Some people are afraid that journaling about, and thinking about, death will invite death (in the sense of physical death). This can happen, if one’s love of death is greater than one’s love of life.
That might sound like a funny thing to say, if you haven’t thought of a ‘love of death.’ I think I first heard about it in one of Erik Fromm’s books. He, no doubt, adapted it from Freud’s ‘death-instinct’ and applied his Marxist analysis to it. Fromm believed that the central driving force was the desire to make up for a lack of authentic being and selfhood. He proposed that there is a love of death and destruction, related to this deficiency of Being. He cited Hitler and Stalin as instances of the love of death.
One might think that only very unfortunate people would have a love of death. If the circumstances of one’s childhood were terribly and regularly traumatic, one might be more prone than others to wishing for annihilation, this is true. My painful family life as a child certainly left me with such a legacy.
The contrast between love of life and a wish for death was brought home to me when I befriended a Vietnamese refugee three decades ago. He had been a soldier in the defeated South Vietnamese army. As a result of his ‘re-education’ by the victors he had been forced into slave labour. At night he was locked up in a cell, and was given only one bowl of rice a day. By day he worked in the fields, under guard, and the profit from his labour went to his prison warder. He found an opportunity to escape after a year, and made his way to Australia by boat. The last I saw, this former prisoner and refugee was running his own farm in South Australia.
When I met him (teaching English to migrants) I asked him, “While you were imprisoned, did you ever wish you were dead?” All these years later, I can still see his astonishment at the suggestion. I know now, having become more familiar with my mind, that I was expressing what I was carrying, what was unprocessed in me. To be sure, since childhood I have often confused the longing for a cessation of my torments with the cessation of my life. Slowly the practice of metta, meditation, mindfulness, Buddhist insight practice, and body-oriented therapy healed this.
Buddhism thinks of ego-desire as having three forms: desire for sense pleasures (kāmataṇhā), desire for becoming or existence (bhavataṇhā), and desire for non-existence (vibhavataṇhā). For instance, you are trapped in an uncomfortable social circumstance. You hope for an escape to something better (crave some other existence), you hope that your discomfort will go away (mild form of craving non-existence), or, you eat (crave sense pleasure). You get depressed and go to sleep, as a craving for non-existence. You can imagine the permutations possible.
So, back to taking mindfulness of death as a practice. Clearly, one’s motivation is very important. If I take the project as a means to knowing myself more deeply, for the benefit of all, then, if there are some unwholesome factors in the mix, with the appropriate motivation (especially a love of truth and a wish to benefit all beings), journaling about death will bring to light the ways that the wish for annihilation might be working in the me. It, of course, helps to have a sangha – a community – or to be practising with another positively-oriented person.
Tomorrow: ‘Authentic being and selfhood.’