Posted on: Saturday, June 9, 2001

Expressions of Faith
Practicing death sheds fear

By Michael E. Tymn

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that it is psychologically beneficial to have death as a goal toward which to strive. Mozart called death the key to unlocking the door to true happiness. Shakespeare wrote that when we are prepared for death, life is sweeter. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne said that "to practice death is to practice freedom."

Strange ideas, but these great men drank deep from the fountain of wisdom and understood life's greatest paradox: that in embracing death we can live a fuller, more enjoyable, more meaningful life.

"Death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality," Jung offered. "There is no sense in pretending otherwise. It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically. (However) from another point of view, death appears a joyful event. In the light of eternity, it is a wedding, a mysterium conjunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half. It achieves wholeness."    

It's extremely difficult for average Western materialists, whether or not they subscribe to a religion, to comprehend such sage reasoning.

"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human mind like nothing else," wrote anthropologist Edwin Becker in his 1974 Pulitzer prize-winning book, "The Denial of Death." Becker explained that to free oneself of death anxiety, nearly everyone chooses the path of repression. We bury the anxiety deep in the subconscious while we busy ourselves with our lives as we seek a mundane security we expect to continue indefinitely.

Sooner or later those repressed anxieties concerning death begin welling to the surface, causing stress, anxiety, fears and depression.

Becker called repression the enemy of mankind. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, author of "The Broken Connection," said much the same thing, stating that "in real psychological ways, one must know death in order to live with free imagination."

The key to living the unrepressed life, according to Becker and Lifton, is having a sense of immortality, a firm belief that this life is part of a much larger and eternal life.

Developing that sense of immortality is not usually achieved simply by attending church or synagogue once a week. We must practice death daily. As Socrates put it, "practicing death" is merely pursuing philosophy "in the right way," and learning how "to face death easily." It means searching for higher truths, cultivating an awareness of the larger life and being able to visualize other realms of existence.

An hour a day of practicing death allows us to better understand life, to savor it, to harmonize with it, to find inner peace, tranquillity, and repose, to move closer to being one with the Creator, and to make a graceful transition to the world of higher vibration when the time is right.

Michael E. Tymn is the vice president of the Hawai'i Chapter of the International Association of Near-Death Studies and book review editor for the Journal of Religion and Psychical Research.