Fear of Death-Swami Adiswarananda

Reality of Death

Death is a terrible reality. The fear of death is the root of all fears. Life is being, but death is non-being. No one escapes death’s cruel jaws. In the words of Thomas Gray’s elegy:

The boast of heraldry, the

pomp of pow’r,

And all that beauty, all that

wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour,

The paths of glory lead but to

the grave.

Saints and sinners, rich and poor, high and low, old and young, learned and ignorant, righteous and unrighteous, all die. Conquest of death has always been the major preoccupation of the human mind. Science, technology, and medicine are all busy finding ways to make life deathless. Yet death continues to take its toll. In an article in The New York Times (June 29, 1997), the author Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes:

America is often called a ‘death-denying’ society; each year the United States spends millions on efforts to conquer death, or at least to postpone it. The self-help shelves of bookstores overflow with such pearls as ‘Stop Aging Now!’ and ‘Stay Young the Melatonin Way’.

If Americans don’t deny death, they often trivialize it, said Joan Halifax, a Zen Buddhist priest who founded the Project on Being With Dying in Santa Fe, NM. ‘By the time a kid gets into high school, he has seen 20,000 homicides on television,’ she said. ‘Death as a mystery to be embraced, entered into and respected has been profaned in our culture.’

References

1. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, viii.ix.

2. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "The Good Death: Embracing a Right to Die Well," The New York Times, 29 June 1997, Section 4: The Week in Review, pp. 1, 4.

3. C Rajagopalachari, trans., The Mahabharata, (Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1990), 142.

4. Ibid., p. 142.

5. W Macneile Dixon, The Human Situation, (Gifford Lectures 1936-37), as quoted in Man in Search of Immortality, by Swami Nikhilananda, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, 1994, p. 26.

6. Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Bhagavad Gita, 2.13, (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Centre, 1992), 72.

© "The Vedanta Kesari" (September, 2003) published by Sri Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Chennai 600 004. Website: www.sriramakrishnamath.org. Reprinted with permission.

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