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In Brief
Making Sense of Mortality
- Awareness of our mortality has different effects depending on whether the awareness is conscious and reflective or subconscious and fleeting. Prolonged contemplation of death produces shifts in personal values and goals.
- Terror Management Theory proposes that we unconsciously fend off thoughts of our mortality by investing in our culture as a symbolic way of attaining some degree of immortality.
- A large body of research has shown that subconscious awareness of mortality prompts people to defend their worldviews, even in ways that may be harmful.
My father was just 32 years old when he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. Weeks later he was in the hospital, informed that he would not be leaving. Miraculously the leukemia went into remission, and he lived another five years. Even as a child, though, I could clearly see that the man who returned from the hospital was not the same one who had left home. Before, he had been concerned mostly with work and material success; now he embraced religion and family. Getting a second, tenuous chance at life was a profound experience that deeply changed his values and behavior.
We deflect it with humor, hedge against it with good works, shun reminders of our animal nature. Yet we all share the reality of mortality, and we know it, try as we might to throttle our thoughts about it. Indeed, this simultaneous knowing and recoiling from our knowledge is a tension that will run throughout our life. Yet despite the significance of the subject, for most of its history psychology has left the matter of how mortal thoughts affect us almost completely unexplored—terror incognita.
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8 Comments
Add CommentA Jewish sage, Hillel, says: If I am not for me, who will be? If I am just for me, who am I? If not now, when?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis quote means you must do the best to help yourself and your neighbor, here and now!Love thy neighbor! Spirituality help us cope with and find answers to our existential problems.
The interesting question is: how/why did humans evolve such a strong instinctual fear of mortality in the first place? According to a recent article in Biological Theory [Vol 5(4)2010, 296–311], awareness of mortality is a byproduct of the evolution of consciousness (with obvious fitness benefits), but importantly natural selection was not finished: it then favoured a fear of mortality together with a perception of amelioration of that fear through offspring production. In other words, attraction to offspring production provided our ancestors with an important mortality anxiety buffer - a perception of being able to 'leave something of oneself' for the future despite being terrorized by the uniquely human capacity to foresee one's own inevitable death. According to this hypothesis, children therefore represented vehicles for the transmission of self-identifying “memes” — personal values, beliefs, and perceptions of selfworth — residing in the minds and behaviors of a parent, to the future, through the minds and behaviors of offspring. Importantly, this also ensured genetic legacy: the transmission of resident genes to future generations, including genes that influence the expression of legacy drive, and hence - ironically - also genes that promote mortality anxiety. Being afraid to die then turned out to be in the best interests of our ancestors' genes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStudying some of the many sites on Near Death Experiences, I recommend
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.aleroy.com/
- can change the way we think about death. Whether NDEs are caused by chemical changes in the dying brain or are in fact what they seem to be, they show that dying and even death can be wonderful experiences. Certainly those who have an NDE share one thing: a loss of the fear of death
Thank you,FredPotter. Your comment adds to mine when I mentioned the benefits of a spiritual approach to life and death which are two sides of the same coin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you,FredPotter. Your comment adds to mine when I mentioned the benefits of a spiritual approach to life and death which are two sides of the same coin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving died seven times and had three NDE's I can say that there is no god and that there is no religious manifestation surrounding death.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have looked down at myself on the side of the road as ambulance workers have tried to revive me, and again when nurses and doctors have done so in my hospital bed. I can recall everything that went on at the time. And for me these times have given me an appreciation not only of my life but of death. I have no fear of death, and when my time finally comes I will accept it, even though I have fought like crazy to stay alive in the past and will continue to do so in the future, until I decide it is time for me to go. But when I do I will sit up say “what a ride” and accept it.
Dear Wizeowl That's impressive. Surely your out of body experiences where you recall everything that went on must signify something about the possibility of consciousness existing outside the brain. Did you have the tunnel experience with a beautiful light at the end? When you say there's no God, do you mean a person-like God or an ocean of being transpersonal consciousness where we are all part of "God - perhaps we should scrap the word"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFred
Wizeowl - why only four out of seven NDEs?
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