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Are we addicted to the drama of death?
The more I ponder the subject, the more I see that we as a culture are addicted to death. We cannot live without it. The assumption of death is our security blanket that keeps us from applying in-depth investigative techniques to figure out if people really, truly die when their body life ends.
I come to this conclusion after countless hours reading about the insights and adventures of people who have had classic near-death experiences (NDEs). When these people died, albeit temporarily, their conscious minds left their bodies.
Once they were resuscitated, they had awesome stories to tell, although they often encountered statements like, “Oh, that was just the drugs, dear.”
Addicted to death means that we are resisting the massive anecdotal evidence piling up (like here) that death is a transformation, not a termination. We like the mortality system as it is. We prefer our scary stories of pain and suffering.
Idea Jail keeps the mind stuck in a death rut
(Disclaimer: It’s a good point here to say that if you haven’t seen Avatar and plan to, you may want to bypass this post until after you’ve seen it.)
Despite what this may seem like, this is not specifically criticism of blockbuster films like Avatar. They’re fine. Rather, as someone who has studied the media for decades, I am acutely aware that much of what I’d like to see in movies hasn’t made it to the big screen. I would love to see movies step out of Idea Jail and break new ground by overcoming stereotypes.
I recently wrote about the nature of conflict in drama, that creating dramas is usually about creating artificial conflicts for characters to deal with. I questioned the long-term impact of a movie-goes, TV-watcher, and book reader mentally digesting the subliminal messages that life is constant conflict.
Let’s talk about this from a law of attraction perspective. If our media does not give us positive, exciting visions, it does not help us create positive, exciting futures. It has been my long-held view that a great service the arts could perform is to provide positive visions that can inspire people. As it is, the formula is to sometimes show happy-ending triumph, but along the way characters are often beaten up something fierce. Avatar is a great example.
Mental Poison Dispenser
As an aspiring novelist. I read my fair share of books on how to amaze readers with my prose. Time and again the writing instructors say that if you want to write a best-seller, you’ve got to fill your novel with page after page of conflict.
Translation: if you ever hope to rise above the poverty line as a selling novelist, the industry demands that you make your protagonists squirm. Make ‘em suffer. Make ‘em miserable.
The flip side of that writing advice that I seldom see talked about is the psychological impact all that manufactured conflict has on readers. The same, of course, can be said for movie-goers and TV viewers because screenwriters work with the same advice to sell their screenplays.
Translation: the media that you ingest as an entertainment consumer has been created and produced to give you the vicarious thrill of watching someone suffer conflict. It is a formula built into the system.
In response to the last blog post I wrote–what if death doesn’t truly kill us–someone wrote to me on Facebook:
“Death is a simply part of the cycle of life. It is no more or no less dramatic than birth. It’s all part of a continuum, like the seasons we experience on earth. Nothing ever really dies, it only changes form.”
I wrote:
I believe this very strongly, especially after having spoken to near-death experiencers. But the media portrays such a different story, stirring up the fear.
She wrote:
“I’ve had my own near death encounter, so it’s not a belief, it’s a knowing. It’s amazing what such an experience does for one’s reality…like living in a world apart at times.”
I think it’s important to note that while the media drones on about the awfulness of death, making great soap operas out of the plight of anyone who dies, there are millions of people who have had near-death experiences for whom the prospect of dying is about as scary as waking up from a dream.
Those millions can step out of Idea Jail on the death front.
