Detoxifying sef-deception
SOTTAcharya S can prove Jesus Christ never existed, and your preacher can’t prove ‘He’ did
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
It’s like taking candy away from a baby. The candy’s no good for the kid, but it will take him many years and much learning to realize the favor you did for him. In the meantime he’ll whine about how mean you were and how wrong it was to do that. But when he’s a healthy adult, because of the very thing you took away, he may actually develop the judgment and wisdom to thank you for what you did. In any case, he’ll be much healthier.
So too with beliefs. If you believe in magic, that some special phrase will keep you safe from harm in all situations and even immunize you from death, you can’t help but fail to perceive the true reality of the world before your eyes — that all things must pass, even though subtle aspects of us may journey onward through our offspring.
It’s a beautiful system when you think about it, one that governs every living thing in the known universe. And every living thing is more than satisfied with it — in fact, prospers in its vital joy because of it — except one. Us.
Humans, normally very discerning in every aspect of their infinitely varied lives, possess absolutely no standards at all when it comes to one subject — death. It is often said that instinct is stronger than reason, and in all the realms of human endeavor, nowhere is this more evident than in the amusingly inventive strategies humans develop to pretend they don’t really die.
The second most common human trait after survival is the urge to prosper and be secure, so it should come as no surprise that, very early on in our history, perceptive and enterprising people, upon recognizing this universal human need to deny that we die, rushed to develop and market products that satisfied the public demand to alleviate this fear. Every culture ever known to man left significant traces of this spiritual commerce.
You know the argument. Can we live our lives and accept that nothing follows? Or must we deceive ourselves and invent, with the power of our infinite imaginations, a way past this daunting wall of mortality. Well, the answer’s in, and the human species has clearly opted for the unprovable hope. But exactly what is the price of this willful self-deception?
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