#224 / The Denial Of Death

The WUMO cartoon, above, could be the frontispiece for Ernest Becker's great book, The Denial of Death, which I have mentioned before on a couple of occasions.

Here's WUMO:

You're a human being. You're going to die You're going to turn into a stinking, maggot-filled, bag of rotten flesh that no one will remember....Just not quite yet ...

And here's Becker:

Man is a worm and food for worms ... He is housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways - the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man ... sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever....

Becker explores the "Two Worlds" I talk about in this blog (Nature and the Human World, the realities that human beings construct), and he applies the techniques of psychoanalytic theory to aid his investigation. It is a book worth reading, and confirms what all great sages teach (one way or another).

We must deny death, forget about death, if we are going to be able to live, at all, in the world into which we are born, the World of Nature, which uses death to bring forth life.

Only by finding a way to deny death, to abjure death, one way or another, can we succeed in sticking out of nature with the "towering majesty" that is our birthright.

The Denial of Death is a book worth reading. I recommend it.

Image Credit:

http://wumo.com/wumo/2016/07/12