Sheldon Solomon on Why We Fear Death
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- čas přidán 13. 09. 2024
- In this clip from footage shot for Transcendental Media's "Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality," Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College, discusses why we fear death.
For more information, visit www.flightfromdeath.com.
I love his goofy laugh at the end there, what a dude!
he's gnarly. i dig how he talks and how he words his statements.
What Schopenhauer and many people do not appreciate is that the loss of our identity and our consciousness (the window of this identity, if you will) is what terrifies us. I will qualify this point by saying fear of death is subjective. And this overlaps with the false instinctual vs conscious fear debate. I discuss the instinctual fear of death in terms of emotions. Some of us are more prone to anxiety, so the degree to which our conscious fear becomes more unbearable is relative to ouranxiety
I think different people have different fears about it. I worry about what I will miss when I am gone, I worry about the pain of dying, but about being dead I doubt I will have too many complaints.
I like his vocab lol. awesome
Love the Solomon dude!
I want to read Becker,becouse of this superfan of him😊
1. Fear of death.
2. Fear of unknown, flood, earthquakes, smallpox, measles, cancer. etc.
To my delight, I just read a murder mystery that had a central theme that more or less paralleled what Sheldon talks about here. In fact, Ernest Becker is even mentioned by name. The main point was that the evil perpetrated by the central characters was a product of death anxiety. First time I've ever seen that in a story as opposed to a treatise or textbook. "The Legend of Devil's Creek." It was dark and certainly gory in parts (think "The Shining" or "Red Dragon"), but rather good.
@ProstheticHymns Adyashanti is one teacher who has numerous videos on here and expresses these concepts very well.
Do I fear death itself or is it not having really lived that I fear?
Question isn’t how wil the world be without me but how can I be without the world. That’s the fear
@ProstheticHymns I would argue, and Buddhist and mystical traditions of many cultures worldwide concur, that this awareness, not identified with any 'thing' but infinite and all-encompassing, is indeed the primordial condition of all humans, always present, and merely obscured by the web of grasping that makes us fear death. For people who have attained a highly aware or 'enlightened' state, death is meaningless, because they are no longer clinging to this identity, this form.
@ProstheticHymns Speaking from experience, when I was directly confronted with the insubstantiality of my own identity, the result was a terror of death and annihilation. Since then, years ago now, I have endured many panic attacks and an overall level of very high anxiety that I have only brought under control through releasing my grasp on the identity that I had taken to be myself (the inclination to form this identity is probably unconscious or instinctual 90% of the time).
I disagree with Solomon and Becker on this point, as far as it is presented here. We can articulate what we fear about death, and it seems painfully clear to me what the issue is. It seems, according to everything I have ever read and experienced on the subject, that we fear death because we fear annihilation, nothingness, oblivion. Perhaps less conscious animals fear death on an instinctual level, as Solomon appears to be saying, but this really does not seem to be the case for humans.
@ProstheticHymns So the fear of death that appears instinctual can, upon examination, be deconstructed into what I have explained. It also means we have a method for overcoming that fear, for Buddhism (and other traditions) says that by releasing our grasping onto the various components of this mental construct, our true nature, of an infinite transcendent consciousness, is revealed to us.
This is someone who should be on Rogan's show..
Agree
I’m a fan of Sheldon Solomon...
You’re the best...
@squamish4244 Thank you. I'll check him out.
This dude is rad, also, he looks like he could be related to Bilbo Baggins.....Bilbo Baggins' rad cousin
@squamish4244 Thanks, that's interesting. So, are you saying that the transcendental consciousness is (in some sense) more instinctual or primordial than "the fear of death that appears instinctual?" I'd ask whether inclinations to construct & clutch the identity you mention are instinctual, but I'm not sure what that would establish for now. I did wonder whether "releasing one's grasp" presents the same fears as death, since both sound like they annihilate the self. Thoughts?
the only worry of dying is leaving my closest ones behind.
otherwise it's just fine. you can't avoid it so don't even spend energy on being sad or whining about it.
@squamish4244 Hi. Someone (perhaps even you) said this in an iTunes review of Flight from Death. I wanted to ask if that is really at odds with what they're saying (& how so). Please clarify.
The life force itself is a fleeing from death.
@ProstheticHymns Hello, no I did not write that review, but perhaps that person had a background in Buddhism, as I do. According to Buddhism, we construct an identity for ourselves out of concepts - mental conditioning, habits, memories, thoughts of the future, physical appearance, etc. and take that identity to be 'me'. Death threatens to destroy that identity and therefore we become terrified.
@ProstheticHymns How did I do this, and bring the anxiety down to a level where I can foresee a future without it, however distant that may be? In addition to the help of several highly skilled healers, I applied the ancient Buddhist practice of mindfulness to use the power of awareness - of observation - to the anxiety and terror and other emotions that arose, and the emotions diminished in strength under that power.
here's a clever escape mechanism: so, Godot writes a little play, calls it "Waiting For Becker."
The only problem with death is getting there.
he makes me realize that I don't speak english
Impermanence, eh. Buddhadasa, the Esteemed Siamese monk has skeletons in the Eating Hall to remind adherents that we all die. It is certainly true, Becker wasn't, exactly, the first to view our realization of mortality as an engaging aspect of the human condition. I don't disagree we create Immortality Delusions, but that is only 1 of the ways we react to our knowledge of Mortality. Both Hedonism, in a non violent manner and criminality are direct reactions. Also, aiding Victims and giving up for the Common Good makes us feel Immortal. The Beckerists like experiments. Go to any parking lot in the World and make a fuss that you've locked your keys in the car. You will see the most under rated motivator of human behavior come out. What do people do when a family has a house fire? When there is a catastrophe, we come out to GIVE. What do heroes always say? [I acted on instinct.] [I did what anybody would have.] I'm not denying Becker's Immortality Delusion impetus, nor Freud's Oedipus drive, nor Adler's inferiority complex theory. Giving up for the hive; it's what drives us and the Corruption of this purpose is why Monarchy, Communism, and Democrazy ALL fail. They ALL allow a few to benefit from what was meant for the Whole. [search Josephocracy]
Or...I could be full of crap.