No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.
Interpretation
People often avoid discussing death to escape the discomfort of acknowledging their own mortality.
Raymond Moody highlights the psychological tendency of individuals to steer clear of conversations about death, driven by a desire to avoid the emotional pain associated with confronting their own mortality. This avoidance can lead to a deep-seated fear of death and a reluctance to engage with the reality of life’s impermanence, demonstrating the struggle between human instinct and the acknowledgment of an inevitable end.
In practice
In a speech about embracing life, one might say, 'As Raymond Moody reminds us, avoiding the topic of death can keep us from fully living.'
People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'
I have absolutely no fear of death. From my near-death research and my personal experiences, death is, in my judgment, simply a transition into another kind of reality.
The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.
And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.
How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.
There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
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