“If you strip away those psychological and physical processes, it’s like peeling off the layers of an onion. When you get to the end, what’s left? Nothing” (Loy, 18). Money Sex War Karma discusses nothingness as well as no-self, suffering, rebirth, and filling the void. Through the combination of these topics, I would like to ask for your opinion about human kind’s fear of death. Pondering the fear of death has led me to conclude that people believe the ideology that if one dies, that person is forgotten. In the desire for recognition beyond death, people try to “fill the void” with fame. However, I also feel this is not a complete reason. Your book mentions that there is no self and it states that “the self is dukkha”; other readings, such as Buddhism: A History, relate no-self with the soul, and it being non-existent. Also, Buddhist beliefs circulate around rebirth and samsara instead of religious-based notions of heaven and hell. Taking all factors into account, could the fear of death be caused by man’s unwillingness to accept being “nothing”, having no-self, and the non-existence of heaven (outside of the realm of wanting recognition) or could there be a deeper issue in relation to the fear of death?
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