The process of dying is feared by many people, who know their dying will be wrought with excruciating pain and suffering. Suffering not only allows people too much time to think and reflect. It allows them space to regret their life. Something, I believe no person wants to deal with. The concept of suffering is almost as alien as the experience of suffering for many folks living far far removed from the Iraq battlefields or the plains of Darfur.The fear of death many times consumes people who are not satisfied with what their life is or was.
The smell and taste of death consumes the life of the children of Iraq and Afghanistan, although I know not if they fear what they have always known – any day could be their last. They live in the reality of pipe bombs…air-raids…suicide bombers not a world of what might have been or should be. The fear must be ever present in their day to day existence.
Death is usually something feared by those who have seen it up close, as robbing possibility from their fragile existence, even if they view their life as mundane or tragically empty of meaning. Death becomes the greatest foe of people caught in a life where they feel meaningless and many times unfulfilled. Death becomes your ally only when life is unbearable and too painful to even draw another breath from the air surrounding the life you are living.
The key to why many people are afraid of dying lies is one small word hope. It has been said, when people lose hope they fear everything.
Why?
People fear that which they can not control nor understand rationally,especially when they have lost hope.
Why?
They fear pain and suffering most usually associated with death, when there is no hope left, because they have no faith.
When people come to see the world as an intertwined system of experiences and events….and the time we spend here from birth to death is only a segment of our eternal cosmic journey then fear fades to enlightenment. The revelation happens to many people,when fear is replaced in the human mind and soul with faith. When you know what you know is true and there is no doubt about life after death, then fear has no power. Dying then is known for what it is, a part of the journey and a point of passage to the next adventure.
When people come to know that faith goes beyond seeing and feeling and is profoundly real, just as death appears final, then death loses its power of fear over the human condition. The human animal instinct to self-preservation is always overwhelmed by spiritual enlightenment, no matter the religion.
Faith in something other than self – the here and now – power – money – the nature of humanity – brings hope and hope strips away the fear of death!
