How to Overcome the Fear of Death–Two Possibilities

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

Photo Mar 31, 5 16 33 PM

The fear of death always comes at or near the top of people’s worst fears. Some psychologists believe that this is such a potent fear, we push it down into the subconscious in order to avoid it. Yet from its hiding place the fear remains active, re-emerging in times like the death of a loved one, making grief even more painful and anxious. Avoiding the fear of death clearly isn’t the best tactic. One reason that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous five stages of dying became so popular is that she gave us a rational framework for handling a once-taboo subject.

 

Rationality is one of the two ways a person can overcome their own personal fear of death. The starting point for most rationalists, particularly scientists, is to assume in the absence of data from the afterlife that our consciousness is extinguished at the moment of death. In a short video on the subject of “What happens after we die?” physicist Brian Greene takes the position, when you’re gone, you’re gone.

 

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Death Makes Life Possible

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A global movement to transform the fear of death into an inspiration for living and dying well.  The DVD is now available on Amazon

Why Physics Needs God But God Doesn't Need Physics

IMG_2688By Deepak Chopra, MD

Recently I created a brief storm on Twitter by throwing out questions that physicists can’t answer. Twitter allows you to contact famous physicists directly, and it’s predictable that a handful will become irritated and even riled up if you dare to challenge them. “What happens in physics stays in physics” is their motto, apparently. But I’m on tour for a new book, The Future of God, and for decades, ever since the publication of books like The Tao of Physics and God and the New Physics, it’s become evident that physics can’t escape its meeting with God.   I don’t mean the clash between belief and atheism. What I cover in the book, and what makes some physicists with famous names turn ad hominem and outright abusive, is something else. They are going to need God to solve some fundamental questions about reality. Even more irritating to them, God exposes the current crisis in physics. After promising us that physics will one day have the answer for where the universe came from, what it’s made of, and where human beings belong in the cosmos, today physics may actually be farther away from an answer than ever. Such is the nature of the crisis. (more…)

Death Makes Life Possible

There are many explanations and conjectures about what happens when we die, ranging from scientific materialism to religious/spiritual views of immortality. Ideas about life after death impact how people approach death – and how they live their lives.

Years of interviews conducted by Marilyn Schlitz with people representing different religious, cultural, and philosophical worldviews on the afterlife provide a diverse set of qualitative data that can help us better understand the prevalence and significance of experientially and culturally informed cosmologies of death and the afterlife.

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