Page 14 - NAMAH-Apr-2025

Namah Vol. 33, Issue 1, 24th April 2025

conceived an innumerable delight in itself, Commission on the Value of Death (2) and more
therefore worlds and universes came into recently, Lord Darzi’s review of the state of play
existence. Consciousness of being and Delight in the National Health Service and the debate
of being are the first parents. Also, they are over the Assisted Dying private members
the last transcendences. Unconsciousness is bill in the UK, are a re-orientation to that
only an intermediate swoon of the conscious or relational value of death.
its obscure sleep; pain and self-extinction are
only delight of being running away from itself
in order to find itself elsewhere or otherwise.
Delight of being is not limited in Time; it is
without end or beginning. God comes out from
one form of things only to enter into another.

What is God after all? An eternal child playing
an eternal game in an eternal garden (1).”
As individuals and as societies, an intuitive
The phenomenal growth of modern medicine need to understand death has been an age-
st
with its curative powers in the 21 century old call for us humans. Reflections on the big
appears to have invariably lent it a questions — Why me? Where am I going? What
custodianship over life and death. In the is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of
West, and increasingly elsewhere across the death? — have occupied intellectual, religious
globe, death has shifted from homes, families and cultural landscapes and commentary
and communities, into hospitals and other for millennia. Not surprisingly, research
acute settings. The growth of capitalistic has shown that the levels of existential
ways of living and being and its contingent distress and anxiety experienced by dying
relationship with individualism, can only patients is directly informed by unresolved
have further added to this alienation. Death, answers to these fundamental questions
however, is more than a purely biological (3,4). Modern medicine can treat disease
event, happening to an individual. It is more and manage symptoms. But it does not
a relational matrix held within ethno-cultural, have the answer to the existential questions
psycho-social and socio-economic systems and crises that invariably accompany the
in which individuals live, and therefore has experience of vulnerability, frailty and
wide ranging implications for families and death salience. The explosion of interest in
communities often well into posterity. New Age spirituality in the last decade had
made attempts to contextualise death in
Given the increasing resource scarcity of explanations of soul-purpose and after-life.
health economies across the world, there The Internet is rife with ‘pundits’ and a wide
appears to be a growing call for death and diversity of views and unverifiable personal
dying to be restored back to families and accounts of spiritual self-actualisation from
communities. Surveys in the UK over the individuals. Yet, existential anxiety, distress
last decade are increasingly corroborating and confusion continue to remain central to
the society’s desire to die at home. The Lancet the death proximity and death salience.

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