The story is not so much about physical death but the different types of deaths we face when we lose certain types of illusions, as does B.D. Read page 27:
1. His image of self as being courageous is gone for he realizes he is a coward.
2. His image as a compassionate man is gone as he sees he can be calloused and apathetic.
3. His image as a moral man is gone when he frequents prostitutes and realizes he is an immoral Billy goat.
4. His image as a strong man is replaced with that of a “whiner.”
5. His image as being loyal to friends is gone as he realizes self-preservations triumphs over all other interests.
Thus the story is dealing with the death of the self, in a spiritual or psychological sense, much more than it is dealing with physical death.
Category 1: You Lose Your Self-Respect
1. Violating your integrity, what you know is right, for some short-term gain. B.D. goes to prostitutes.
2. You betray your own allegiance to a certain moral code. For example, you are a young man seeing older men treating women badly, cheating on their girlfriends, treating women with contempt, living the lives of playboys, and so on. You’re so appalled by what you see and you swear that you will be better than that, that you will never treat women in such a profligate, insulting manner but you grow up and become the very playboy you once scorned. You realize the promises you make to yourself are empty and that you are shallow, hollow, and not worth the name that is stamped on your birth certificate.
3. Realizing that your self-preservation results in your betrayal of family or friends. Manipulating others for your own gain.
4. Betrayal of a friend. You are too self-involved to intervene in a friend’s problem. Or you steal his girlfriend or on a smaller level you give his name and phone number to a telemarketer.
5. Compromising your standards because of fear or laziness. Going out with someone you don’t really like for lack of other opportunities; taking a job for the same reason.
6. No longer caring about your unhappiness because you’ve succumbed to learned helplessness.
7. You’re no longer a welcome member of a certain group, community, or clique. For whatever reason, this group of people has rejected you and this results in self-doubt. You ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me? How could so many people be wrong?” Once having enjoyed a sense of belonging, you now feel banished from the pack. You’re an exile, a pariah, a leper.
Category 2: You Lose Your Mojo (charm, “magic,” passion for life and creativity)
1. You fall out of love with your college major and face an abyss.
2. You fall out of love with your girlfriend and acquire new girlfriends whom you’re not in love with either and you look in the mirror and feel empty.
3. You lose your creativity and realize you’re no longer passionate about your work.
4. You fall out of love with life itself. This is called ennui, a boredom for all of life.
5. You lose the motivation to hang out with your friends and mope around and you can’t figure out what happened to you. All you know is that something has been lost. We call that your mojo. It may come back. It may not.
6. Losing your mojo is not always a mystery. In many cases, it’s related to the loss of self-respect.
Category 3: You Lose Your Sense of Meaning and Order
1. The world used to seem ordered and within your control and this gave you confidence, but something happens, a violent crime against you or your family, a physical affliction like some disease, perhaps cancer, and suddenly you feel helpless. The world is chaos.
2. Someone you looked up to was very important because this admirable person was your role model and made you believe in values and morals and living a life of excellence and then this person becomes a fallen hero. This hero may even betray you. A pastor of a church steals church funds to pay for a mistress he’s had for several years. A governor who made his name prosecuting criminals is discovered to be a customer of an expensive prostitution ring of which he has spent eighty thousand dollars of government money.
3. For reasons that are from within you or outside of you, you reach a point where life no longer has any meaning for you, which means you reach a point where you have nothing to lose. This is what we mean when we say “something is at stake.” To have stakes in life means to have things that you care about, things that are worth your care and discipline—could be maintaining a relationship you value, working toward a career, saving for a house. The point is you have something to lose, something is at stake. Not everyone has a stake in life. They have nothing and are beyond caring. This is a sort of death.
4. You may have once believed that all suffering is a gift of God to teach us wisdom and to punish us for our sins and as such suffering has a corrective measure about it; suffering purifies us and gives us wisdom. But you may reach a point where you no longer have faith that suffering is a gift or punishment from God. You may reach the point in which you believe that most suffering is cruel and meaningless and as such you no longer believe in the religion that you were raised in. This is a sort of death.
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