Trip Report: Why do we fear death?
As I stated before, I have a year long experience with ayahuasca in religious settlements, but recently I felt the need of using ayahuasca by myself, and so I did (even though, I do not recommend it). This week I brewed MHRB (Mimosa tenuiflora) with Banisteriopsis caapi, forming an “anahuasca” known in Brazil as “Jurema’s wine”, and so I drank it (a total of 200ml) and it worked very well. I’m not going to detail too much the whole experience, but I would like to focus on one portion of the trance.
I was on the floor with my black cat, Bastet, and the surroundings were really dark, so I dove head-on on a journey about death, secrets and misteries. And in that trance I felt I was going to die later in that day (but as you see, I’m still alive). I wasn’t really scared, I was amazed, but still, I didn’t want to die, I got a little bit mad, but I questioned myself about being mad, why am I mad with my approaching death? What do I do with my life that is so much worth living, so good that I refuse to die on that day? I felt like I didn’t want to die, but didn’t understood why, what am I doing here? Why am I alive? I didn’t receive the answer, so I decided to keep hanging on my life untill I discovered it.
I started to guess why do we fear death, and I found two possible answers:
1 - The Fear of the Unknown: Quoting H.P. Lovecraft: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. Humans are (presumably) the only species on earth that is conscient about his own incoming death, being the only species or not, the fact is: We do. And so we’ve been since the begining of times trying to discover what happens when we die, and since we don’t have any actual proof of where we go when we die, this is probably the greatest mistery of mankind, we fear death because we don’t know what is going to happen, eternal void? Hell fire? Another life? So many options most of us don’t want to experience it to discover, fearing the worst.
2 - The Essence of Life: Through my trance state, I “found out” that life is a trance state, consciousness, being aware of being alive and learning is a kind of trance, and since you are alive, there is something inside you that forces you to keep on (I’m not going to talk about mental disorders in this post), we aren’t alive to pay taxes or to work, keep society healthy, this is only our “social” life, but not our essential life, there is a hidden room inside us that hides the mistery of life, and living is keeping on the world with this mistery, when we discover what’s inside this room, there is no more life, for we had understood it whole. Being alive is keeping up a secret that you can’t discover, but you still try to, being alive is trying to find out what is being alive.