Believing in Transformation | Psychology Today
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The human mind always seeks solutions to problems and occasionally finds itself in a complete stalemate. Death is one of them, the ultimate one. Human beings can’t imagine our own absence. The concept of nonexistence for an existent being is, at best, baffling, like endless space or other universes. Such puzzlement precedes enlightenment.
When confronted with a fatal illness and given a short time to live, few can maintain any kind of personal philosophy. This is partly because the threat of imminent death changes a vague, abstract concept to one’s own “no longer being.” When one is forced, to acknowledge that one’s own life is imminently disappearing, it is truly terrifying. There is nothing in our ordinary previous experience that prepares us for this experience. In the face of death, one seems all alone. No one is immune from this. In Eternal Echoes, John O’Donohue writes of Christ’s predeath emotions: “Evident in his inner torture and fear in Gethsemane, something awful happened in that garden. He sweated blood there. He was overcome with doubt. Everything was taken from him. Here the anguished scream of human desolation reached out for divine consolation. And from the severe silence of the heavens, no sheltering echo returned. This is what dying is: the bleak, empty place where no certainty can ever settle.”
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Comment by curiousdwk on 30 November 2009:
Perhaps the author redeems himself/herself later in the article, but in the first section there were so many glaring generalities that I didn’t agree with that I couldn’t go on. “Human beings can’t imagine our own absence.” Can I imagine my non-existence before I was born? Then I can after my death. Can I imagine the non-existence of my pet cat? Then I can of myself.
“Few can maintain any kind of personal philosophy” [when facing death]. Where is this person coming from to make a statement like this?
“When one is forced, to acknowledge that one’s own life is imminently disappearing, it is truly terrifying.” To whom? Perhaps to the author, and perhaps to some people, but definitely not to everyone. I have met people, religious and non-religious, who could face death calmly. It is possible and I would say natural except for the hype that many people give it.
“In the face of death, one seems all alone. No one is immune from this.” Again, where is this author coming from to make a statement like this?
“Here [Jesus in the Garden of Gethemane] the anguished scream of human desolation reached out for divine consolation. And from the severe silence of the heavens, no sheltering echo returned. This is what dying is: the bleak, empty place where no certainty can ever settle.” This author is a joke.
I couldn’t go on after this intro.
(P.S. And the editors of Psychology Today wonder why they aren’t taken more seriously as being scientific in their approach.)