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By Root 642 0

to free yourself from fear you must work backward. You start with the thought of your mortality. You accept and embrace this reality. You think ahead to the inevitable moment of your death and determine to face it as bravely as possible. The more you contemplate your mortality, the less you fear it—it becomes a fact you no longer have to repress. By following this path, you know how to die well, and so you can now begin to teach yourself to live well. You will not cling to things unnecessarily. You will be strong and self-reliant, unafraid to be alone. You will have a certain lightness that comes with knowing what matters—you can laugh at what others take so seriously. The pleasures of the moment are heightened because you know their impermanence and you make the most of them. And when your time to die comes, as it will some day, you will not cringe and cry for more time, because you have lived well and have no regrets.

Keys to Fearlessness

THERE SEEMS TO HOVER SOMEWHERE IN THAT DARK PART OF ALL OUR LIVES…AN OBJECTLESS, TIMELESS, SPACELESS ELEMENT OF PRIMAL FEAR AND DREAD, STEMMING, PERHAPS, FROM OUR BIRTH…A FEAR AND DREAD WHICH EXERCISES AN IMPELLING INFLUENCE UPON OUR LIVES…. AND, ACCOMPANYING THIS FIRST FEAR, IS, FOR THE WANT OF A BETTER NAME, A REFLEX URGE TOWARD ECSTASY, COMPLETE SUBMISSION, AND TRUST.

—Richard Wright

In the past, our relationship to death was much more physical and direct. We would routinely see animals killed before our eyes—for food or sacrifices. During times of plague or natural disasters we would witness countless deaths. Graveyards were not hidden away but would occupy the center of cities or adjoin churches. People would die in their homes, surrounded by friends and families. This nearness of death increased the fear of it but also made it seem more natural, much more a part of life. To mediate this fear, religion would play a powerful and important role.

The dread of death, however, has always remained intense, and with the waning of the power of religion to soothe our anxieties, we found it necessary to create a modern solution to the problem—we have almost completely banished the physical presence of death. We do not see the animals being slaughtered for our food. Cemeteries occupy outlying areas and are not part of our consciousness. In hospitals, the dying are cloistered from sight, everything made as antiseptic as possible. That we are not aware of this phenomenon is a sign of the deep repression that has taken place.

We see countless images of death in movies and in the media, but this has a paradoxical effect. Death is made to seem like something abstract, nothing more than an image on the screen. It becomes something visual and spectacular, not a personal event that awaits us. We may be obsessed with death in the movies we watch, but this only makes it harder to confront our mortality.

Banished from our conscious presence, death haunts our unconscious in the form of fears, but it also reaches our minds in the form of the Sublime. The word “sublime” comes from the Latin, meaning up to the threshold or doorway. It is a thought or experience that takes us to the threshold of death, giving us a physical intimation of this ultimate mystery, something so large and vast it eludes our powers of description. It is a reflection of death in life, but it comes in the form of something that inspires awe. To fear and avoid our mortality is debilitating; to experience it in the Sublime is therapeutic.

Children have this encounter with the Sublime quite often, particularly when confronted with something too vast and incomprehensible for their understanding—darkness, the night sky, the idea of infinity, the sense of time in millions of years, a strange sense of affinity with an animal, etc. We too have these moments in the form of any intense experience that is hard to express in words. It can come to us in moments of extreme exhaustion or exertion, when our bodies are pushed to the limit; in travel to some unusual place; or in absorbing a work of art that is too packed with ideas or images