How do we gain power over death?

[coberst]

How do we gain power over death?

 

Psychology informs me that it is the nature of humans to be influenced greatly by the recognition of the self and that the self must die. All of us have a great energy directed toward not dying. We dread the conscious thought of dying because our instincts reject death. When we consciously entertain the thought of death we are driven into anxiety and the task of the ego is to reject this anxiety and thus the ego represses such consciousness.

 

We have the narcissistic urge to reject death and to gain power over death. In gaining this power over death we do many things and one of these things we do is kill others to prove that “Our God is bigger than Their God”. Accumulation of power in all of its manifestations is a form of fighting death and gaining immortality in a sense. Of course we know we must die but our efforts are directed at repressing this awareness by fighting the evil of death and thereby killing others in this effort.

 

We create all kinds of artificial things to hide within in this process. Nationalism and religion are perhaps the most dangerous of our creations. I guess almost all killing in war is done under the banner of nationalism or religion.

 

Becker compares three great thinkers Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, and Carl Jung to conclude that the three provide us nothing with which to connect their conclusions except that they dissented from Freud. However, there is agreement on the answer to the fundamental question, “What causes evil in human affairs?”

 

This agreement is also the agreement in all of the human sciences; “man wants above all to endure and prosper, to achieve immortality in some way”.

 

Wo/man wants, above all, to reject the knowledge of mortality; s/he does so by seeking to assure immortality in some way. Mortality is connected to our animal nature and thereby wo/man reaches for some way of being transcendent of that nature. As our mental capacity increased we rejected other animals with a vengeance because these other animals “embodied what man feared most, a nameless and faceless death.

 

Our fears are buried deeply within our unconsciousness by repression, that great discovery of the science of psychoanalysis. This repression “is achieved by the symbolic engineering of culture, which everywhere serves men as an antidote to terror by giving them a new and durable life beyond that of the body”.

 

I have recently finished reading “The Art of War” an article in the March 12, 2007 edition of “Time” by Lev Grossman. The article is about a, largely computer generated, movie regarding a war in ancient Greece. The movie’s title is “The 300 Spartans” and Zack Snyder is the director. The movie is, except for the human actors, a virtual world created by digital movie techniques. The Art of War - TIME

 

“Snyder is one of a small, hypertechnical fringe of directors who are exploring a new way to make movies by discarding props, sets, extras and real-life locations and replacing them with their computer-generated equivalents.”

 

“With so much computer-generated make-believe going on, the actor’s physicality is the movie’s only link to the real world…every frame was manipulated and color-shifted to create an intense, thunderstorm palette…The result is a gorgeous, dreamlike movie that’s almost perfect. Every frame is neat and composed, like an oil painting, not a hair or a grain of sand out of place. All noise and dissonance have been digitally eliminated. Maybe that’s the only way to make a war movie right now, or at least, the only way to make a war movie that’s not an antiwar movie…That’s why it’s a piece of mythology. It’s what we would hope for. “300” is a vision of war as ennobling and morally unambiguous and spectacularly good-looking.”

 

That’s one hell of a special effect. And this movie is, I find, an insight into the meaning of “evil in human affairs”. We are all directors of our individual and our community’s virtual reality.

 

I suspect we have repressed such conscious thoughts about mortality that we are inclined to dispatch with a shrug any talk of such matters; do you ever consciously seek to “achieve immortality in some way”?

 

Quotes from Escape from Evil—Ernest Becker

[Boerseun]

Well, I am immortal.

 

So far, so good, at least.

 

But jokes and giggles aside, I think the animalistic instinct we share with other animals is not necessarily an instinct to live forever, as it is merely an instinct to avoid pain. If you go out of your way to avoid pain, then you would most likely avoid fatal situations and end up living longer as a side benefit. But the original intent was merely to avoid pain.

 

I'm not aware of any other animal contemplating its own mortality, though.

 

And many older people that I know have actually made their peace with their approaching death, and are quite blasé about the whole thing. I'm not sure whether you can draw universal truths about the personal experience or expectations of death. Some people live in morbid fear of death, others simply don't give a hoot.

[coberst]

We have repressed our anxiety of death and as a result we have, among many things, created religion.

[Donk]

When I was young I didn't worry about death at all. Youngsters expect to live for ever. Why not? My clear memories only went back a decade or so, and that seemed like forever. The prospect of five, six, seven more decades in front of me - well, that was five, six, seven forevers!

 

I worried about it a little when I was older, with a young family. Insurance meant that they'd be physically ok, but I wanted to spend time with them, tell them some of the things that I'd had to figure out the hard way. They grew up and moved away - job done

 

I'm now past sixty and I enjoy living. There's a whole list of things I still want to do, with more being added as fast as the old ones get ticked. The thought of dying doesn't bother me though. There's something - an inner certainty - that I can't put properly into words.

 

I'm not religious in any conventional sense. When I die, I'm pretty certain that that's it for the body, the memories, the personality. But something will be left. The nearest I can get to explaining it is a focus of attention. When I'm gone, that "attention" will be focused on somebody else. Similar to Buddhism, but without the meditation, the chanting, the begging bowl. No feeling that I have to explore, to find the truth. And definitely no impulse to preach my beliefs to others! As I say, it can't be put into words, so I couldn't preach if I wanted to.

 

I could be wrong, but I've had the same "inner certainty" feeling in the past over other matters, and always been right. And if I am wrong, so what? If it stops me worrying, that has to be good. I've seen people so scared of dying, so intent on cheating death for a few extra years, that they forget about living!

[Moontanman]

Reproduction is the only way to cheat death. We live on in our children.

[Rade]

We gain power over death by understanding that death as a thing does not exist.

[Boerseun]

We gain power over death by understanding that death as a thing does not exist.

Well, "death" is not a "thing", it's a "state". If you understand death to be the absence of metabolism, or even the cessation and absence of electrical brain activity, then death surely exist. The upside is that in the absence of metabolism and/or brain activity, the subject will not be aware of it.

 

Nature's Final Kindness: She applies full anesthetic to her patients before introducing the maggots.

[Rade]

Well, "death" is not a "thing", it's a "state". If you understand death to be the absence of metabolism, or even the cessation and absence of electrical brain activity, then death surely exist.

A "state" is "a way or form of being". For example, a system can be said to be in "steady state". But there is no "being" state to be found in death, thus death does not exist as a "state", only existence exists as a "state". Thus, if death does not exist as a thing or state, knowledge of this fact is one answer to the OP question--how do we gain power over death. Now, of course this is not the only way humans answer the OP question. Many choose the path to belief that death leads to more life, in some cases in a cycle of death-life-death-life....in other cases in everlasting life. Both of these also are examples of how humans can gain power over death.