[perons]

I know this feeling, so hopefully this is going to be as helpful to you as it was for me.

There is a budhist parable called the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow, from a Theravada sutta. You should read a good translation on the "accesstoinsight" website, but it goes somewhat like this: Malunkyaputta, one of Gautama Buddha disciples, asks him to answer the metaphysical questions that were afflicting him (questions about the Universe, life after death and such) - and if Gautama failed to answer him, he would renounce His teachings. To which Gautama Buddha basically responded that he never promised to answer those questions, and the reason is:

"Imagine as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me... until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short... [lots of "until I know" later].. He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.' The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him."

So those questions were, in fact, useless. No matter the answer, the arrow was still there inflicting pain. And Gautama follows that by saying that his Teachings were the way of removing the arrow and treating the arrow wound, and not a way of answering those questions.

I'm not budhist, but I read this passage in a moment of my life I actually spent nights awaken because thinking about death was simply too dreadful (it's a very personal background, but I was VERY christian until the very night I noticed after my prayers, at 20 yo, that it was not that I believed in christianism, but I was just afraid of not believing in anything at all), so I was looking into anything I could support myself with. This story made me understand a couple of things:

1. Someone around two millenia ago also had trouble sleeping because of those questions. That's weirdly comforting, knowing that this is something part of our human condition, and something we've been trying to figure out how to deal with for as long as we became self aware.

2. The story aknowledges that what we are feeling, this existential dread, is pain. Is real pain, even if a mental and emotional one. That means that we can and should find a treatment to it, philosophically or not.

3. Most important of all, looking for answers of the kind "Is there life after death?" Is independent of not fearing death anymore. Someone two millenia ago noticed that we can live a happy life and not suffer from the existencial dread NO MATTER your own personal answer for those questions.

Again, I'm not buddhist, and by no means I no longer fear death. I still have my existential crysis now and then, still have some trouble sleeping sometimes. But it's a process of facing this feeling and understanding that it is possible to face our little time alive with human dignity and without feeling overwhelmed by death. We still can treat this pain and live happy with ourselves and our loved ones. Everyone deserves this.

Anyway, hope this helped, even if a little bit. No matter what you believe, knowing someone faced this same problem before and actually discovered a way to live happily is something that soothed me in my worst nights, hopefully it can start something good to you too.