People who are actively seeking to develop their personality, to broaden themselves all around, to be happy, and to be successful in life, should always remember death. If a person always remembers the inevitability of death, then that person will be sure to guide their lives in a proper direction.

Everyone who seriously wants to be successful thinks a great deal about the direction their life is taking, and what it will bring in their future. We invest money in various things. We look for new financial opportunities. We prepare ourselves for hard times. We try to become more efficient in living our day to day lives. We think about how we will be able to buy a home. We think about insuring all our belongings. We think about maintaining our health.

These are all great. These will all lead to growth and personal development. When we think constantly about where we are now, and where we want to be, we effectively steer our lives in the right direction, and we achieve our goals. That’s all fine and dandy if all you want is a little personal growth. If all you are looking for is a little money, and just a little fragile happiness, then there is no need to read on. However, if you want more than just a little financial security or a little happiness, then something more is needed.

Many people work hard. They go to college. They work diligently through a long career. They are constantly anxious to pay off their bills or their debts. They worry about their children or their marriage. They struggle to overcome all their problems. And they eventually do succeed.

But there’s a catch.

Once these people finish working through problems ABC, they are presented with a new set of worries, XYZ. In this way, they spend their entire lives full of anxiety. The unfortunate part is that most of these anxieties are self-imposed.

An Experiment

Here’s an experiment. Ask a bunch of young people these questions:

1. What are your biggest worries?
2. Have your parents also faced these worries? And have they conquered them?
3. Are your parents happy?

Young people are often worried about what they will do after school finishes, and how they will get financial security in life. A large number of these people will also say that their parents are no longer worried about financial security. Then, almost no one will say that their parents are happy.

Hopefully this should tease your brain. Seriously though, if your survey results also look like mine, then doesn’t that say we have a systematic flaw in the way we are living? Shouldn’t there be opportunity for everyone who diligently directs their lives to gain happiness? There is such an opportunity. And we can achieve that happiness, if we keep perspective.

Security in Life

In one word, “security” is what we are seeking in life. We want to be free of all worries, and thereby feel secure. But life will never ever be free of worries. We think after we do this thing or that thing, that we will feel secure. It hardly ever happens. And if it does, it is only for a short while.

All Worries and Anxieties Are Fear of Death in Disguise

Say for example a person is worried about becoming broke. Such thoughts arise as:

“What will happen to me?”
“What will become of me?”
“How will I live?”

The common thread here is me, me, me! When we value ourselves based on something like our finances, our sense of identity (i.e. our sense of “I”) gets tangled up with the problem at hand. If I am rich, then suddenly I become poor, then my sense of identity has changed. In other words, to a certain degree, I have died.

What is death? It is exactly defined as the destruction of our sense of identity.

What we really are, for the time being, most of us are not aware. All we have is a sense or a belief of what we are. We identify with situations and circumstances of life. We say this person is tall, short, fat, slim, rich, poor, black, white, nice, mean, etc. These are NOT what a person actually is. These are only attributes that we use to describe. When these attributes change, we fool ourselves into thinking that we ourselves have actually changed (i.e. died).

In this way, all our anxieties are around changing the attributes that make up our apparent sense of identity. We want to control these attributes, because we are afraid of our sense of identity changing. In short, we are afraid of death.

A Person’s Life is a Preparation for Death

If we worry when it comes to things like losing money, or losing a relationship, then how much more will we worry when it comes time to die!

On the other hand, if we first worry a certain amount when it comes to becoming old and dying, then the mental strength and faith that we slowly gain in ourselves and in our potential will make other challenges far less significant to us.

This is why the greatest challenge in personality development is to achieve the goal of fearlessness. If we can do that, everything else is automatically achieved.

We will have clarity of thought to make better decisions in life, when we are sobered by the remembrance of death. We will stop creating new worries when we know various attributes are not what we really are. We will have more focus. We will see everyone more kindly and compassionately when we realize that we are all subject to the same fate of dying. We will be humbled also.

Lastly, if we can be perfectly successful in conquering the fear of death, we will achieve not just partial, but complete sense of security in life. When we know, through and through, that only various attributes leave us at death, how could anything worry us?

Don’t you think?

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