Thought Experimentation Take Two-Death

Death: The Everlasting Fear


Before diving in, I must come clean with my fears for this experiment. My main fear is that everyone will write about the same things as I, on death that is, and that I will have lesser ideas. On subjects like "Death" I do not rant well. I can go on for days about trite subjects such as the weather, the Ugg boot and short combination (I detest it, to share the short version) or how Dairy Queen took away their S'mores parfait and therefore directly contributed to children's happiness and confusion that a delicious treat they had once eaten disappeared (also that it was my favorite...and they have all the ingredients there for Pete's sake). Yet I do not tend to participate in discussions on such heavy, overarching topics like death. Do I scare away because of this self-image issue of looking dumber? Do I scare away because I have no ideas or opinion? Do I scare away because Death is a topic everyone has an opinion about and thus there is a greater chance of them disagreeing with me or making me feel dumb? Or do I scare away because of my own fears and apprehensions surrounding Death? I actually do not know the answer to these questions, because while reading the "Vampire Lectures" by Laurence Rickels (which obviously deals a lot with Death and various ideas surrounding it) I realized that I simply never think about it. I have no opinions on it. I have no arguments or ideas. Why have I never realized this? Clearly this is the reason I shy away from the subject in conversation, but why have I even shied my mind from it? These are many questions that require answers in this thought experiment. I suppose my only other fear with this is that I will not be able to make my own opinions and ideas and will simply sponge up others in the process. I do not think I will though, as in my explorations of Death I used many sources, from other people to books to class discussions to movies. I think this gives me a well-rounded base for exploration.
My biggest issue in thinking about death is that it just doesn't seem possible to me that we could just die. It is too extreme of an idea to me. What about the other part of me? What about my soul and thoughts and persona? That has to go somewhere. I think it is a form of energy and you cannot simply destroy energy. It cannot just die. I find it to be ‘spiritual matter.’ Rickels brings up how “There is a death we cannot ignore, that we must conceive, and that is the other’s death. It is always the other’s death that cannot be circumvented or overlooked.” To me ‘the other’ he speaks of is within us. It is that spiritual matter. Reincarnation makes the most sense to me, as it is a displacement of this matter. An energy transfer if you will. Our soul does not die, it comes back to the Earth in the form of a new body. This concept is key in many major Indian religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and even some Greek philosophers and religions. Yet I see many people’s responses to the idea of reincarnation as being very judgmental and that it’s a somewhat crazy notion. Yet "matter cannot be destroyed and the mind is a powerful thing, so who is to say we are not reborn?" as Rickels aptly puts.
I think that many people do not wish to see themselves as reborn because it basically means that we are all a 'part of the universe,’ from which there is this loss of individuality. I personally have this fear, I realize, as it goes along with my obsession of being special and extraordinary. Yet if I am simply a part of this universe, I am so along with everyone else. When I die, I will just be absorbed into the universe. I long to see my self in all things and in all things see my self, which is the healthier way to look at being a part of the universe, but I simply cannot. I wonder if that is what will die, not my spiritual matter but my individuality, or at least my own sense of my individuality. My energy will still be here, but my ego and my idea of 'being' will die as I merge with everything. A classmate brought up that if “you are rooted in identity you identify with wants and needs...I do not think you can be fully happy in this state.” I must agree with this. I think that I need to see myself in the larger scheme of things, the larger spectrum.
I tried to go a bit farther into this particular concept of death, of identity death. I have heard people (usually after some sort of drug trip) say that they felt that "all of my family and friends and experiences and everything, EVERYTHING could be illusionary." This naturally leads to an intense feeling of being totally and completely alone. In “Dracula,” for example, the character Jonathon increasingly wonders if reality is not becoming “a sort of awful nightmare.” This is after he is bitten by one of Dracula’s brides, and clearly the idea of his death (the death of his ‘other self’ or persona but not his physical body) is freaking him out something fierce. I cannot imagine being in this rare situation, where I would know that my personal self is going to die. I honestly would not know how to deal with it, and my reality would certainly change a great deal.
Our brains really cannot comprehend our own death, which is why it is such a difficult topic. It has actually been studied how we do not ever die in our dreams. We may come close, but we never actually see or more importantly feel and experience the moment of death. Our brains cannot, as I said, comprehend it (The International Association for the Study of Dreams). “When it comes to represent the unrepresentable, one sense is cut off, shut down, so that in its place hallucinations can be released” (Rickels). Avoiding the thought of dying is an evolved response and is what keeps us alive, because thinking about it is so unsettling it could turn us away from hobbies, dating, finding a mate, and reproducing. I can see how it actually depresses people though, to think about Death. If you look at it as this thing of impending doom, and that all the things you do, from hobbies to friends and family, are really just a means of distraction from overwhelming truth that we will all die. I believe we need to look at how humankind as a whole has most emphatically not been given the tools needed to foretell death for a reason. However, when we see others die it reminds us of what is in store and we do not like to think about it. We spend much of our lives pretending it won't happen. When we see someone die, we lose the ability to fool ourselves for some time.
I know I fear change, and as human beings our brains naturally fight against it. Death is a huge change our brains almost cannot deal with it. When someone dies they ARE NOT coming back, which is a much greater change versus them going on vacation or something of that nature, a temporary change. Maybe this is why people hold séances or see mediums. They long for something to be the same, for whoever has died to have the same voice and mannerisms and be here, our life, somehow. Even those who believe that "death is just another stage to go through" cannot be sure their unconscious has accepted that to be true or if we're just telling ourselves that. One cannot know until they experience a close death, a brush with their own mortality etc. It all comes back to the giant unknown that is death. We cannot even know our individual reactions to it as they will most definitely change. “In the young-child’s-eye view (which in the adult continues to beam up from the unconscious) our own life is indestructible. His majesty the baby is a control freak who thinks he is all powerful.” As children we consciously think that we cannot die. It is inconceivable. As we grow and learn and start witnessing death, it becomes a greater reality and our consciousness tells us that it is our imminent future, and this is a realistic thought that the majority of us have. We all know that we will all die someday. Yet unconsciously we still do not truly believe it because of what I have been saying concerning our brain’s inabilities to do so.
The inevitability of death does not imply that life is utterly meaningless. We simply cannot look at it in this way. Why would we have ever been created if we had no meaning? I am personally a spiritual person that believes in some sort of higher power or energy source, and I think that something had to create us. Something made us with a purpose, meaning we as individuals must have a purpose. Why else would we keep evolving and becoming stronger and in greater numbers? If we are indeed worthless, just here to die, then why wouldn’t we have died or been destroyed long ago? I refuse to admit or believe that my life is meaningless. Maybe this stems from my longing to mean something, maybe not. I can just barely comprehend death, so trying to comprehend meaning absolutely nothing is next to impossible for me. I cannot believe such ideas because I do not want to. Rickels says that “trip begins…when you have finished it” and I think that is how our world gets turned around on the idea of death and dying, when we try to keep it in place.
Other ideas of where this energy or matter goes were argued to me by classmates. Someone brought up to me that perhaps the substitution for this energy is the energy of the impact we have left behind, such as how it affects the people we know or our unfinished work. Or how "we live in other people" and that we leave bits of ourselves in the people we know (our thoughts, our affection, etc) and that changes them a little bit. I personally see this as a bit of a cop out. Yes we have an effect on those around us, but what about those who really do not? Rickels brings up how “in many countries the view was real popular that anyone who died alone…was bonded to his own return.” Clearly this individual who has died alone must transfer his energy another way, as he cannot through others. This then brings up the concept of the undead, another kind of ‘returning’ to Earth.
I think of the ‘undead’ to include zombies and vampires and the like, and I simply cannot even force myself to be afraid of it. I have become so immune to those concepts that it does nothing to frighten me. I think of a bad movie I would get on my Netflix Instant Queue. All of our generation has become so desensitized to the‘living dead’ when it used to be a horrifying idea in generations past. However, with the concept of reincarnation I think we are all the living dead in a way. We are the reincarnation of ourselves, an‘other’ from another lifetime. This is another reason many do not believe in the suggestion of reincarnation. It is another concept too extreme for our brains to handle in my opinion. We are like vampires; we corrupt various shells. The only difference is that in reincarnation we corrupt shells of different lifetimes while vampirism corrupts shells in one lifetime of that being. For example, in‘Dracula’ the character of Lucy is bitten by the Count and is now a vampire herself. Dr. Van Helsing points out to the Lucy’s brother that the vampiric body he sees before him "is not the Lucy you love...it is a shell corrupted!” This is a scary thought, that we will become evil as the living dead, for “victims detest being overtaken by vampirism....to enter the fearful state of the undead” Rickels points out, but my idea of reincarnation’s ‘living dead’ is not the same. When one hears the term “the undead” we assume they are evil, because they are not us, the living. People hide and have hidden for years behind crosses and religion from the undead, because it “represents the power of good over evil” (‘Dracula’) and therefore assumes the undead is evil. We are the ones who have made the concept evil though, with videos and stories of zombies eating brains and vampires sucking blood.
Our goal here in these stories of vampires and werewolves and other versions of those who are ‘the living dead,’ I believe, is to continually dehumanize the dead as we dehumanize our enemies in war. This dehumanization allows us, the living, to say we are not like them. We are not dead. It leads right back into the fear of death and feeds it heartily. For “you can be dead while yet alive, but there is also too much life in death…there is a between state, which is the vampiric state, that is the state of being two, doubling. Doubling takes over when the borders between life and death no longer hold.” This is a state we fear, where once there were two completely separate dichotomies there is now “contamination” spilling over. “This is what is so scary. Not that death is battling life, but that with the introductory offer of undeath, life and death no longer hold the line of distinction.” (Rickels) So we make it less human, demoralize the idea. I then think of how hard we try not to look like the dead, or the aging (for those who are aging are the same as those who are dying). This is definitely a reason behind the last century’s beauty products onslaught of “looking younger and thinner” by slathering creams on ourselves, loading makeup on our faces, wrinkle cream etc. Even hundreds of years ago people feared aging looks. Rickels, in describing the Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory, declares her a “psycho version of an inevitable shift from the direct hit of narcissism to its displacement, which runs on omnipotence of thoughts, the death wish, magic, technologization.” She bathed in the blood of virgins to look younger, and we object to such extremity now but can we really be the ones to talk? Women, and men too, now move fat from their ass to our lips, or get Botox injected into their face. Can we escape our fear of death if we do not look it? If we do not look ourselves can we somehow fool ourselves into not losing ourselves? Or maybe we do this as a simple evolutionary action. Perhaps when we reproduce we are leaving physical bits of us behind in the shells of children, like we never die. So looking ‘more attractive’ gets us a mate and then children. Thus continuing the energy of our self.
“The Vampire Lectures” speaks a lot on the act of mourning as a means of lessening the fears we hold. If we do not mourn, we cannot get over a death and therefore may become dead ourselves. Rickels brings up the movie ‘Psycho’ where the main character Norman loses himself and takes over his dead mother’s persona. I think this goes back into my idea of an energy exchange. Since Norman’s mother’s self is staying on this Earth, Norman’s self cannot.
“Mourning rituals pack a double dose of the ambivalence our unconscious is always picking up” says Rickels. It helps us more than anything else with our fear of the dead and death. We sometimes make it seem quaint, quiet, and respectful, such as an outdoor funeral. It is much less scary in this way. These rituals can also be seen as “defensive measures that must deliver us from their return.” Another defensive measure we automatically resort to is making excuses for the dead. When someone dies, we oftentimes mention how they smoked or drank for years, or that their health was bad, or that they were very old. If there are these reasons behind the death, then maybe they deserved to die in a way. Well, not deserved, but it makes it much less surprising if there are reasons and logic behind it. “One must by law find substitutes for what one cannot…have and hold…so all desire, all socialization, and so on will be based on substation and not on a direct hit or fit.” We mourn substitutes of they who have died, such as ashes, a grave, a picture, or their memory. This leads into idea that “whoever goes can be let go, can be put to rest, can be substituted for.” This feeds my own personal fear of death in that I do not want to be let go, as I see it as a form of being forgotten which is one of my greater dreads in dying.
So how do we become at peace with death? Well there is a Nobel Award winning question, if only I had the answer. I think that we need to first of all become aware of how we see death. Until this book and following lectures, I didn’t even know how I felt on the subject of death and dying. Now I have a much firmer grasp on what I think of death, and that I believe that when I die my ‘self’ or ‘other’ will be reincarnated somewhere. This is a very satisfying thought to me. It is very reassuring to have some belief in what will happen to me after death. This is why people who are a part of a religion seem to have less fear, because of their beliefs. With every religion comes where you go when you die, be it reincarnation, heaven, hell or something else entirely. With acceptance first comes awareness of what you do and do not believe in. “A century ago people would not have believed that we would be able to sit in our homes, watch a square box, and through it see a man land on the moon. There may well be another, spiritual world around us of which we are still unaware.” (Rickels) I think this view makes it very possible that there is somewhere for us to go. The other common solution is mourning, which has its place in getting over the death of another, but in my opinion not the death of our individual selves. It is much easier to deal with the mortality of others than our own. Mourning allows us to get over another’s death, so we do not embody it, but to get over our own we must accept that it will happen and decide what we think will happen and then just…well…live.