Death is …
What is death? Few people seriously thought about the nature of such a phenomenon as death. Often we not only do not talk about it, but also try not to think about death, because such a topic for us is not only sad but also scary. From childhood we were taught: “Life is good, but death is…. I don't know what, but definitely something bad. It is so bad that you don't even need to think about it."
According to statistics, people are more likely to die from old age and from diseases associated with it, such as cancer and stroke. The palm belongs to heart diseases, the worst of which is a heart attack. They leave for another world, about a quarter of the population of the Western world.
To what extent is it dead?
There is no clear line between life and death. “There is no magical moment when life disappears,” says R. Morison, a professor at Cornwell University. “Death is no longer a separate, clearly limited limit, like childhood or adolescence. The gradualness of death becomes obvious to us."
Never before has it been so difficult to ascertain death, as now, when there is already the equipment that supports life. This problem was exacerbated by transplantation, which involves the removal of the desired organs after the death of a person. In many countries, doctors and scientists are experiencing quite understandable anxiety: are organs always removed from a really dead person?
Meanwhile, another study by scientists showed that death in living things, including humans, spreads like a wave from cell to cell. The entire organism does not die immediately. After the death of individual cells, a chemical reaction is triggered, leading to the decay of cellular components and the accumulation of molecular "debris". If this process is not prevented, the person is doomed.
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Buried alive
The fear of being buried alive has always been among people at all times. In the Victorian era, some of the coffins were equipped with special pipes that led to the surface in case a person came to life. At the end of the 18th century, French doctors were also very concerned about premature burial. They proposed to create specialized "waiting morgues" in all major cities of France. Video surveillance, motion detection and other equipment and alarms that are installed in coffins are practiced today. And many stories about the fainting of workers crematoria, during cremation, who had to see and hear how the "dead" jumped up from their coffins and screamed furiously, consumed by the flames, continue to scatter around the world.
From such albeit not very reliable, but chilling "horror films" it becomes clear to what extent it is vital to equip medical practice with a reliable, absolute criterion for determining a person's death.
In centuries past, doctors have used many interesting methods to determine the fact of death. For example, one of them was that a lit candle was brought to various parts of the body, believing that after the cessation of blood circulation, the skin would not become blistered. Or - they brought a mirror to the lips of the dead man. If it fogs up, it means that the person is still alive.
Over time, such criteria as no pulse, breathing, dilated pupils and the lack of their response to light could no longer fully satisfy doctors in terms of a reliable statement of death. In 1970 - in Britain for the first time on a 23-year-old girl who was pronounced dead, they tested a portable cardiograph, which is capable of registering even a very weak heart function, and from the very first time the device revealed signs of life in a “corpse”.
Imaginary death
However, the person whose brain is still alive, but he himself is in a state of coma, is also considered dead. A coma is traditionally considered an intermediate state between life and death: the patient's brain does not respond to external stimuli, consciousness fades away, only the simplest of reflexes remain … This question is ambiguous, and legislative disputes about it are still ongoing. On the one hand, relatives have the right to decide whether to disconnect such a person from the equipment that supports the vital activity of the body, and on the other hand, people who are in a coma for a long time rarely, but still wake up … That is why the new definition of death includes not only brain death, but also its behavior, even if the brain is still alive.
No fear of death
One of the most extensive and generally recognized studies of posthumous experiences was carried out in the 60s of the XX century. The supervisor was psychologist Karlis Osis from America. The study was based on the observations of physicians and nurses caring for the dying. Conclusions were made on the experience of 35,540 observations of the process of dying.
The researchers concluded that for the most part, dying people did not experience fear. More often, a feeling of discomfort, pain, or indifference was observed. About one in 20 people showed signs of elation.
Some studies have shown that older people experience less anxiety at the thought of death than younger people. Polls of a large number of elderly people showed that the question "Are you afraid of death?" only 10% of them answered “yes”. They noted that older people think about death often, but with surprising calmness.
Visions before death
Osis and his colleagues paid particular attention to the visions and hallucinations of the dying. At the same time, they emphasized that these are "special" hallucinations. All of them are in the nature of visions experienced by people who are conscious and clearly understand what is happening. Moreover, the work of the brain was not distorted either by sedatives or by increased body temperature. However, immediately before dying, most of the people already lost consciousness, although an hour before death, about 10% of the dying were still clearly aware of the world around them.
The main conclusion of the researchers was that the visions of the dying often corresponded to traditional religious concepts - people saw paradise, heaven, angels. Other of the visions were associated with beautiful images: amazing landscapes, rare bright birds, etc. However, more often in their posthumous visions, people saw their previously deceased relatives, who often wanted to help the dying man in the transition to another world.
Most curious of all is another thing: studies have shown that the nature of all these visions is relatively weakly dependent on the physiological, cultural and personal characteristics, the type of diseases, the level of education and religiosity of a person. Similar conclusions were made by the authors of other works who observed people who survived clinical death. They also noted that the descriptions of the visions of people who returned to life are not connected with cultural characteristics and often do not agree with the ideas about death accepted in this society.
Although, such a circumstance, perhaps, could easily be explained by the followers of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. It was Jung who always paid special attention to the "collective unconscious" of humanity. The essence of his teachings can be very roughly reduced to the fact that all people at a deep level are the custodians of the universal human experience, which is the same for everyone, and which can neither be changed nor realized. He can "break through" into our "I" only through dreams, neurotic symptoms and hallucinations. That is why, probably, deep in our psyche the phylogenetic experience of experiencing the end is actually "hidden", and these experiences are the same for everyone.
Curiously, psychology textbooks (for example, the famous work of Arthur Rean "The Psychology of Man from Birth to Death") often refer to the fact that visions before death, strikingly coincide with those described in ancient esoteric sources. At the same time, it is emphasized that the sources themselves were completely unknown to most people who described the posthumous experience. It is safe to assume that this actually proves Jung's conclusions.
At the time of death
Psychologist and physician Raymond Moody (USA), having studied 150 cases of posthumous experiences, compiled a "complete model of death." In short, it can be described as follows.
At the moment of death, people begin to hear unpleasant noises, loud ringing, buzzing. At the same time, they sense that they are moving with speed through a dark tunnel. Then the person notices that he is outside his body. He simply sees it from the side. After that, the spirits of previously deceased relatives, friends and loved ones appear, who want to meet and help him.
To this day, scientists cannot explain the phenomenon characteristic of most posthumous experiences, nor the vision of the tunnel. But it is believed that the neurons in the brain are responsible for the tunnel effect. When they die, they begin to be chaotically excited, which can create a sensation of bright light, and the impairment of peripheral vision caused by a lack of oxygen creates a "tunnel effect". The feeling of euphoria arises due to the fact that the brain releases endorphins, "internal opiates", which reduce feelings of depression and pain. This leads to hallucinations in those parts of the brain responsible for memory and emotions. People begin to feel happiness and bliss.
Sudden death
Scientists also have a lot of research on cases of sudden death. One of the most famous is the work of psychologist Randy Noyes from Norway, who identified the stages for sudden death.
Resistance - people are aware of the danger, fear and try to fight. As soon as they realize the futility of such resistance, the fear disappears, and people begin to feel serenity and calmness.
The life lived - passes like a panorama of memories replacing each other with speed, consistency and covering the entire past of a person. This is often accompanied by positive emotions, less often by negative.
The stage of transcendence is the logical conclusion of the review of life. People perceive their past with increasing distance. Finally, they can reach a state in which all life is seen as a whole. At the same time, they are amazingly able to distinguish every detail. After that, this level is also overcome, and the dying person seems to go beyond himself. It is then that he begins to experience a transcendental state, sometimes called "cosmic consciousness."
What is the fear of death
Fear of death - what could be the reasons? It is possible to suggest several possible answers, - says Elena Sidorenko, a psychoanalytically oriented psychologist. - First, it is the fear of death as such, the fear that it will come. Your own or a loved one, etc.
In this case, most likely, we are talking about the existence of fantasies that overwhelm the inner world of the subject, splashing out and interfering with reality. According to the psychoanalytic interpretation, in this case it is more appropriate to say about the presence of some desire that feeds and develops the unconscious human fantasy. This mental content can be rooted in the depths of the distant past and carry the sound of the presence of a murderous drive (i.e., an unconscious desire to kill, destroy), denied by a person due to social disapproval (this is not possible, not accepted, can be punished).
In another case, fear is possible, like an indefinite anxiety. Without delving into Freud's theory of fear, we note that the German word angst (fear) has no unambiguous meaning. This word can often have a contrasting meaning. Unlike fear, as the fear of something that has a certain object, the feeling of anxiety is characterized by just the absence of such an object. This refers to a kind of "anticipation", the anticipation of the experience as such.
And, in the end, it makes sense to touch upon the fear of death as a special condition, a stable reaction of the subject in a traumatic situation with a stream of internal and external excitations that the subject is unable to control. This is an automatic response. Freud wrote about this in his work "Inhibition, symptom, fear". In this case, we are talking about evidence of a person's mental helplessness. This is an automatically occurring fear of death. It is the body's spontaneous response to a traumatic situation or its repetition. The prototype of this experience is the experience of the infant as a consequence of his biological helplessness.
Death as the goal of life
“From psychoanalytic practice, we know that fear of death is not a basic fear,” said the famous St. Petersburg psychoanalyst D. Olshansky. - Losing a life is not something that all people, without exception, are afraid of. For some, life has no value, for some it is disgusting to such an extent that parting with it looks like a happy outcome, someone dreams of heavenly life, because earthly existence is seen as a heavy burden and vanity. It is scary for a person to lose not life, but that meaningful, with which this life is filled.
Therefore, for example, the use of the death penalty against religious terrorists is pointless: they already dream of going to heaven as soon as possible and meeting their god. And for many criminals, death is like getting rid of the pangs of conscience. Therefore, the exploitation of the fear of death for social regulation is not always justified: some of the people are not afraid of death, but aspire to it. Freud even talked about the death drive associated with lowering all tensions of the body to zero. Death is a point of absolute rest and absolute bliss.
In this sense, from the point of view of the unconscious, death is an absolute pleasure, a complete discharge of all drives. It is not surprising, therefore, that death is the goal of all drives. Death, however, can frighten a person, since it is associated with the loss of personality or one's own "I" - a privileged object created by the look. Therefore, many neurotics ask themselves the question: what awaits us after death? What will be left of me in this world? Which part of me is mortal and which part is immortal? Succumbing to fear, they create for themselves a myth about the soul and about paradise, where their personality is supposedly preserved after death.
Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that people who do not have this own "I", who do not have a personality, are not afraid of death, as, for example, some psychotics. Or Japanese samurai, who are not independent reflective personalities, but only as an extension of the will of their master. They are not afraid of losing their lives on the battlefield, they do not hold on to their personality, because initially they do not have it.
Hence, we can conclude that the fear of death is imaginary in nature and is rooted only in the person's personality. Whereas in all other registers of the psyche there is no such fear. Moreover, drives tend to death. And we can even say that we die precisely because the drives have reached their goal and completed the earthly path.
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