By Michael E Tymn

Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wrote that the greatest offense one can commit against life is hoping for another life. His philosophy is expressed today by those who preach that we should ‘live in the moment’ or ‘live in the present’ and not concern ourselves with the past or future, especially with what comes after death.

Many friends and relatives who know of my interest in death, dying, and the afterlife express concern that it is a negative subject matter. ‘One life at a time for me’ is a typical reaction, a subtle and supposedly ‘intelligent’ way of saying that the person is not interested in discussing anything related to death, while also saying that we should ‘live in the present.’

So easy to say, but so difficult to do, especially when one reaches his or her senior years. During the first 50 or 60 years of life, most of us are so occupied with the challenges of everyday living that there is little time or need to consider death or what comes after. Subconsciously, however, death is on our minds. ‘The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,’ cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in his 1974 Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. ‘It is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying it in some way that it is the final destiny of man.’

To free oneself of death anxiety, Becker explained, nearly everyone chooses the path of repression. We bury the anxiety deep in the subconscious and go about our every day activities mostly oblivious to the fact that in the great scheme of things those activities are exceedingly short-term and for the most part meaningless. We busy ourselves with our jobs, enjoy various recreational pursuits, spend considerable time escaping into fictitious stories in books, at the movies, and on television or in experiencing vicarious thrills at sporting events – all as if they have real meaning and as if we expect them to go on indefinitely. We adopt movie actors – people who are merely acting like real people – and athletes – pretend combatants – as our gods, striving to emulate them in whatever way possible. The unreal becomes the real.

Becker refers to this seemingly ‘secure’ person as the ‘automatic cultural man.’ He is ‘man confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premiums, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush.’ If Becker were alive today, he would no doubt substitute iPod for toothbrush.

Becker’s ‘automatic cultural man’ is a modern description of Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘Philistine.’ For Kierkegaard, the ‘father’ of existentialism, Philistinism was man fully concerned with the trivial. Of course, if we are not completely selfish, we also involve ourselves in loving, caring for, and serving others. Those acts seem to at least partially give meaning to our lives and validate our existence, until we ask: If our loved ones are simply marching toward nothingness with us, what is the point of it all? One school of thought responds to that question by suggesting that our primary goal should be to make life a better place for our children and future generations.

But assume that science succeeds in erasing all of humankind’s problems, allowing future generations to live in peace and harmony with unsurpassed comforts and conveniences. What would those children experiencing Utopia then do for their children? While the average life span might be extended by 20 or 30 years, they all face extinction sooner or later. To what end the progeny? To which generation full fruition?

At a certain age, usually when we have left the work force and the children are on their own, questions about the meaning of life begin to drift upward from the subconscious to the conscious. And then, one day, perhaps when it becomes apparent that our days are numbered, those repressed anxieties relating to death begin welling up into the consciousness. We proceed to live our final years under a dark and increasingly foreboding shadow. For the most part, the muddled information provided by orthodox religion offers little relief, little comfort.

Kierkegaard recognized the need for man to believe in a larger life. ‘If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all – what then would life be but despair?’ he asked.

As Kierkegaard saw it, many people are so tranquilized in the mundane or the trivial that they lack the awareness that they are in despair. Many of these Philistines ignorantly celebrate their triumph over what they see as religion’s biggest superstition – life after death.

Pioneering psychologist William James stated that one cannot effectively live in the moment without some concern for the future. ‘The permanent presence of the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient of expectancy,’ James explained. ‘Every one knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given present.’

James recognized that some people – the moralists, today’s humanists – can live a moral life without any faith that they would live on, but he saw the stoic courage of the moralist in the face of personal extinction as so much bravado that eroded with age. ‘The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense,’ he wrote, ‘and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well – morally suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind.’

When someone gives me the ‘one life at a time’ or ‘live in the present’ pitch, I respond by saying that I agree that we should be living in the present, not living for some distant afterlife. But I add that the best way to live in the present, or to live in the ‘now,’ is to ‘live in eternity.’ That always brings puzzled expressions and requires some explanation. I begin by calling upon some great thinkers. As examples, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that it is psychologically beneficial to have death as a goal toward which to strive. Mozart called death the key to unlocking the door to true happiness. Shakespeare wrote that when we are prepared for death, life is sweeter. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne said that ‘to practice death is to practice freedom.’ Essentially, what they all said is that in understanding death, in embracing death, we come to understand life and better enjoy it.

But the puzzled expressions of my friends and relatives persist. It is not easy to explain how to ‘live in eternity,’ but the analogy I find best explains it is retirement from the work force. Most people, even those who find some joy and fulfillment in their jobs, look forward to retirement. They envision more freedom and opportunity to pursue things that really interest them and which involve less stress and conflict than their occupations. They anticipate more time for leisure activities, travel, maybe even an around-the-world cruise. Retirement is not something they constantly dwell on, but it is a motivator that more or less straddles the dividing line between the conscious and the subconscious. That’s what ‘living in eternity” is like – having that long range goal in the back of the mind while still focusing on the present. It’s like a baseball player taking each game as it comes, but still envisioning some day being in the Hall of Fame. It’s something of a dream that continually inspires him to face up to the challenges.

What if retirement meant no income of any kind – no savings, no social security, no pensions? There would be nothing to look forward to except poverty, squalor and despair. Unfortunately, that is how most people look at death and the afterlife. Orthodox religion has not been able to paint a picture that offers anything more than a humdrum heaven or horrific hell. Assuming that a person feels qualified for the humdrum heaven, how can he or she get excited about floating around on clouds all day while strumming a harp, or in what seems like an endless Sunday church service singing hymns and praising God? How appealing is that?

In effect, there are three approaches to viewing death: 1) a march into an abyss of nothingness; 2) seeing the humdrum heaven and horrific hell of orthodoxy; 3) viewing it like beginning retirement with an around-the-world cruise. Those who embrace death usually settle on number three.

Various polls suggest that 80-85 percent of the U.S. population believe in an afterlife, but the problem is that they don’t really ‘believe.’ They just ‘hope’ for it while striving to be ‘one with their toys,’ i.e., true Philistines. Materialism is their religion and celebrities are their gods. They might as well be marching toward the abyss of nothingness that the atheist does his best not to think about.

In his book, The Broken Connection, Robert Jay Lifton, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology, states that we must ‘know death’ in order to live with free imagination. He tells us that we have to be able to imagine it, to visualize it before we can accept the survival of consciousness. Therein is the failure of orthodox religion; there is nothing to visualize beyond harps and clouds.

When we study death and what comes after, which leads to embracing it, we can begin to visualize something, even though it may never be completely in focus. In so visualizing, we begin to comprehend the divine plan. We are able to understand that there is no sudden enlightenment on the Other Side. There is no heaven-hell dichotomy. There are planes or dimensions to which our undying minds or souls gravitate based on the spiritual development achieved on earth. We are able to formulate a paradigm that involves a Creative Force, whatever shape He, She, or It takes, and are able to see how the divine plan plays itself out in cosmic evolution. We see how we are really souls occupying bodies rather than bodies housing souls and how our souls are progressing in finding their way back to Oneness with the Creator through the challenges, the adversities, the trials and tribulations offered us in a particular lifetime. We understand how a life without adversity offers little opportunity for growth and that to hope that future generations find Utopia is to wish even greater Philistinism upon them.

More than anything, when we come to understand death and what comes after, we are able to appreciate the words of Mozart that ‘death, as we consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence.’