[I]t was noted thousands of years ago in the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharatta, in which a sage poses the riddle, “What is the greatest wonder of the world?”
The answer: “That no one, though he sees others dying all around, believes he himself will die.”
In the face of our individual powerlessness, we find it somehow reassuring to cling to the illusion that there is something—some new weapon, a defensive shield in space, a new missile—that can protect us against nuclear death.
And so the strategists’ secret is abetted by the self-deception that leads people to want to play along, to believe, to deny the truth of futility and hopelessness in planning for nuclear war. If we are to avoid the endgame of human history, we would do well to consider just why we fall prey so readily to such a fatal delusion.Perhaps in the current struggles over the control of gun ownership, we can see this same pattern playing out. Is it possible that some percentage of people who buy guns do so out of fear of death...or the fear of loss that feeds the fear of death? Is it possible that if they developed deeper understanding of death, they would find a different way to seek the peace they desire? And what of our own lives? What harm might we be doing to ourselves and to others out of a lack of understanding of death? These are not questions with right or wrong answers--and there may be better ways of framing them--but perhaps they are questions worth grappling with in our quiet moments, when the mind can face them with some equanimity.
In our own yearning to understand death, can we perhaps see yearning for true peace? And can we use this to inspire ourselves to the effort required for this understanding? The world may be secretly hoping we can.
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