DEATH: FACING YOUR OWN FINAL CURTAIN WITHOUT FEAR

Mental Health and Human Resilience International Journal (Medwin Publishers), 2024

This essay explores the psychological freedom that emerges from the acceptance of death, arguing that it should not be seen as merely a one-sided freedom of death without the complementary freedom of life. While death is often met with dread and fear, it can foster a sense of authenticity and alignment with personal values. However, this realization must also emphasize the importance of life, as the goal of psychological well-being lies in living, not just acknowledging death. This balance allows us to live fully, prioritize meaningful experiences, and discard trivial concerns. By drawing on Carl Sagan's reflections on humanity's insignificance within the cosmos, this essay encourages empowered and responsible living that embraces both life and death.

Think, 2012

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1978

have a unique authority and competence in the interpretation of the human encounter with death. Theirs is an extraordinary range of experience, in clinical research with psychedelic substances, in cross-cultural and medical anthropology, and in the analysis of Oriental and archaic literatures. Their pioneering work with psychedelics administered to individuals dying of cancer opened domains of experience that proved to be nearly identical to those already mapped in the "Books of the Dead," those mystical visionary accounts of the posthumous journeys of the soul. The Grof/Halifax book and these ancient resources both show the imminent experience of death as a continuation of what had been the hidden aspect of the experience of life.

Open Journal of Philosophy

Finality suggests an unchangeable conclusion. It also raises the idea of a goal towards which a reality is directed. This is the sense in which one finds the final cause in Aristotle and other philosophers. Nearly everyone feels helpless before finality. This is because it evokes the spectrum of finitude as it appears to occur in the dead. No one in the prime of life and at the peak of health, wealth, pleasure and hopeful optimism actively desires death. Yet like a shadow, the awareness of a possible sudden end stalks at everyone. It is not the most comfortable feeling. This raises a situation where both the idea and the reality of death must be confronted in order to make sense of life. Has it meaning? Is it destined or free floating? How and when will life end or does it even have an absolute termination at all? Is death life's last unassailable barrier or just a simple demarcation from other forms of conscious existence in some way? Though often never put into words, failure to engage these questions raises conundrum. Attempts to answer them form and inform cultures, nourish customs, create traditions, inspire inventions, and generally stimulate the human spirit. They keep religions alive, engage thinkers, inspire fidelity to cultural roots and symbols and fire up the spirit of research. It is the position of this paper that confronting human finality is at the service of valorizing human life further. It is like an unseen engine that keeps the vehicle alive. Thus, life approaches death while death serves life. It (death) forbids anyone at the level of the intellect, experience and knowledge from making any absolute positive claims regarding the termination of life. Confronting death psychologically, physically and spiritually requires specific perspectives since each man must face it inevitably in his person and each culture and religion must make sense of it in its own way. That is what this study examines.

Sociological discourse, 2017

Death is an infallible part of the human life, and what makes human different from all other beings is fact that he knows that he is going to die. Knowing this, human beings are spending their whole life knowing that the day of their end is going to come. It is clear that death has its biological part, also as a huge event in the existence of all life forms, including human, death has its philosophical point of view, and finally, unlike some may disagree, death itself is a huge social phenomena as well, and as such, the social influence of death deserves close attention and its own part in the social science studies. This paper analyzes the presence of the death in human culture, including institutions, rituals and beliefs following the discourse of late Zygmunt Bauman who left huge influence on this field of study. Since the earliest forms of communities, humans are trying to overcome the death, the state of "after-life" and some form of immortality of the being is something that is common to all religions and beliefs ever known to mankind, which stands as a evidence that the final void of non-existence know to us as death is something that always presented horror in the mind of the humans.

Dialogica, 2024

This paper examines Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, focusing on how Yalom utilizes Epicurean philosophy to address and mitigate death anxiety. Central to Yalom’s approach are three Epicurean arguments: the mortality of the soul, the notion that after death there is nothing, and the equivalence between the state of non-existence before birth and after death. These arguments provide a framework for understanding and reducing the fear of death by emphasizing the finite nature of human existence. While this secular perspective offers a path to overcoming death anxiety, the paper also recognizes the significance of religious and spiritual beliefs that offer comfort and meaning to many. It argues that various approaches – whether philosophical or religious – serve as valuable tools for individuals to find peace with mortality and to embrace life more fully.

2018

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science by Research.This thesis explores people’s attitudes towards death and dying. Humans have the ability to create meaning and attach these meanings to objects or events within their life, which then rouses some form of emotions. In respect of death emotions tend to be negative, but with meaning formation might provide the ability to develop positive emotions. Semi-structured interviews were utilised to explore the participants’ attitude towards death and dying. They comprised of seven women and two men with ages ranging from 21 to 81 years. Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used, providing an explanation of an individual’s lived experience. Data revealed key factors influencing whether death was seen as normal part of life or an object of fear, included faith, meaning and communication, providing a more positive outlook to death and dying; d...

This study is a philosophical thinking about the relevance of life and death and about the relevance of death to life. It begins with a discussion of the concept of death and the beliefs, attitudes and dispositions which people have about it. It examined why people consider death as horror and argues that it is the horrorful conceptions that partly make people fear death. Thereafter, it presents the attempts made by some thinkers to relieve people from this fear. It presents some views which consider death as gain and as a prelude to a better life. This study also inquires critically whether death is a panacea to the problems of life, imbues meaning on life or removes meaning from it. It concludes that based on what is evident before us in the present state of existence, life does not appear affable; but this does not imply that death is a panacea to it.

Shofar: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Jewish Studies, Special Issue "What's Jewish About Death?", 2021

"There is, of course, nothing particularly Jewish about death, that ultimate universalizing force. But today, several years following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, and in the midst of the 2020 swelling of support for Black Lives Matter, a worldwide activist movement driven by grief, alongside the devastating and still in-progress global Coronavirus pandemic, the puzzles of what Jewishness and Judaism, in their many configurations and iterations, can teach us about death, and what attending closely to death, as well as its close companions, mourning and grief, can teach us about Jewishness and Judaism, have particular urgency. As numerous historians and scholars recognize, it was in times of great upheaval, including around the Crusades and the Black Death, and its attendant massacres, that various now widely recognized Jewish customs and rituals surrounding death, mourning, and memorialization were crystallized. 2 This contemporary moment, then, seems like the right time to rethink what death—and its economic, material, social, ideological, and emotional contexts and circumstances—can mean for Jews and the world around us. This special issue, edited by a sociologist and a literary and visual culture scholar, is not just multidisciplinary but transdisciplinary. It includes essays incorporating scholarly research and methodology culled from Latin@ studies, Rabbinics, film studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. The creative compositions include photography, comics, the short story, poetry, and creative nonfiction writing. By bringing together explorations of Jewish death and loss, sometimes as incontrovertible fact and sometimes as metaphor, sometimes in a communal and sometimes individual sense, from the standpoint of those who have lost and from the standpoint of those afraid of losing, through traditional and secular frameworks, and articulated in a multitude of formats and modalities, we hope this volume, whether held in your hands or scrolled on a screen, will serve as an object of contemplation and curiosity, an instrument for bonding together learning, thinking through, and feeling."