What is the essence of the process of dying - is it the cessation of existence or a transition to another level of being? What is death? How to overcome fear of death? Does a person's life completely end at the time of death? Does an immortal soul remain after a person's death? People have never stopped pondering these questions throughout their history: all thinking people have asked these questions.
Philosophers tried to answer them at different times and in different countries. Entire schools of thought have tried to find an acceptable answer to these questions. Scientists at all times "fought" over the mysteries of life. Theologians approached these questions from a slightly different position, and they also gave their own answers. These questions do not cease to interest a person to this day?
The famous 19th century philosopher S. Kierkegaard wrote about the moment of death as follows:
"Can you imagine something more terrible than such a denouement, when a human being disintegrates into thousands of separate parts like a crumbling legion of exiled demons, when it loses the most precious, most sacred for man - the unifying power of the personality, its single, existing self?"
A person is born, grows, gets old. At each stage, he gets to know himself and the world around him. Growing up, people begin to realize themselves as individuals. Questions arise: "Who am I?", "What am I in this world?", "Why did I come to this world?", "What is the meaning of life?" A person gradually comprehends that his appearance (birth) in this world is aimed at the implementation of a task set by someone, the correct solution of which depends on the person himself.
At the same time and inevitably, there is an understanding that once a person is born, it means that he will die someday. Anyone who for the first time fully realized the inevitability of death experiences an all-consuming fear that prevents them from comprehending that everything in this life is mortal and sooner or later ceases to exist, disappears into oblivion.
Why does the fear of death appear? The fact is that a person does not feel his birth: he does not realize, does not feel this moment due to the fact that he simply does not remember it. Some scientists believe that a person only fully becomes a person, a full-fledged personality, when he begins to realize himself, that is, when he begins to "remember" himself. As soon as a person has memories to which he can return, then he can be considered a person.
The first memories of a person refer to one or two years of life, and awareness of oneself and the world around comes much later. And yet a person is already able to feel his growing up and be aware of the changes taking place in his body. At the same time, his attitude to the world around him and his assessment of reality are also being transformed. While he is unable to feel and realize the moment of death.
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A person cannot come to terms with the idea that it doesn't matter, sooner or later everything will end for him and he will cease to exist in earthly life. A lot of people who have experienced a state of clinical death describe their experience as something absolutely defying description. Many have called their experience "ineffable." At the same time, they emphasized that what happened to them could not be described with ordinary earthly words.
Man is so constructed that he is afraid of the unknown. The fear of death also appears, because it is something unknown and, perhaps, entailing certain hardships. What will happen after death? What does he feel and feel when he leaves the world of the living? For someone, the very idea that they will no longer be in this world is simply unbearable, they will lose their familiar surroundings, the warmth of the hearth, the attention of relatives and loved ones and go to "travel" through unknown worlds.
Earlier it was argued that no one can understand and feel the moment of death. Epicurus wrote in one of his works:
“As long as we are, there is no death. When there is death, then we are not."
“The fear of death turns a person into an animal. In order not to become like an animal, one must overcome the fear of death."
This truth became fundamental for one of the sects of the twelfth century, preaching the new Buddhism.
Ascetic monks tried to overcome the fear of death with the help of prayers and fasting. But the common man finds it difficult to overcome such a feeling. Each of us accumulates certain experiences about life and death throughout our lives. We see people being born and dying around. But if birth is the appearance of a new person in the world, then death is his natural departure.
The moment of death is always overwhelming. For a person, the usual order of things is violated, because death first of all deprives us of communication with a certain person. A burial ceremony takes place and the remains of a person are lowered into the ground. And for everyone present, a picture emerges involuntarily: now the buried person remains alone in a cold, closed box, covered with earth from above. From now on, the human body will remain underground in the grave, and worms will begin to eat it.
All these pictures that appear in the imagination of every person cause fear of death and disgust, which are almost impossible to overcome. L. Tolstoy experienced a very painful fear of death. But he was not more worried about his own death, he was worried about his loved ones. So, he wrote, reflecting on the life and death of his children: “Why should I love them, raise and watch over them? For the same despair that's in me, or for the stupidity? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them - every step leads them to the knowledge of this truth. And the truth is death."
Very many of people at the time of death hear the voices of people who are next to them at that moment. And these voices are the last connecting link that still holds a person in earthly life. But as soon as a person stops hearing this voice, he enters the area of completely new impressions and feelings.
But thinking about death, imagining what will happen to the body of a person when he is lowered into the grave, we do not stop thinking about death in an ordinary way, applying everyday measures to this phenomenon. However, death is the cessation of the existence of only the bodily essence. Any organic body that is born will inevitably die. The Russian philosopher N. Strakhov wrote:
“Senility and death are a necessary consequence of organic development. After all, if any organism could improve endlessly, it would never reach adulthood; he would constantly be only a teenager, a creature that is constantly growing, but which was never destined to grow.
And if the organism in the epoch of its maturity suddenly became unchanged, therefore, it represented only recurring phenomena, then development would stop in it, nothing new would occur in it, therefore, there could be no life. Death follows from the very concept of development. Death is remarkable for its speed. It quickly reduces the organism from a state of activity and strength to simple decay. How slowly man grows and develops - and how quickly, for the most part, he disappears."
According to Strakhov, the reason for this speed lies precisely in the high organization of a person and in the superiority of his development. A highly organized being does not tolerate any significant disruption of its functions. And if we proceed from this point of view, then death is good.
However, no matter how good these arguments are, they can hardly reconcile every person with inevitable death, it is unlikely that a person will like the fact that after a short life, eternal non-existence will follow. And would a normal adult see death as a blessing? And no matter how the thought is suggested that everyone is mortal and that death is inevitable, still a person wants to believe that besides death, nothingness, there is something else.
To some extent, religion helps to overcome the fear of death. After all, any religion puts forward the idea of the immortality of the human soul. And let the human body be mortal, but its soul is immortal and at the moment of death it leaves the material essence. We feel ourselves not only physically, but also spiritually. The dying of the body turns out to be less frightening if it is not accompanied by physical suffering. It seems that the human body falls asleep (it’s not in vain that they say “eternal sleep”), but the soul remains, and this suggests that the perception of life with the help of consciousness, reason does not stop, but only moves to another level.
All the apostles, companions of Jesus Christ, as well as 70 of his disciples, who preached the teachings of Christ in different parts of the earth, are saints. Faith in Jesus helped them perform miracles, heal people, and even raise the dead.
In religious beliefs, the human soul goes to heaven or reaches nirvana, dissolves in eternal bliss. But what does science say about this? Professor V. Bekhterev tried to answer this question in his article "The Immortality of the Human Person as a Scientific Problem".
The indisputable fact is that after the death of a person, his body begins to decompose. All atoms and molecules, which previously constituted an integral organism, gradually enter into new compounds and pass into a new state. The matter that forms the human body is thus almost completely transformed. However, man is not only matter. In addition to matter, there is also energy: in nature there is a law of conservation of energy and this law knows no exceptions. Energy cannot appear out of nowhere and disappear into nowhere, it passes from one form to another. This law applies to all manifestations of human neuropsychic activity.
"Not a single human action, not a single step, not a single thought, expressed in words or even by a simple look, gesture, in general, facial expressions, disappears without a trace," Bekhterev wrote. And since a person lives among his own kind, he, to one degree or another, has an impact with his psychic energy on those around him, and therefore, he himself, in turn, experiences such an influence. And all neuropsychic energy is formed in the form of a generalized social "superpersonality".
But she lives and exists long before the birth of a certain person, but also does not end her life after his death.
A person, as it were, "pours" his neuropsychic energy into the general neuropsychic energy of people. V. Bekhterev also clarified that he is not talking about the immortality of any individual person, but about social immortality, since it is impossible to destroy the neuropsychic energy that forms the basis of the human personality.
Bekhterev in his article points out that we are talking about the immortality of the spirit.
“This immortal spirit, throughout the entire individual life, through mutual influence, as it were, passes into thousands of surrounding human personalities. Therefore, the concept of the afterlife in the scientific sense should be reduced, in essence, to the concept of the continuation of the human personality outside of its individual life in the form of participation in the improvement of man in general and the creation of a spiritual universal human personality, in which a particle of each individual person certainly lives, at least already departed from this world, and lives, not dying, but only transforming itself, in the spiritual life of mankind."
Often, in a dying state, a person experiences a sensation of movement. It seems to him that he is moving at a very high speed through some dark space. People describe this space in different ways: chimney, well, valley, cylinder, tunnel, vacuum, cave, long corridor, open door, road, path.
But these ideas of V. Bekhterev are not absolute truth: they are only an attempt to explain scientifically what is life, what is death and what happens after a person's death.
Each person overcomes the fear of death in his own way. Some live without thinking much about death. They live because they live. Others seek sense gratification and pursue material goods. For them, death is the end of everything. Still others try to bring the understanding of death under certain scientific or philosophical concepts that can explain this phenomenon. Death can be interpreted as an ordinary and inevitable natural process, or it can appear as a transition into eternity and harmonious merging with the life of the entire universe, with the world mind. The fourth helps to overcome the fear of death by the belief in the immortality of the soul and religious images.
And you don't have to look for the best option among them. As M. A. Bulgakov wrote in his famous work:
"Everyone has that life and death, that immortality that they deserve."
In our age, when scientists make amazing discoveries and the secret is given less and less place in the life of a modern person, interest in the problem of life and death does not wane. And all the same, a person asks the question: "What is death?" An astonishing study was carried out by the American scientist Dr. R. Moody. He collected a variety of information about what a person experienced and felt during the time when he was on the verge of life and death. The scientist's research and findings were amazing and attracted a lot of attention.
His respondents expressed the same thought, which boiled down to the following: they are no longer afraid of death, they are not afraid of death. In his book Life After Life, Dr. Moody wrote:
“Many are coming to a new understanding of the essence of the other world. According to this new view, that world is not a one-sided judgment, but rather maximum self-disclosure and development. The development of the soul, the perfection of love and knowledge do not stop after the death of the body. On the contrary, they continue on the other side of being, maybe forever, or at least for a certain period, and with such a depth that we can only guess about."
And the scientist comes to the conclusion that he no longer believes that after a person's death he is swallowed up by nothingness. "Life after death exists - and all the phenomena that I became aware of are manifestations of this life."
But not all scientists unconditionally agree with these conclusions: research in this area continues. The information that was provided to Dr. Moody by different people echoes in many respects the evidence that the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg had. The famous scientist, who left behind works on mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, at the age of 55, turned to religious and mystical topics and, possessing powerful energy, brought himself to a state where the soul leaves the body.
According to the scientist, he managed to feel himself outside the body: "A person does not die, he simply frees himself from the physical body, which he needs when he is in this world." Swedenborg argued that at the time of death, a person passes from one state to another. But after death, a person does not immediately realize, does not understand that he has died, because at that moment he is in a certain "body", which to some extent resembles his previous physical body.
And the spirit of a person is his soul, which after death lives in a real human form. Moreover, the spiritual state is much less limited than his previous bodily existence. When a person dies and goes to a new level of being, perception, thought and memory become sharper, and all spiritual gifts become more perfect.
It is very convenient to believe in these statements. Moreover, many provisions are confirmed in different religions. But why not find the optimal answer to this question once and for all? (After all, philosophers in ancient times proved with equal convincingness both the mortality of man and the immortality of his soul). Nevertheless, a single conclusion was never drawn: everyone finds an acceptable answer to the question "What awaits a person after death" for himself.
Of course, a person is free to completely disregard any arguments of science and all modern research. Any of us can ignore the scientific concept of life and death altogether and adhere to the point of view that suits him the most.
Only one thing is absolutely clear: earthly life for every person will certainly end. Sooner or later this will happen - it is unknown, but in the end there will definitely be death. At the moment of death, the unity of the spiritual and physical shell will be broken. Soul and body will cease to be one. The body will change, disintegrate into its component parts. But where the soul goes after death - no mortal is given to know. We can only believe, guess or fantasize, but these are only our earthly thoughts about eternity.
Perhaps the genius writer will be right and everyone will be rewarded according to his faith. And if you believe in the law of Divine justice, then everyone will be rewarded for his deeds. Some are waiting for heaven and eternal bliss, others for hell and eternal torment. And the third, perhaps, will be granted eternal rest. But death, just like birth, everyone experiences individually and will never be able to tell either about his birth or about his death. This will remain the eternal mystery of being.
E. Danilova