TRANSCRIPT
What is the fear of death? Well, three things right now have popped into my mind that all go into the fear of death. The first thing is, I think at some level, just inherently, the idea of dying can be scary. The unknown is scary, and nobody really knows what’s going to happen to them after they die. And it’s also a sad thing. Are we gonna lose our life, this thing that we treasure so much, this thing that we all want so much to be alive and to be here and to get the chance to explore this thing called existence? It’s all gonna go away. Our perspective on the universe is gonna fade away, and we’re gonna be gone. I think that is inherently scary.
But I think that fear of death is really probably just a minimal part of what really goes on when people are feeling a fear of death, a fear of dying. I think the other two things are actually much, much stronger in terms of going into why people are afraid of dying and afraid of death.
The second thing that I think really goes very strongly into people’s fear of death is the fear that they’re not actually living. And I think what it is, is people who get really scared of death, a lot of times they’re not actively engaged in their own lives. They’re not actually having their spirits come out and really be true, be real. They’re not actually living their dreams. They’re living in some dissociated state. They’re not actually doing what they want with their life. They’re living for some external purpose. They’re having a sort of a meaningless feeling on the inside. Their life itself is not very valuable, it’s not very purposeful, and they don’t like it. And that is very painful. And it’s also, for many, many people, very, very hard to change that.
They’re so stuck in this rigid existence that the fear they have of actually changing it, the terror of doing something new, of growing, of breaking out of this pattern that they’re in, is so terrifying that it’s actually easier to transfer all their fears onto fears of death, on fears of dying. So really, when they’re saying they’re so terrified of death—because some people are just obsessed with it—they’re so terrified of dying and death and what is it going to be like and what’s gonna happen to me afterward. Underneath it, so often, it’s really just they’re afraid of living their life here and now. They’re afraid of being true to who they are, true to their feelings, true to their desires, their goals, their motivations. And they’re so out of touch with the process of living, really living here and now, that in a way they’re rusted, they’re weak. It’s very hard to start if they haven’t been doing it for a long, long, long time. And so it’s scary. It’s scary to really start breaking that cycle and start living again.
What I have seen, though, with people, very interestingly, is when they really are feeling disconnected with their lives and they start reclaiming their life, reclaiming their purpose, finding actual meaning in it, being more honest about what they really want and figuring out how to do it, their fear of death can go way down. For some people, they actually lose it. They’re not even afraid of death anymore. So even if they do have a small part of them that actually might inherently be afraid of dying—and I think probably we all have that to some degree—it becomes insignificant compared to how afraid they were before of dying. Because really, it was just a metaphor for being afraid of living.
Now, what’s the third thing that really goes into people being afraid of death and people being afraid of dying? The third thing, to me, that I see that’s very connected to the second thing is that—and the second thing again being that people are afraid of living—now the third thing is that people were never allowed to really live. So they are having all this buried sea of having not lived from their past. What it is, is they are traumatized. And so their traumas froze them up, basically killed them from having been able to live their life for years and years and years. Basically, fundamentally, they are traumatized children who were not allowed to live their lives. And this past, not being able to live their lives, also plays right into their fear of death now.
So basically, what it is, is when a child gets traumatized, when a child is forced to push down their feelings and not be connected to who they really are, what they really want, how they really feel, in a way that is a metaphorical death. So actually, they went through a mini death. Or to put it a different way, the degree to which they were traumatized, the degree to which we are traumatized, the degree to which I was traumatized, is the degree to which they actually were dead. We are dead. I was dead. I was killed in a way. Yet the interesting caveat with people who are traumatized is often they’re not aware of it. They’re not aware to the degree of which they were traumatized. They’re not aware of their feelings. They’re split off from their feelings. So in a way, it’s like all those feelings are still there. All their post-traumatic feelings are still there, and it’s just buried. All their desires are buried. All their creativity is buried. But they’re not aware of it. And they were terrified of coming back to life because coming back to life and being real and being who they really were would have made their lives even worse back then.
And so what people do is they can transfer all that buried fear, rage, anger, terror, sadness into fear of death. And so all that past stuff plays right out into their fear of death. And all that past stuff of not really having lived, of having actually been psychologically and emotionally killed in so many ways, also connects to not living right now in the present. So basically, that’s whether it’s second and third reason are very similar. Past trauma, past unresolved trauma is what leads right into presently being stuck, presently not living our lives.
So the fear of death, to me, does, to recap, come down to three things. The smallest part is a real actual fear of death. The second part is that we’re not really living for purpose, not living for truth, not living our real dreams right now. And the third part is that we were crushed and we were traumatized, and this has been going on for a long, long time. And all three of those things can get mixed together in people’s minds that play out in one big thing: “Oh my God, I’m terrified of dying.” And ultimately, the answer to me is to heal those ancient traumas, then to really, in the present moment, live our lives to the fullest that we can for purpose and meaning. And then the third part is just faith: life on life’s terms. And when the time comes to go, we will go.