The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

by Sheldon Solomon

Accordingly, helping people forge new social bonds, fortify existing connections, and restore estranged relationships is often a high priority on the existential therapeutic agenda.

Robust interpersonal relationships serve to bolster faith in the cultural scheme of things and help individuals obtain and maintain self-esteem.

“We come into contact with others only through our exteriors,” Becker explained, “yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life…we are hopelessly separated from everyone else…. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them.”

If you go into a relationship wanting the other person to know you fully, you will inevitably be disappointed and frustrated.

is to have the goal of getting to know another person rather than the goal of meeting your own needs.

By getting to know someone as a whole person rather than a need fulfiller, you can come to realize that the other person as just as ultimately alone as you are. But you now have that in common.

apple. It is that knowledge that made us human and initiated our unrelenting quest for immortality—a quest that profoundly influenced the course of human history and persists to this day.

“Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.”

“Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast?”

In death, then, is the eternal life which men have sought so blindly for centuries, not realizing they had it as a birthright. Only by dying, can we continue living.”

Certain drugs can foster this kind of experience, as can meditation,

And such experiential states are most fulfilling when they occur in the context of one of the four other modes:

Those living in the hard place often take refuge in self-medication through drugs and alcohol, self-indulgence through mass consumption and frivolous hedonism, and self-help through dubious books, New Age gurus, and spiritual fads.