Overcoming the Fear of Death (1)
Ignorance Is the True Killer
There are six common and greatest fears of humans identified by Napoleon Hill. People allow these fears to stop them from living their lives the way they really want. One amongst them is the fear of death. By death here, people mean the event where the human body stops its biological processes that has kept it running. In other words, the moment when the heart stops beating, a person is acknowledged to have experienced death. Many people are terrified about this even though they know what happens to the body when its biological processes stop — it decays, ‘returns to dust’. But then comes the question most people think they want an answer to, What’s next?
People fear death for an apparent number of reasons. Such as
- the apparent inevitability of death
- its non-predictability
- the fact of leaving biological or social relationships
- the probability of never achieving dreams and fulfilling hopes
- the unknown that lies ‘in the beyond’.
At the back of all these excuses for holding to the fear of death is the one thing that ‘makes people perish’. ‘The lack of knowledge.’ IGNORANCE is the real deal, the true killer — or death. Not ignorance of the place where people go after death. Almost everyone who has walked the earth has their own theory and idea of ‘the great beyond’, even if that means nothing, nowhere or remaining back here. Most people seem to know too well to their evaluation what lies beyond that either they enter arguments trying to explain it or they enter into disagreements trying to judge another’s. It is strange that almost everyone is an expert at something they fear, for the reverse is true in our reality: what we know and are expert in, we honour and love, but never fear.
This is indicative of how strangely rooted this ignorance is. It is a killer type: what we don’t know that we don’t know. For instance, do people generally acknowledge the unreasonability of acting on the one hand as if we are only our bodies all the time when we live on earth but, on the other hand, the idea of death means to us that we are leaving our bodies to go somewhere? We can tell intuitively when we think about death that ‘LIFE continues,’ that ‘we do not die,’ that ‘there is still more,’ ‘a great beyond’. But the moment we shift our gaze to all our experiences in this world, we sort of act as if that Life is limited, we die and there is no more, not even a little beyond.
Let’s bring this part home. First, we know death in the most precise meaning to be the cessation of the body from its bio-activity. We fear all indications of that, meaning we act as if all that exists is the body and we don’t want it to go. But when we think about death and afterwards, we feel that life continues, regardless of the theory we about how. But our fear of death is rooted in what kind of continuity life is after the body ceases.
We see then that the greatest ignorance of humans, for which we fear death, is the ignorance of ourselves. We are ignorant of who we are. We are not our bodies, but having identified as it, we are afraid to let the thing we are most familiar with go when we must outgrow it. It is so strange that we have information about almost everything else in the world, except ourselves: who/what continues after death. It is this ignorance that causes us to perish. For if we do not know ourselves, how do we know the things we fear (about death or any other matter) are real unto us? Is it not meant to be the fear belonging to us? But who are we that have or are in possession of such fears?
Our ignorance is the true killer. When we can tell in truth who we are, what that part of us is that leaves the nonbiological body, we have scaled more than 95% of our fears towards death.
