You can stop your fear of death by observing Nature. You can look at nature documentaries on television, subscribe to National Geographic and talk to biologists, but the best way you are gong to help yourself is to go look at Nature with your own eyes. By doing this, you will better know what you know and do not have to doubt that someone else misinterpreted what they saw and reported.
Yes, there is a heck of a lot of death in Nature, but there is also rebirth. Everything is recycled. Bodies, energy, water – it all comes back. Sure, they don’t come back in the same forms, but that would not be true to Nature. Prey animals get killed in order to feed the predators. Predators die and become food for other predators. All bodies decay and become soil or compost which helps to make plants grow for some prey animals to eat. Natural things changes, and everything in Nature changes.
Pointing to the Moon
Just look at the moon. Starts as a sliver, grows rounder, then decreases and then vanishes – only to reappear one night as a shining bow of silver again. This happens every month and occassionally twice a month. The appearance of the moon always changes to us, but the moon is always the moon, even though the moon appears to go through a lot of changes.
Or take a look at the seasons. Everything is bare in winter (except for the occasional conifer) and stark and cold. Then, green shoots poke up from the ground and out of the stark, bare branches. You can barely move because you are trapped in this riot of life. And then, it all shrivels away to bare ground again, only to grow again.
We are like everything else in Nature, but we are a natural thing. We might like to think of ourselves as separate from everything else in Nature, but that’s just an illusion. Our bodies work on the same physical laws that govern every other form of life on Earth. We start small, grow large, shrivel, disappear and then reappear in another form, or maybe the same form. We still don’t know all we can about Nature, or human nature, including what we turn into after death, physically and metaphysically. But, somehow, we do go on. And on. And on.
If that doesn’t work, watch animals die of old age. Often, it’s a very quiet death, with their eyes open and looking out at something that seems to be holding their attention. You can bury the animal or let it decompose. The dead body is then a host to new life, albeit rather strange life forms. But if you were to take just the skeleton of the dead animal and put it in garden compost, this can act as a powerful fertilizer for your plants. They get to take elements of the dead and make new life.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The oldest story known is the Epic of Gilgamesh, where one man tries to find the secret to immortality. He finds a plant to make him immortal, but a snake eats it. Of course, that’s the only plant and there is no other. So Gilgamesh decided to stop trying not to die and make the best of the life he had left. He constructed great walls for his city and carved his story upon it.
And now, about four thousand years later, we can still read about Gilgamesh. He died, but has somehow lived on in his story.
If this doesn’t stop your fear of death, it can help to quell the fear to a dull roar, if nothing else.
