Which is more frightening, Life or Death?

Interesting results! I’d have to say that I agree with the majority on this one. I believe life can often be frightening because it presents the illusion of control, while death can be frightening because there is no illusion of control.

Life is presented to us from the very beginning as entirely up to us. Even before we can comprehend what we are, our most minuscule milestones are left in the teeny hands of self. Though granted external support and encouragement, it is nevertheless up to us when we take our first steps, speak our first words, soil our last Pamper.

As we grow from infants to toddlers to children to adolescents, the directions of our lives continue to be molded by our parents and surroundings — yet the illusion of self-mastery remains. We may be placed in a school or on a sports team against our own will, but environmental interaction is deemed our own choosing.

This ability to choose should not be confused with an ability to control. And for those who do believe in absolute control, the ability to control oneself should not be confused with the ability to control one’s life.

Whether or not we truly even have the freedom to make our own decisions is a greater and grander question of free will that shall be saved for another time (looking forward to that!). Let us say, for the sake of argument and for the sake of existential sanity, that we do have the freedom to choose. Why on Earth would we ever think to conflate that freedom of choice with freedom of control? You may choose which career, relationships, experiences to pursue, yet where is your authority to determine the outcome of these pursuits? It is nowhere, it does not exist, because as much as we like to view our lives on a map of intrapersonal, earth-bound terrain where effort equals effect, life is just as much not about you as it is all about you.

You choose what you cast out into the universe, you do not choose what is casted out onto you; the most you can do is trust in a karmic balance, and have faith that you will reap what you sow. And of course, try to find a place of harmony where your utter insignificance in all things lives in content equilibrium with your massive, astronomical importance to your own world (and thus the world).

With death, those who found particular comfort in life exerting (or even just chasing) what they felt was control, will likely fear the loss of that sensation to a higher degree. Not only does one lose control when they die, but many people believe we lose all forms of consciousness, perception, being. I personally do not believe this to be true, yet no one can truly know ‘till they get there!

This conversation of control varies in nature throughout the world, and becomes a notably more frustrating one when examined in the West. We tend to associate control with an energy of opposition. On Thesaurus.com, which is owned by Dictionary.com and explains meanings of words through both American and British English, the top two synonyms for the noun “control” are “command” and “mastery.” Command is order, instruction, rule, of an essence far from cooperation and equality. “Mastery,” if you ask me, has an even more authoritative feel to it.

This is where a good deal of our problem lies — we think that in order to control ourselves, we need to learn self-domination rather than self-cooperation. A quest for control can easily become a reality of confinement.

Like all things, being a person requires nuance and balance; just as any functioning adult should understand the importance of overseeing oneself, managing habits and behaviors, they should as well make sure that they are not treating themselves as a submissive student to be silenced and commanded.

Dualistic worldviews paint a picture of separation between You and the part of You which you are trying to control. Much like control, that separation is another illusion, and viewing yourself as one thing of two ever-opposing life forces will have the cosmos chuckling to themselves while they watch you like a dog chasing its tail.

In death, all of that goes out the wide open window. You are able to embrace the open-ended everythingness, or nothingness, that awaits you. You can lay back and kick your feet up, because (perhaps for the very first time) you truly believe that things are out of your hands. And then, as you slip away, you realize you could have embraced this notion of no-control when you were still alive and it would have made everything so much easier.