M2470
The way out of the fear of death
By Martinus

1. What the fear of death gives rise to
Mankind's greatest problem in life is the fear of death. Pervading terrestrial human culture, this is so exaggerated that it is almost all-determining. It determines to an extraordinarily great extent the entire fate of humanity. It is this fear that causes the human beings to take up arms and create war, and thereby lead nations into terrible tax liabilities. These in turn reduce their standard of living and cultural phenomena to large domains of poverty and misery. With its promotion of arms build-up and war, we have seen that nations have converted their cultural arena into enormous heaps of ruins and created millions upon millions of disabled persons and mile-wide areas of war graves in many countries. Thousands upon thousands of children have lost their parents and have been made homeless, just as thousands of parents are today still looking for their children who were lost during the Armageddon of war. To these must be added thousands of spouses who, during the same Armageddon, have disappeared and are missed by their partners. All these burdens and sufferings are rooted solely in the fear of dying, the fear that other human beings will come and destroy their lives.
2. Death is not just the total loss of one's physical organism
It is not so much the fear of dying the natural death of old age as it is the fear of the total or partial death by unnatural means that tortures humanity. To die means not only losing one's entire physical organism. It means also losing some of one's normal joy or happiness of being alive. Here, there is much in the behaviour of the unfinished or imperfect human being that plays a part in reducing other beings' normal joie de vivre. For example, people who are very jealous, very envious, and do not like that other people are better placed than themselves. Such people are always unfriendly to and undermining of the people they envy or are jealous of. Other people are colossally intolerant and hostile towards people who have a different view of the mystery of life or belong to other religious movements, sects or societies: in short are hostile towards all people who think differently. Furthermore, there are people who are very ambitious and in an exaggerated manner brutally elbow themselves forward in front of their fellow human beings at work and ruthlessly undermine their positions in order to capture these positions for themselves. Thus, there is a very extensive range of tendencies in many people that are deadly and destructive for other people's happiness or undermining their normal daily lives. To have one's zest for life or normal existence undermined and destroyed is thus the same as losing something of one's normal physical life. It is to a similar degree an experience of death.
3. The human being does not murder and kill with only daggers, cannons and nuclear bombs
Murdering is thus not simply the direct killing of another human being. It is also murder when one undermines the happiness of other human beings and makes life very difficult for them. Thus we see here that the human beings are still, in a big way, murderers. The human beings do not murder and kill with only daggers, cannons and bombs, but they murder and kill also with words, thoughts and facial expressions in their everyday behaviour, thereby becoming dangerous to their surroundings. People know that many animals are dangerous, such as large predators and poisonous snakes, but they do not think that even in their everyday behaviour, in many situations, they are even more dangerous or deadly to their surroundings or beings than the animals, because they kill to a large extent their own species. While the animals prefer to kill only foreign species and races, the human beings largely kill their own race or species. The life of the human beings is therefore the most dangerous or most persecuted that exists. The human beings have no hesitation in undermining and diminishing other people's joy in life where they can thereby lay their hands on these other beings' advantages and goods. It is no exaggeration when the situation of humanity is today expressed as "everyone's war against everyone".
4. In the domain of war, it brings dishonour not to be offended and not to adhere to the principle of "eye for eye and tooth for tooth"
Since it is the nature of war to create death and disability, one understands that "everyone's war against everyone" must thus also more or less bring everyone to live in death and disability, must live in insufficient joy of life, must live in worries for this or that, by which one is undermined or persecuted. It is very easy to notice when one is being persecuted by others. It is almost always noticed to the smallest details. On the other hand, the observation is not so accurate when it comes to one's own behaviour towards other living beings. Thus, although the human beings have much in their being that causes them to be dangerous to their surroundings and fellow human beings, they almost never have that view of themselves. They always believe that they are persecuted innocently and thereby become angry and bitter at the other people. How many people can put up with an insult? Indeed, is one not considered to be simply disgracing oneself by taking the position of not being offended at all? Is it not the same thing that applies when one does not adhere to the principle eye for eye and tooth for tooth but turns the right cheek when struck on the left?
5. The true cause of the fear in the world, or why one sees the splinter in one's neighbour's eye but not the beam in one's own
How many people, do you think, are a truly fair and just judge in the judgement of their own being toward other beings? It is at least still a very small percentage. Have you ever sat yourself down to question yourself? Have you tried to figure out how you would deal with a very serious and derogatory knowledge of another human being that you might come into possession of? Are you sure that you have overcome the common urge to pass something sensational on to other people, indeed quite without having it checked and confirmed as truth or reality? Although you may not like to tell this derogatory news to anyone and everyone, do you think that you could resist telling it to a person who is your friend or confidant? If you cannot, then you are already on a slippery slope, are a dangerous person for your fellow human beings. Then you have already set a murder in motion, an attempt on joie-de-vivre in motion against the person who is the object of your scandal. How dangerous this motion should be to the said being will thus depend on how many "confidential" friends you have let the news go to, and how many "confidential" friends these have in turn let the news go to. Why should these trusted friends, like yourself, not pass the news on to their "confidential" friends? And does one not think that this news will be told far and wide amongst the greatest part of these "confidential" friends, and that it is only in some special cases that it meets beings who bury it in their hearts in order to not hurt another human being? You see here how razor-sharp you have to analyse yourself in order to get a fair judgement. But is it not here exactly this, as Christ has said: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" We have come here to the true cause of the fear in the world and thus to the cause of the unrest, the cause of the diseases, the depression and lack of desire for life. It is thus the human being's own being that is the real cause of its unrest, unhappiness and suffering. It thus represents a behaviour that cannot be the meaning of life at all, a behaviour that is deadly or murderous. Such behaviour cannot constitute the great end result of evolution: "the human being in God's image".
6. Hospitals and prisons cannot guarantee health and peace
Now, it is just not so that nothing is done to remedy this evil. Hospitals, infirmaries, rest homes and convalescent homes and so on are being built on a large scale, just as one has also the police service and judicial system, with associated prisons and penal institutions and much more. But all these measures cannot absolutely guarantee peace and health. In reality, they are only relief measures. There must be another way to peace, to eradicate the diseases, depression and dissatisfaction with life. This other way cannot be anything less than a science of the meaning of life itself. The meaning of life should not continue to be various more or less imperfect and erroneous claims, hypotheses or dogmas, whose correctness can be disputed and thereby increase antipathy, hatred or war with its deadly companions, the sufferings of all kinds. The true meaning of life has the purpose of creating only perfection and with that peace, joy and happiness and not a murderous undermining of the living being's experience of life.
7. Where one can acquire the science of behaviour
Where does one obtain the knowledge of this meaning of life? Indeed, where has one got material science from? Is it not through seeing, hearing and understanding? Once upon a time, people had no understanding of the physical world, were unable to master fire or water, iron or steel, time or space. Are they not masters of these phenomena today? Yet they did not reach this mastery through hypotheses or assertions but through realistic facts. But now they still have to find facts from which science can be created for the psyche and behaviour, a science that, as facts, can show them all the states of calamity as results of erroneous behaviour. Thus, it should not be fanaticism either in terms of food or behaviour, but a complete natural fulfillment of natural demands. The unnatural and killing desires and demands that the human beings have fostered in their daily lives must be combatted, but not with assertions from the more or less authorised fanaticism or system of dogma. One must take action and break through the apparent hopelessness. Life is in itself absolutely not hopeless. There is a way for everyone out of the dark. Life is a wonderful teacher. Without the Bible or other holy books, without prophets, priests, and teachers, we can learn to read life's own interpretation or explanation of the solution to the mystery of life in the form of direct facts. There is not a single phenomenon in the solution to the mystery of life that life itself does not bring to light when one learns to understand its own language.
8. When the human being's thinking turns into a death force instead of a life force
What, then, must this speech of life bring the human being? It must first and foremost bring the human being immunity to all suffering or forms of unhappy fates. As long as there are unhappy fates, the beings in question have not yet come to know the real life, the real peace and joy of being. One seeks to create immunity to diseases with vaccines, but this is not the perfect way. It can therefore constitute only a temporary emergency measure. The real and absolute immunity against all the evil can be created only by mental means, that is, through the creation of a perfect life force. This life force is not created by any kind of physical matter; it is not created by killing animals or by vaccinating other beings with diseases. It does not require any kind of vivisection or torture of other beings. One creates this psychic vaccine, serum or life force with one's mental sphere. All kinds of thought are of an electrical nature and pass through the blood. Here they form the real perfect life force if the mental sphere of the human being is in complete contact with the laws of life. If, on the other hand, the human being's power of thinking is not in contact with these laws, it becomes an inferior, yes, sometimes a deadly life force. It has no ability to make the human being immune to the sufferings but is in itself toxic and to a high degree creates for its originator susceptibility to undermining mental and thereafter physical illnesses. It thus becomes absolutely deadly. Instead of acting as a life force, it becomes a death force in the organism, which it can eventually lead to a complete downfall.
9. A life vaccine that makes the human being immune to all suffering
The big question then becomes for the inquiring researcher what capacity his life force constitutes. Is it disease and death promoting, or is it as it should be, namely, one hundred per cent life promoting? Focus on the perfect life vaccine or life force is thus the one thing needful for all suffering and unhappy human beings. This life vaccine or serum is of psychic material and can therefore be built up only with the help of specially selected types of thought. But this is as yet unknown to the human being. They let all the different types of thought, the death-bringing as well as the life-giving, flow more or less uninhibited through the brain and blood without in any way thinking about what this can do to undermine the health within their own organism and what they create in the way of unhappy situations in their own relationship to fellow beings or surroundings. Thus, they cannot imagine that it entirely promotes their destiny towards culmination in misfortune and suffering. There are types of thought that lead to heart disease, to cancer, to leprosy, to stomach ulcers, to impairment of the highest and leading life functions; indeed all sufferings without exception will have their deepest root or first origin in utilised types of thought that deviate from the laws of life in the given situations.
10. The cause of the fear of death and the way out of it
As we have seen here, all fates, light as well as dark; all kinds of suffering as well as all healthy well-being are determined solely by what we, in advance of these fates, had made a habit of thinking of our fellow beings, what we had made a habit of thinking of the highest structure of life and the death-bringing or life-giving effect of this thinking on our relationship to our neighbour, which is the same as our fellow beings in the plant and animal kingdom as well as in the human kingdom itself. Thus, the fear and the resulting unhappy states of the human beings are rooted solely in these beings' ignorance of ways of thinking and life force, ignorance of how perfect mental states are created and thus ignorance of the path to becoming the master of life and death, as it is the meaning of life that the human being should someday become. God has foretold his intention for the terrestrial human being as follows: "Let us make the human being in our image, after our likeness". Only the human being that has come to be wakingly day-conscious in its spirit or psyche and with that overcome death and darkness in its fate can portray as "the image of God". The human being that is not master of its destiny is correspondingly a slave to this. Thus, the way out of the fear of death, the way to the light, goes through only our ability to think perfectly. And we can begin to understand here that types of thought, which in manifestation and release reveal that its originator loves God above all things and its neighbour as itself, are the fulfilment of all the laws and thus inevitably make the being one with the Father, one with the way, the truth and the life, one with the sea of light in the radiant glory of God's spirit.
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The article is from the book Collection of Articles 1, and it was written by Martinus for Kosmos No. 8, 1953. Article ID: M2470. Original Danish title: Vejen ud af dødsfrygten. Translated by Anton Jarrod 2020 and first published in the English edition of Kosmos no. 2, 2020.
© Martinus Institut 1981, www.martinus.dk
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