Malaikat Maut

Facing the finality – Death and Adjustment Hypotheses 

Dr. Mohammad Samir Hossain 

Encouraged by Dr Peter Fenwick’s review of my book Human Immortality: Death and Adjustment Hypotheses Elaborated in Newsletter 27, I would like to share more of my thinking with the Spirituality SIG membership and this short article is a modest attempt to do so. Seeking the meaning of life is a universal criterion of humanity (Wong, 2000). Meaning is important when understanding its purpose. Both our ‘origin’ and ‘destination’ are related to the meaning we give to life. Civilized human society has shown enormous interest in our origins, with evolutionary theory exploring many aspects of human origin. However, the strange fact is that we express so little interest in our destination. Every life on earth must end with death and yet this fact is rarely analysed methodologically. Even if death is the absolute end, we still require some methodological approach for its optimum accommodation, yet practically speaking, there is no such approach. This has never seemed normal to me. My personal fears about death used to bother me a lot. When my first son ‘Seeyam’ died in my arms, all the unasked questions about death came flooding into consciousness. I was blind with pain for the first two or three days after losing him. Then I felt a need to analyse the phenomenon of death in order to answer these questions. When I started working on my Death and Adjustment Hypotheses, the first thing that I reflected on was my faith in the positivity of Nature. I have always believed that humans have the ability to adjust to every natural phenomenon in life. Therefore, I was unwilling to accept death as something too terrifying for us to think about. I began by identifying the most painful or unacceptable aspect of death. It was much easier to evaluate this for myself than for others, but I am confident my experience extrapolates to a wider sample. It is the finality of death that seemed to be the most painful and unacceptable criterion for me, and I think for many others too (Wong, 2000). What I understand by the finality of death is that bodily death means the permanent cessation of our existence. Though it might seem obsessive on my part, I wanted to be sure of this absolute ending of existence through death. Nevertheless, the problem that prevented me from exploring this ‘finality’ is the lack of any empirical study supporting or opposing it. This further opened the door to a new thought – that according to empirical science, the finality of death would be no more than a 50/50 chance. In that case, and since my religious beliefs in an afterlife go against such finality, surely the phenomenon of death should have been more tolerable for me after losing my son? The same should be true for all people belonging to the major religions that describe an afterlife. 

Only a moral life can give us the clearest perception of death. As a potential remedy to many of the prevailing problems we face, including those in the sphere of mental health, we need to speak out against the rising materialism of modern society. Then can we contemplate without fear our true finality, whatever that is to be.