continued a journey having many layers of consciousness.
I knew someone who would cry while telling me that they did not want to die. The fear of death became of no value as sickness and the loss of people they knew, one by one, made the continuance of life undesirable to them.
How can you grieve the end of someone's suffering? How can you mourn for someone who has taken the next step on their journey? The fear of death is useless anxiety because the living is as dead as death can get, thinking that they are alive when they are not.
The Western culture has produced a world populated by the animated dead. Fabricating people that are stimulation in motion, that laughs, that sings, that dance, that talk, that go to work, that breathe, all the while producing nothing that infinity can account for as being anything of significance.
The Anxiety of the Unknown is as natural as using the toilet and cannot be flushed away by denial and dreaming. So, I comfort myself by making peace with that which is impossible to know until I take that next step and walk into it.
