The Sex Appeal of Death

The Sex Appeal of Death

from an essay by Tibor Hajas

Contemporary Europe, or rather Western civilization in general has been boycotting the death experience - excluding it from the voluntary ghetto of life.

This civilization is life-centered, and tolerates nothing which it considers to be irrational or unacceptable. The afterlife, which did not prove to be rationally acceptable, was done away with. Thus rationalized, death became irrational, and therefore unacceptable.

From the point of view of the Self, death is the ultimate irrational state. But the Self must nevertheless experience dying, and since it has dissociated itself from the sphere of irrationality, it has no way of getting in touch with death, or of establishing control over it. Death is the ultimate. Death is, for the mind which conceived of the concept of Totality, the real and frightening manifestation of that concept.

Europe has been striving for the expunging of death from the start. Death itself became the enemy, a spectre in opposition to the real nature of civilization. From time to time, and for brief periods, this spectre has been a reflection of this civilization's damaged nervous-system. But the systematic sublimation of death did not serve to integrate it into general experience – it distanced it, covered it up.

The most recent European mass death experience, World War II, provided such an unimaginably intense vision of death, that since then death has really become a taboo subject – one open to neither understanding, nor analysis. Death, since then, has turned into an inconceivable abstraction, and the individual death experience has become incommunicable, because Europe no longer has any way to describe it.