How to overcome soul-destroying fear
So what should you do to overcome anxiety? What qualities, in addition to firm faith, should be cultivated in yourself?
- Feeling of self-denial. It appears when a person consciously refuses some benefits in the name of another person, lives not for himself, but for people. An analogy with a child in the womb would be appropriate here. If a child were afraid of being deprived of comfort and refused to be born, he would die himself and destroy his mother. But overcoming fear, thinking not only about himself, the child is born for a new life.
God's mercy conquers death if a person entrusts his life to God - The desire to overcome fear. When John Climacus was intimidated by demons, he went to the cemetery and prayed there all night. This is one of the patristic principles - if you are afraid of something, you need to go to where this fear lives and try to eradicate it. For example: employees and volunteers of oncology departments and hospices approach issues of life and death differently than other people.
Important! The sooner the thought of the need to be prepared for the end of this earthly journey reaches a person’s consciousness, the less fear remains in his soul.
How to recognize a phobia: main symptoms
It is possible to determine whether a person has a pathological fear of death by paying attention to the following symptoms:
- anxiety, sleep disturbance;
- changes in eating habits, sharp fluctuations in body weight;
- a significant increase in blood pressure during periods of anxious thoughts;
- hand tremors and nervous tics;
- uncharacteristic behavior: irritability, tearfulness;
- decreased concentration;
- panic attacks;
- depression or depression;
- increasing superstitiousness.
Why you shouldn't rush death
Some might think that since after death the soul simply begins a new life, then maybe suicide is really a way out of a difficult life situation? Like, I’ll just go to the next round, I’ll have better luck there.
I hasten to assure you that this is not so. Suicide is one of the most serious crimes leading to a huge karmic debt. During rebirth, you are entrusted with a mission - your destiny, and unauthorized departure from life is a direct refusal to fulfill it. You remain indebted to the Universe and your own soul, and this will not be in vain for you, rest assured.
Suicide
After suicide, your soul does not get the experience it was intended to have. And so your life will repeat itself again with minor changes. And it’s not a fact that it’s for the better. Typically in such situations, gender and sexual orientation change, or vice versa.
Plus the circumstances that forced you to commit suicide. Sometimes they only get worse so you can learn to overcome them. Therefore, we do not advise you to hastily leave this life. After all, this won’t make anyone feel better, especially you.
If you are in a difficult situation, do not rush to take your own life. And remember - there are no unsolvable problems. Write to me and get diagnosed using a photo. I will help you look at the problem from a different angle and find a solution.
The main reason for all fears
Fifthly, most unconscious people do not understand the simple truth. They do not understand that all their fears stem from the fear of death . Fear of being poor, fear of not being fulfilled, fear of not being successful.
I always ask you, dear friends, to understand cause and effect. Fighting a consequence is like fighting the shadow of an enemy: you can hit it a thousand times very accurately with a sword... and lose the battle, because the shadow is a consequence.
And having understood the causes of uncertainty, poverty, illness, you can calmly, step by step, developing your intellectual and spiritual strength, regularly attending intellectual training, listening to a mentor, defeat them, and be cured of them once and for all.
Regrets about the past
It happens that we sigh heavily about the past and think that “we should have responded to that boor like that then” or “I shouldn’t have told her that I liked her, then everything would have been different.” In any case, no matter what we do, we can find a bunch of reasons for regret.
Diving into the past, no matter how painful it may be, has many benefits for our psyche. For example, running away from a dangerous reality and responsibility for interacting with it. In reality, you need to make a choice, but you can delve into the past and avoid making a choice, because the past cannot be changed.
In these experiences, the sacrificial position is reinforced: “if it weren’t for those circumstances, I would be happy, but now I’m unhappy, and it’s all because of those circumstances.” Besides, everything has already happened in the past, there is certainty; in reality there is no certainty, it is full of unforeseen dangers, and the worst of them is death. In the past there is no place for death.
Hostility and adherence to ideology
The German sociologist and philosopher Erich Fromm believed that the main difficulty of human existence is the gap between freedom and security, which are always competing with each other. People are simultaneously trying to run away from freedom for the sake of security, and to take back their freedom, because it constitutes the human essence.
Freedom presupposes the coexistence of different worldviews, allowing those that contradict the one we have chosen to protect ourselves from the fear of death.
Imagine: all your life you firmly believe that by following certain rules, you can find happiness in another, eternal life, and this consoles you. And then you meet a person who claims that you adhere to the wrong rules and the “other life” either looks completely different or does not exist at all. How will you feel? How do you feel about the idea of each person having the freedom to choose which rules to follow?
By calmly accepting the right of another person to live in his own way, you will be forced to admit that you are wrong: there may not be another, eternal life. It turns out that the desire for freedom threatens your picture of the world with collapse, and behind this comes the realization of the inevitability of death.
We all tend to divide the world into Ours and Them, giving preference, of course, to Ours. There are a lot of criteria for division: by common territory, gender, sexual preference, ideology... Sometimes even by hair texture!
To recognize and highlight the signs of Ours, the brain needs a minimal amount of information: to feel sympathy for the person opposite, it is enough that he simply repeats our movements. This happens with amazing speed: for example, to determine someone’s gender, race or any other affiliation and our attitude towards it, 0.05 seconds is enough.
A quick automatic reaction against Strangers can be tracked using an implicit association test, which determines what pleasant or unpleasant emotions the subject associates with people of a certain category.
We are capable of dividing ourselves even according to the slightest arbitrary criteria.
A specific culture—a group of Ours—is determined by values, beliefs, and ideology. These are intangible categories that must be correlated with something tangible: clothing or jewelry. So we can identify Ours, for example, by a tiny pendant in the form of a cross of a certain shape. Separated from the idea that it symbolizes, this pendant has no value, but we know that crosses are worn by Christians - and if we consider ourselves one of those, then a person with a cross is perceived as one of our own and inspires more trust.
Then it gets more interesting: the symbolism of our values becomes valuable as such, begins its own separate life, and now it is no longer the object that symbolizes beliefs, but beliefs the object. People are ready to die for symbolism, because the cross for them is no longer just a cross, but a sign of a community that protects them from death. This is such a paradox.
Why do Friends and Aliens even quarrel?
In the 1980s, social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski formulated death management theory (TMT), which proposes that almost all human activity is aimed at protecting against anxiety caused by the understanding of the finitude of life.
TMT posits that activation of death thoughts increases favorability toward in-group members and negative bias toward out-group members. This is evidenced by the devaluation and behavioral avoidance of members of ethnic, gender and sexual out-groups (Stranger groups); negative judgments about those who violate sociocultural norms, and positive ones about those who support them; an increase in the attractiveness of those who highly appreciate a person’s worldview, and a decrease in the attractiveness of those who criticize; strengthening ideas about one’s ethnic group as a standard of culture and morality (ethnocentric attitudes).
Proponents of TMT explain its socio-psychological effects by saying that the experience of horror before the realization of our death forces us to defend ourselves against it. Thus, we either attribute death to an uncertain future, or we believe that some important aspects of our personality are not subject to it - literally (in the form of an afterlife) or symbolically (in the form of a continuation of life in children, ideas, creativity). When thoughts about their death were activated (for example, when subjects were asked to write an essay about it), the importance of such methods of prolonging life increases greatly.
Might be interesting
Your memory will live forever: how society, politics and capital manipulate our fear of death
So, adherence to ideology is needed in order to be in one’s group, to feel safe and to try to prolong one’s life through the life of ideas. Enmity with Aliens is a direct consequence of this, and it can have many functions: to assert that one is right, to feel unity with one’s own in the fight, or to “fulfill a higher mission,” in general, as much as one’s imagination allows. It is only clear that these two phenomena are inseparable, and they often do not need objective reasons, other than the fear of dying.
Laws of the Universe
However, this does not mean that you can do absolutely any obscenity, and it will not come back to haunt you. Two laws of the universe are still very effective and invariably punish people for crimes: the law of the boomerang and the law of karmic debt.
About the boomerang, I think everything is already known. Whatever you do will come back to you. This is not just a warning that parents use to scare their children, but a valid law of the universe. For the negativity that you cause to other people, it will return to you in kind, maybe not immediately and not in the form in which it was sent, and it may not seem to have anything to do with it at all, but it will certainly return. Fortunately, the boomerang law works not only for bad deeds, but also for good ones. Kindness, love, tenderness and compassion also return. And how. Remember this.
What is karma?
As for karma, many people already know about this.
Karma is influenced by almost all our actions, and perhaps even thoughts, if they are aimed at harming other people. Having accumulated sins during one of its incarnations, the soul will be forced to atone for them in the next, if it does not have time in the current one, and maybe in the next ones, if there were enough sins for ten lives ahead. Moreover, exactly the way you sinned towards another person will be treated towards you. There are quite a lot of examples: steal - you will lose your property, kill - you will pay with your life, have a beautiful appearance and play with people’s feelings - expect problems with them in the next life, constantly drink or use drugs - say goodbye to your health and say hello to chronic diseases , and not only in this life. You should not accumulate karmic debts. Getting rid of them is difficult, time-consuming and unpleasant.
Pathological workaholism
We are talking about a pathological attachment to work, when the desire for an active life goes beyond the scope of natural hard work and turns into addiction. A person suffering from workaholism feels constant anxiety due to the fear of failure, being outcompeted, or being seen as incompetent; he compulsively strives for the approval of others, on whose opinions his emotional state directly depends.
The World Health Organization defines workaholism as an excessive reliance on work as the exclusive source of identity and support; while other values, such as family, friends or health, are ignored.
How can this be related to the horror of realizing one's death?
People use work as a shield from anxiety and uncertainty about the future. Work makes a person’s life more meaningful and orderly, schedules it by day, week and month, allowing you to feel power over time. The absence of a temporary structure and a specific goal contributes to the emergence of an existential vacuum and causes a feeling of anxiety.
Through work, a person learns and achieves a certain mastery, which gives him a feeling of creative success and meaning in life. Without it, noogenic neurosis can develop - a painful search in an existential vacuum for at least something valuable.
When the balance between work and love is not maintained, work becomes a form of addiction - an obsessive need through which a person escapes from reality into an alternative state. It is beneficial because in it we are distracted from the dangers that reality brings, and we feel more illusory control over our lives.
Workaholism as a pathological condition can develop due to:
- problems in your personal life - then work fills the vacuum created in relationships with your family or partner;
- unrealistic self-esteem - then work becomes a way to deal with the fear of not meeting social requirements or the fear of failure;
- fear of loneliness - then work can be a way of distracting from it and everything connected with it;
- fear of communication - then work can help avoid this by working extra hard on weekends and holidays, for example.
Excessive work becomes an important and often the only compensatory mechanism that helps to cope with emotional chaos, turn a blind eye to problems and give life at least some kind of harmony.
The problem is that this mechanism is quite fragile: any event “not according to plan” unsettles a person, encroaches on his identity and exposes him to the fact of his mortality, which he tries with all his might to ignore.
To prevent this from happening, you need to find additional support that will support you in difficult times and find a new source of resource, but to do this you will have to turn to reality with all its unpredictable threats. And that can be scary.
How to get rid of a phobia of death
In psychotherapy, phobias are given close attention. Typically, such disorders respond well to correction, and gradually the person returns to a normal emotional and mental state. The following methods are used today to treat phobias:
- conducting psychoanalysis and identifying the root cause of the phobia;
- research of the nervous system;
- psychotherapy;
- hypnosis sessions;
- drug therapy.
Fear of death, like other phobias, requires careful and timely treatment. Otherwise, it can significantly impair quality of life and mental health.
