FEAR OF DEATH.

Causes of the fear of death. — Reason why Spiritists do not fear it.

Causes of the fear of death.

— Man, whatever the rung of his social position, since the savage state, has the innate sentiment of the future; intuition tells him that death is not the last phase of existence and that those whose loss we lament are not irremediably lost.

The belief in immortality is intuitive and far more widespread than that of nothingness. Nevertheless, the greater part of those who believe in it present themselves to us as possessed of great love for earthly things and fearful of death! Why?

— This fear is an effect of the wisdom of Providence and a consequence of the instinct of self-preservation common to all living beings.

It is necessary as long as one is not sufficiently enlightened about the conditions of the future life, as a counterweight to the tendency which, without this restraint, would lead us to leave life prematurely and to neglect the earthly labor which must serve our own advancement.

Thus it is that, among primitive peoples, the future is a vague intuition, later becoming a simple hope and, finally, a certainty merely attenuated by a secret attachment to corporeal life.

— In proportion as man better understands the future life, the fear of death diminishes; once his earthly mission is made clear, he awaits its end calmly, resignedly, and serenely.

The certainty of the future life gives a different course to his ideas, a different aim to his labor; before that certainty, nothing that is not bound to the present; after it, everything for the future without disdain for the present, because he knows that the former depends on the good or bad direction of the latter.

The certainty of meeting his friends again after death, of resuming the relations he had on Earth, of not losing a single fruit of his labor, of ceaselessly growing greater in intelligence and in perfection, gives him patience to wait and courage to bear the transitory fatigues of earthly life.

The solidarity between the living and the dead makes him understand that which must exist on Earth, where fraternity and charity henceforth have an end and a reason for being, in the present as in the future.

— To free oneself from the fear of death, one must be able to regard it from its true point of view, that is, to have penetrated in thought into the spiritual world, forming of it as exact an idea as possible, which denotes on the part of the incarnate Spirit a certain development and aptitude for detaching itself from matter.

Among those who are not sufficiently advanced, material life prevails over spiritual life.

Clinging to appearances, man does not distinguish life beyond the body, even though real life is in the soul; the body being deprived of life, in his eyes all is lost, and he despairs.

If, on the contrary, we concentrate our thought, not on the body, but on the soul, the source of life, the real being surviving all else, we shall lament less the loss of the body, rather a source of miseries and pains. For this, however, the Spirit needs a strength acquirable only in maturity.

The fear of death therefore arises from an insufficient notion of the future life, though it also denotes the need to live and the dread of total destruction; equally it is stimulated by a secret yearning for the survival of the soul, still veiled by uncertainty.

This fear decreases in proportion as certainty increases, and disappears when the latter is complete.

Here is the providential side of the question.

To the man not sufficiently enlightened, whose reason could scarcely bear the very positive and seductive prospect of a better future, it would be prudent not to dazzle him with such an idea, since on its account he might neglect the present, necessary to his material and intellectual advancement.

— This state of things is maintained and prolonged by causes purely human, which progress will cause to disappear. The first is the aspect under which the future life is presented, an aspect which might content little-developed intelligences, but which could not satisfy the enlightened reason of reflective thinkers.

Thus these say: Since principles contested by logic and by the positive data of Science are presented to us as absolute truths, it is because they are not truths.

Hence the incredulity of some and the dubious belief of a great number. The future life is for them a vague idea, rather a probability than an absolute certainty; they believe, they would wish it to be so, yet despite this they exclaim: But what if it should not be so! The present is positive, let us occupy ourselves with it first, for the future will come in its turn.

And then, they add, what definitively is the soul? A point, an atom, a spark, a flame? How does it feel, see, or perceive? It is that the soul does not seem to them an effective reality, but an abstraction. The beings dear to them, reduced to the state of atoms in their way of thinking, are lost, and no longer have in their eyes the qualities by which they made themselves beloved; they cannot understand the love of a spark nor what we might have for it.

As for themselves, they remain mediocrely satisfied with the prospect of transforming themselves into monads. Thus is justified the preference for the positivism of earthly life, which possesses something more substantial. The number of those dominated by this thought is considerable.

— Another cause of attachment to earthly things, even among those who most firmly believe in the future life, is the impression of the teaching which has been given to them concerning it since infancy.

Let us admit that the picture sketched by religion on the subject is in no way seductive and still less consoling. On one side, the contortions of the condemned expiating in eternal tortures and flames the errors of a moment; for whom centuries succeed centuries without hope of relief or pity; and, what is most atrocious, repentance avails them nothing. On the other side, the battered and afflicted souls of purgatory await the intercession of the living who will pray or have prayers said for them, without doing anything by their own effort to progress. These two categories make up the immense majority of the population beyond the tomb. Above them hovers the limited class of the elect, enjoying, for all eternity, contemplative beatitude. This eternal uselessness, doubtless preferable to nothingness, is nonetheless of a tedious monotony. It is for this reason that one sees, in the figures depicting the blessed, angelic figures in which boredom is more apparent than true happiness.

This state satisfies neither the aspirations nor the instinctive idea of progress, the only one that appears compatible with absolute happiness. It is hard to believe that, merely for having received baptism, the ignorant savage — of obtuse moral sense — should be on the same level as the man who has attained, after long years of labor, the highest degree of practical science and morality.

Even less conceivable is that the child deceased at a tender age, before having consciousness of its acts, should enjoy the same privileges solely by virtue of a ceremony in which its will had no part whatever. These reasonings do not fail to preoccupy the most fervent believers, however little they meditate.

— Future happiness not depending on progressive labor on Earth, the ease with which one believes one acquires that happiness, by means of certain external practices, and even the possibility of buying it with money, without regeneration of character and habits, give to the pleasures of the world their best value.

More than one believer considers, in his innermost self, that his future being assured by the fulfillment of certain formulas or by posthumous gifts that deprive him of nothing, it would be superfluous to impose upon himself sacrifices or any inconveniences for the sake of others, since salvation is achieved by each one working for himself.

Surely, not all think thus, there being indeed many and honorable exceptions; but one could not contest that the greater number think thus, especially among the little-enlightened masses, and that the idea they form of the conditions of happiness in the other world does not foster attachment to the goods of this one, encouraging egoism.

— Let us add further the circumstance that everything in custom contributes to lamenting the loss of earthly life and to fearing the passage from Earth to Heaven. Death is surrounded by lugubrious ceremonies, more apt to instill terror than to provoke hope. If they describe death, it is always with a repellent aspect and never as a sleep of transition; all its emblems recall the destruction of the body, showing it hideous and fleshless; none symbolizes the soul radiantly freeing itself from earthly fetters.

Departure for that happier world is accompanied only by the lament of the survivors, as if an immense misfortune had befallen those who depart; they bid them eternal farewells as if they were never to see them again. They are pitied for the loss of worldly pleasures, as if they were not going to find greater pleasures beyond the tomb. What a misfortune, they say, to die so young, rich, and happy, with the prospect of a brilliant future! The idea of a better future only lightly touches the thought, because it has no roots in it. Everything thus contributes to inspiring the terror of death, instead of instilling hope.

Doubtless much time will be needed for man to rid himself of these prejudices, which does not mean that this will not come to pass, as his faith becomes firmer, to the point of conceiving a more sensible idea of spiritual life.

— Moreover, common belief places souls in regions accessible only to thought, where they become in some sort strangers to the living; the Church itself sets between the one and the other an insuperable barrier, declaring all relations broken and any communication impossible. If souls are in hell, all hope of seeing them again is lost, unless one goes there too; if they are among the elect, they live completely absorbed in contemplative beatitude.

All this interposes between the dead and the living such a distance that it makes the separation supposed eternal, and it is for this reason that many prefer to have near them, though suffering, the beings dear to them, rather than see them depart, even if for Heaven.

And will the soul that is in Heaven really be happy seeing, for example, its child, its father, its mother, or its friends burning eternally? Why Spiritists do not fear death.

— The Spiritist Doctrine completely transforms the prospect of the future. The future life ceases to be a hypothesis to become a reality. The state of souls after death is no longer a system, but the result of observation.

The veil has been raised; the spiritual world appears to us in the fullness of its practical reality; it was not men who discovered it by the effort of an ingenious conception, it is the very inhabitants of that world who come to describe their situation to us; there we see them at all degrees of the spiritual scale, in all phases of happiness and unhappiness, witnessing, in short, all the vicissitudes of life beyond the tomb.

This is why Spiritists face death calmly and clothe themselves in serenity in their last moments upon Earth. It is no longer only hope, but certainty that comforts them; they know that the future life is the continuation of earthly life under better conditions, and they await it with the same confidence with which they would await the rising of the Sun after a night of storm.

The motives of this confidence arise, moreover, from the facts witnessed and from the concordance of those facts with logic, with the justice and goodness of God, corresponding to the intimate aspirations of Humanity.

For Spiritists, the soul is not an abstraction; it has an ethereal body that defines it to thought, which is much toward fixing ideas about its individuality, aptitudes, and perceptions.

The remembrance of those dear to us rests upon something real. They no longer present themselves to us as fugitive flames that say nothing to the thought, but under a concrete form that rather shows them to us as living beings.

Furthermore, instead of being lost in the depths of Space, they are around us; the corporeal world and the spiritual world identify themselves in perpetual relations, assisting one another mutually.

Doubt about the future no longer being permissible, the fear of death disappears; one faces its approach in cold blood, like one who awaits liberation through the door of life and not of nothingness.