Death and self-adulation:

Whenever there is death, particularly mass death, we are reminded of a profound aspect of our life as a human race: we have a short time span. Our intellect is entrapped by sensory stimuli. We can only elude them by alluding to them. The few moments of lucidity, which our intellect sometimes climax to are often-- in fact always-- provoked by sensory shocks.

Death always reminds human beings that it is real, even though it is easy to forget.

The best testimony that believers are bound to be  a minority of the multitude of human race is that--at the time of death-- the vast majority of people become reflective, especially when they are confronted with a massive tragedy that strikes near. When the loved ones, or the not-so-loved ones, buried, humans return back to their state of heedlessness. Human reflexivity beyond mundane matter has a short attention span. Most humans are very sensory and visual and they cannot journey beyond their here and now.

Faith and delusion sometime look alike for ordinary people because each defies the dictates of what seems plausible, present and perceptible. The difference though is clear. Delusion is an escape from the physical world. Belief, on the other hand, is a challenge to it.


Between delusion and faith lies the most deceptive form of delusion. That is, the ability to go along with the herd in a direct, disguised, or deflected form of self-worship. When we lose ourselves, we become many. A moral man in loss could become a clown, a prostitute, a professional assassin, a professional actuary, a professional drug addict or a professional counselor. It all depends on what brings others' complement expressed in words, in cash or in sexual, or social gratitude. A self in loss is a self that is insatiable. Self adulation (by courting others in whatever form of courtship is permissible) is disappointing. As is often the case, whenever the joy of self-adulation runs its course, there comes the impulse to self-destruct.

In a society of self-worshipers, the plight of the individual is never felt, and when it is, it becomes a commodity; a novel, a mistake, a parable, a joke, or more often a politician's pretentious moral indignation.

The self loses a sense of security and ultimately degenerates when it worships itself. The reason is simple. No one knows the frailty and the ungodly stature of 'self' than itself. Society, a deceptive collective of 'selves,' provides an illusory sense of self-security. When we all encounter massive death, we seem to be awakened to these facts. But that awakening is something that happens individually when the smaller incidents of death, which take place every minute, strike. But with the individual, connected as it is, it alway returns rapidly to its slumber church in the collective ritual of the society. We will alway forget death because we are busy doing what we have convinced ourselves is 'living life.'