Chapter 28 3.People who are more interested in practical interests are more afraid of death

Philosophizing death captures the seven inches of death fear.But in terms of changing our psychological structure and making us stronger, it needs to be supplemented. Many years ago, a cold winter night.In a house on the hillside of a Grand Canyon, a few people and I were chatting by the fire.The wind howled outside the window, and the flames in the house flickered.The topic is endless, and I don't know who suddenly brought up fear of death.A 50-year-old man frustratingly admitted that he was terrified when he saw a coffin. The situation terrified me at the time.But in the long years that followed, I realized that our fear of death may indeed be irrational to such an extent: from the fear of death, to the fear of any symbol associated with death.They are coffins, graves, wreaths, even words like "death" and "corpse."For example, the person I mentioned earlier called me and told me that he had "fear of non-existence", that is, he did not dare to face the word "death".

I believe that when those two words crossed his mind, a sense of dread gripped him. But the only reason this man, and that man in his mid-fifties, is afraid of symbols of death is because they have eerie features, or are associated with them.Using their imaginations, they forged a chain linking objects, words and horrific images of death. It is necessary to admit the fact that in this world, things that are too beautiful or too ugly, too warm or too terrifying have a magical power that can easily bypass our intellectual structure and stimulate our psychological structure, stirring up ecstasy or a terrible storm.But this is achieved through ideas, through chains of imagination, and if coffins, wreaths, and wreaths did not symbolize death, then, when we see them, the horrible situation would not exist in our psychic structure.

This means that our fears of things like coffins and wreaths are actually of our own design, and their symbolic meaning for death is assigned by humans.But since man can ascribe a certain symbolism to them, he can also remove it by breaking the chain of imagination that links them with death.As long as we treat them as objective objects in the intellectual structure, we will not be disturbed by fear in the psychological structure. To be alone in the dark is to be in a situation of nothingness, and you will feel that there are unknown threats grabbing you around you.This threat is equivalent to the threat of death.If you muster up the courage to go alone to the dark woods or mountains and sit quietly for half an hour at night, you will find that this is a completely different situation from the reality of the day.When the fear strikes, you force yourself to calm down and feel the atmosphere, which is an indescribable experience.This kind of experience may be blending with the universe, or feeling the insignificance of human beings alone under the emptiness, but as long as you are not afraid, you have experience to weaken the impact of death fear on you, because you imagine the situation after death , is nothing more than an advanced version of this dark situation.

It is no coincidence that people who are more interested in practical interests are more afraid of death.The more a person assimilates to the society he lives in, the less his thoughts and actions do not exceed the scope of the society he lives in, the narrower his whole mind and existence become.And the more this is the case, the more his existence is like a speck of dust to the entire universe. A person who is firmly attached to "reality" is a person who has cut off the time chain of past, present and future, that is to say, a person who has rejected "eternity".Psychologically he loses in the race against death sooner than those who feel themselves mentally and psychologically living in a time-space stretching forward and backward.

It is obvious that if we neither understand history nor imagine the future, psychologically we will lose touch with the world constructed by time series, and our existence will be easily overwhelmed.A person who can talk to the past, a person who can conceive the future, is less afraid of death than a person who hangs in the air, because his existence has been favored by "nature"!