Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website
But grappling with the importance of death-awareness merely becomes another manifestation of how as a proponent of Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, it is juxtaposed to how one construes the “spiritual” contours of life-awareness. How does that really get us any closer to connecting the dots between life and death insofar as how we actually choose to live that life and experience that death.
Still, the manner in which one comes to approach his or her own death appears to be no less the embodiment of dasein. Instead, we simply have any number of conflicting religious/spiritual denominations providing the faithful with endless assumptions about how one is expected to love others, develop equanimity of mind and stay the present.
When? where? how? why? In what actual set of circumstances? Let’s not go there, okay?
In other words, spiritually. As a way of thinking of human interactions in a world where the reality of conflicting goods is simply subsumed in general description intellectual contraptions like this.
As for detaching oneself from worldly pleasures that become considerably more attainable if you are able to think yourself into believing that, to the extent you focus instead on spiritual growth, you will be rewarded on the other side. And, of greatest importance of all, that there is existence beyond the grave. And, thus, that connecting the dots between morality/enlightenment here and now and immortality/salvation there and done becomes by far your greatest concern.
On the other hand, if one is actually able to believe this sort of thing…
…how exactly is that to be made applicable to the behaviors you choose? Behaviors predicated on the moral and political values [prejudices] one comes to embody existentially as the personification of dasein out in a particular world historically, culturally and circumstantially.
I know: let’s not go there either.
Or, for the objectivists among us, sure, go there, but wholly in sync with their own trajectories.