Why We Humans Have A Fear Of Death And What To Do About It

Fear of death is one thing cancer patients will have to face sooner or later. Learn why we humans fear death and what the core issue is. And discover some simple exercises you can do now to let go of this fear once and for all.

Death Is The Big Taboo Of Today

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the Unites States.

For many cancer seems to be a death sentence. Death is something most of us don't want to deal with. 

If sex was the great taboo of the 19th century, death is the great one of the 20th and 21st centuries. Many fear death and don’t want to think about what happens when the body ceases to exist. We try to deal with this fear by thinking and talking about death as little as possible.  

When we do have to confront it, we usually dress it up with expressions like “when something happens” or “pass away.” But no matter how much we try to avoid it, the prospect of death still haunts us.

The fear of death plays a significant role in our internal experience. It haunts us and rumbles under the surface.

Some religious people believe in an afterlife where you either go to heaven or hell.  A righteous person will go to the Promised Land.  And an evil person will burn in hell. Atheists think that their existence end when the body dies. They fear of losing their identity and become nothing. 

In eastern countries, they accept in reincarnation as the truth. The goal for Buddhists is to let go of the ego and thereby stop the cycle of life and death. People that believe in reincarnation fear of being reborn as a lower life form and get stuck in this circle.

So let's explore why we humans are afraid of dying and where it all began.

When Did Our Fear Of Death Begin?

Steve Taylor is the author of The Fall. In this book, he describes the history of human evolution.

According to Taylor, our ancestors didn’t have the same kind of ego that we have today. He calls them unfallen people. They lived in harmony and didn’t fear death.

Our fear of death started when we began to develop an ego around 4000 BCE. The dramatic changes in climate in Central Asia and The Middle East made survival harder. And this produced a sharpened sense of individuality among everyone. Taylor refers this as the Ego Explosion.

When living beings develop self-consciousness, they also become aware of their potential non-existence. That is, they became aware of death.

Most animals have no self-consciousness. And as a result, they don’t appear to have any awareness of mortality.

One major difference between unfallen people and us is that they seem less afraid of death. Unfallen peoples' individuality isn't so important to them, the prospect of losing it wasn’t a big deal.

They couldn't separate their existence from nature or their tribe.With the Fall, individuals felt more divided. Their personal life became the whole basis of who they were. So its end became a frightening prospect. 

It didn’t matter that the community or the rest of the universe would continue to live after a person’s death. All that mattered was that the self would no longer exist.

So how did unfallen people view death? And how did it differ from our beliefs about death?

Native People's View Of Afterlife 

Fallen peoples' concepts of an afterlife were one way to deal with the fear of death.  There was no way their egos could live on forever in the same awful world like this.

So they believed in a paradise which was free from war, oppression, poverty, and disease. A place where they would live side by side with gods and angels. 

Native people had concepts of an afterlife too. But they saw life after death as an unexciting affair, which wasn’t so different from this life. The Cheyenne Indians believed that after death they carried on living in the same way, but as spirits.

Native peoples life after death doesn’t involve the survival of the personality or the ego. For them life after death rarely means immortality. Other native peoples had a more “spiritual” conception of life after death. They didn't feature the survival of the individual at all. 

The Nuer of Africa, for instance, believed that when a man dies the life goes back to God or Spirit from whom he came.

Life comes from God or Spirit and returns to him. The Keresan Pueblo Indians believed that when people die their souls go to Shipap. Shipap is the place of emergence,  which bore them and everyone will return to.

Before the unfallen people developed an ego, they believed in a collective consciousness. Everyone was part of a whole and not separate. They didn’t have a concept of time, and the now was the only thing that existed.

The notion of time developed after their ego emerged. Now they worried about a horrible future where bad things could happen to them.

It seems that the unfallen people were right about death all the time. Modern science has discovered that our world is an illusion and not what we believe it to be.

Read on and learn the fascinating information about the universe

Quantum Physics Discover That Our World Is An Illusion

Albert Einstein and other in the quantum field have studied the universe. What we perceive as our physical material world, is not physical or material at all, in fact, it is far from it. Nobel Prize winners and other scientists around the world have concluded this. 

In the 19th century, physicists started to explore the link between energy and matter. Scientists dropped the belief of a material universe. And instead, they recognized that matter is nothing but an illusion. 

As you focus in closer and closer to the structure of the atom, you see emptiness. Each atom is 99% space. The atom and we have no physical structure.

Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are energy that is spinning and vibrating. We are beings of energy and vibration, radiating our unique energy. The new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality.

Our world is an illusion. Things that seem solid aren’t. Everything at its core is energy vibrating at different frequencies. Our senses take these vibrations and make us believe in a material world.

Humans are in fact one with the universe. The whole universe is energy, so we humans are not separate entities but instead part of the whole.

Our individualities are like the drops in the ocean. The drops are always a part of the whole, and there is no real separation. You cannot create or destroy energy, only change it from one form to another.

So if there is no real death, then why are we humans afraid of dying? Let’s find out what the core of death anxiety is and how to deal with it.

Why Do We Fear Death?

Eckhart Toll is the best-selling author of the book “The Power Of Now.” He suffered from depression earlier in his life and wanted to end it.

Eckhart told himself that he couldn’t live with himself anymore. But he wondered who is this other person I can't live with? Were there two of him or just one?

He discovered that the ego wasn’t part of who he was. This realization made him experience peace. He felt part of a whole and knew that everything was an illusion and that there was no death.

At the core of our being, we are one with the universe, infinite and eternal, beyond space and time and death. You are not your body because you drag around it every day. Nor are you a car because you drive it. 

Although we have become alienated from this true nature, we still have an intuition of it. Our deepest drive is to regain the wholeness which we’ve lost.

But, we go about this in completely the wrong way. We have confused our true spiritual nature into the realm of the ego. In our deepest selves, we are one with God or the universe.

But on the level of the ego, this translates into a desire to be God. We want to be powerful, to control and dominate other people. Hence the desire for status, success, and power.

In our deepest selves, we are everything. But on the ego level, this translates into wanting to have everything. The spirit in us is immortal, but on the ego level, this translates to living forever as an individual.

So let's find out the core issue of our death anxiety. Can you guess what it is?

The Number One Reason We Humans Fear Death

Our fear of death stems from losing our identity. During our life, everyone tells us that our name, nationality, and body is who we are. We also get brainwashed into thinking that our profession is part of our identity. 

We chase after success and power to be happy and to override or cancel out our suffering. Everyone tries to become “someone” because we feel a sense of nothingness inside us. We strive to complete ourselves by filling a void that exists inside us.

One of the desires of the developed ego is to live forever. That is why fallen people want to believe in the survival of the individual for eternity in heaven.

But since many of us no longer accept the possibility of immortality in heaven, we try to attain it on earth. We do this by becoming so powerful that we reach permanent god-like status. 

Or we want to become so mighty or famous that we transcend death by leaving an impressive legacy. Because we've worked hard to maintain our status or knowledge, it's difficult to let go of these things. 

Every one of us has a mental list of stuff we need to achieve or do in life to feel valuable. We feel obligated to getting married, obtain material success, and more.

When we die, we want others to remember us for our impressive achievements. Our fear is that nobody wants to come to our funeral and forget us. To stop fearing death, you need to let go of the ego. 

So how do you let go of your need for status and achievement? Find out in the next section

Why Our Thoughts Are Behind All Suffering

Every physiological fear stems from our negative thoughts. Your ego exists because of your negative thoughts. The ego is a mental parasite that feeds of your negative beliefs. So if you want to let go of your ego, you need to challenge your mental ideas.

If you cling to an identity, you need to write down the things you are afraid of giving up. After that, you should look at the reasons why you need these things. The thing that you cling to might be your status, family, money, knowledge, etc. 

It is our thoughts that cause us to chase these things. When we analyze our thoughts, we see that external things can’t make us happy. And we then can let go of them and have nothing to lose.

There is nothing bad in letting go of our identity or knowledge. The way to enlightenment is to unlearn what we believe in. When we don’t accept negative concepts or limited things about life we are the happiest. Look at children. 

At the beginning of their lives, they are like a blank canvas. Their innocence and ignorance protect them from suffering. They are much happier than adults.

As they become adults, they start to believe in negative concepts about themselves. And that leads them to become depressed and fearful about death. So letting go of your concepts about life makes you go back to the curiosity of your childhood. 

Let me summarize what you learned today and then teach you some exercises on how to letting go of your fear of death.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.