Until I experienced a near-death incident, and for the first time, death was no longer an abstract idea. I was there, and death was with me.

I had been always wrong when I imagined death. it appeared in my head as something peaceful: all you would have to do is close your eyes, faint, lose consciousness, and then there would be darkness, or light, or whatever comes after. I had imagined the transition itself as something almost passive.

But do you know how it feels to be in the very last moment before dying or, perhaps more precisely, in the moment when you are losing consciousness?when You are completely conscious.

All you hear inside yourself is: I am actually dying.

Since that incident, whenever I hear about someone's death, I find myself wondering how they felt in their final moments. Especially when the death is tragic fire, violent attack or a car accident, for instance. What happens inside his mind in the seconds before his head gets cracked? Can you imagine what it would really feel like to have these words running through your head: I am burning right now.. I am dying. And to still be able to actually feel it? At what point does a person stop feeling anything? What is the last sensation they experience before everything goes dark?

For me, my words were: “I am drowning. I think I’ll be dead soon. I can't  breath I hope it will be fast. Okay, I think I should just let myself go and stop fighting to breathe..” And I did, (before I was rescued)

It also made me think about their faces.

We've always seen it in movies: someone is facing their final moments, perhaps locked somewhere with fire striking outside, and suddenly the character sitting on a chair then gives that almost nonchalant look of surrender. A quiet acceptance. A peaceful face, as if they have already made their peace with death.

But could that really be possible?

Because what I imagine is something completely different: horror on the face, wide eyes, frantic movements, desperately looking for a way out. What happens to the mind when it realizes there is no way out? How does the brain process the knowledge that this is it that there may be only seconds left?

I've never thought about what kind of conversation one would have with oneself during those exact moments.

It seems unbearable to me.

Perhaps the most terrifying part is not death itself, but the dialogue you have with your own mind while dying. The realization. The consciousness of what is happening. The mind witnessing its own ending.

Maybe that is what I had misunderstood when I said I wasn't afraid of death.

I was not afraid of being dead.

Yet i had never truly considered the possibility of being conscious while dying.

“The more virtuous a man is, the more severe is his super-ego, and he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.”

— Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

This quote from freud's Civilization and Its Discontents made me think about the nature of religion, not God this time, but religion as a moral and social system.

Many ancient religions establish moral standards that seem to contradict certain aspects of human nature. Human beings are naturally driven by desires, self-interest, competition, and attachment to themselves and those close to them. Yet religious morality often asks them to control these impulses and behave according to much higher standards.

For example, religion may ask people to love their neighbour as they love themselves. But is this actually possible? Human beings are not naturally completely selfless. We tend to care more about ourselves than about others. Religion can therefore create a gap between what a person naturally is and what they believe they should be.

And when a person cannot reach that ideal, guilt appears.

There is an interesting psychological mechanism here. The more a person feels that they have failed to reach the moral ideal, the more they may feel the need to return to that same system in order to correct themselves, a process also know as “redemption”.

In this sense, guilt can strengthen attachment to the system that produced the moral standard in the first place.

A simple analogy might help illustrate this. a game for instance, When someone keeps failing to obtain what they want, they may become even more attached to the game and continue playing in the hope of finally succeeding. Perhaps guilt can work in a similar way it doesn't make us leave the system; instead, it can make us more invested in trying to succeed within it.

Thus, Guilt doesn't necessarily prove the decency of human beings but instead it reveals someting much more hidden.

what if the problem is not that human beings fail morality, but that morality fails to understand human beings?

Let's  look from another principle, When we create a theory, we expect certain results from certain conditions. If the result matches the expectation, the theory gains support. If the result consistently contradicts the expectation, then there is something wrong with the theory itself. We do not blame the substances involved simply because they failed to produce the result that the theory predicted.

The same principle can be applied to religion.

If a moral system assumes that human beings should behave in a certain way, while human beings repeatedly fail to behave in that way because of their natural desires and tendencies, perhaps the problem is not simply that human beings are “bad.” Perhaps there is a contradiction between the moral system and human nature itself.

Religion may ask people to overcome their desires, while human beings are naturally driven by desire. It may ask them to overcome selfishness, while self-interest is deeply rooted in human behaviour. It may demand a level of love and compassion that human beings are not naturally capable of maintaining at all times.

The result is predictable: people fail, and failure produces guilt.

The more they fail, the more guilty they may become. And the more guilty they become, the more they may seek forgiveness, redemption, or another opportunity to become the person they believe they should be.

This creates a cycle:

desire → failure → guilt → redemption → desire → failure → guilt...

perhaps guilt is not simply an accidental consequence.

It might be part of the structure of the system itself.

Religious traditions often claim that God is perfectly good and that evil exists so that goodness can be recognized. According to dichotomies, light has meaning only because darkness exists; happiness is understood only after suffering. Evil, therefore, becomes a necessary contrast rather than evidence against God's goodness.

Yet still, If an all-good God intentionally created a world where innocent people suffer simply to teach the value of goodness, can such suffering truly be justified? Perhaps evil does not disprove God's existence. Instead, challenges our assumptions about God's nature.

This leads to the concept of the Demiurge. In several philosophical and Gnostic traditions, the creator of the material world is not necessarily perfectly good. The creator may be flawed, indifferent, or even responsible for the imperfections of existence. If such a being created humanity, then the presence of evil would no longer appear paradoxical. The question would no longer be whether God exists, but rather what kind of creator we are dealing with?

However, before assigning responsibility to a creator, we must ask another question: what if evil is not woven into the universe but constructed by human beings themselves?

This shifts the discussion from theology to psychology. Anna Freud argued that human behavior is deeply shaped by unconscious defense mechanisms. One of these, “identification with the aggressor”, explains how victims of abuse may unconsciously imitate those who harmed them. Cruelty, from this perspective, is not an inborn instinct but a psychological adaptation developed through repeated exposure to fear, violence, and domination.

If cruelty is learned rather than inherited, then every act of violence becomes linked to another that came before it.

So if every cruel individual was once shaped by cruelty, who was the first to introduce evil into human history?

Hannah Arendt approached this mystery differently. In “The Banality of Evil”, she argued that horrifying crimes are often committed not by monsters but by ordinary individuals who stop thinking critically and simply obey authority. Evil may arise less from hatred than from conformity and the refusal to question one's actions.

Yet another possibility remains. Perhaps the concepts of good and evil are themselves human creations?

Sigmund Freud suggested that morality develops because civilization requires it. Human beings possess instincts that, if left unrestricted, would threaten social life. Moral rules therefore function as restraints, allowing communities to survive. If this is true, morality is not simply discovered; it is constructed. What we call "right" and "wrong" may reflect the needs of civilization more than eternal truths.

If morality is indeed a human invention, then what one society condemns another may celebrate. Throughout history, ideas of justice, virtue, and crime have changed dramatically. This raises a difficult possibility: perhaps our moral certainty is less absolute than we imagine?

Religion introduces another psychological dimension. People often thank God even during immense personal tragedy, saying, "God knows best." Such statements are usually interpreted as expressions of faith and trust. But another interpretation is possible. Could this acceptance also arise from psychological necessity? Faced with overwhelming suffering, does belief provide meaning where none can be found? Is this genuine submission to God, or is it also an expression of fear, helplessness, and the human need to believe that suffering serves a purpose?

None of these perspectives fully explains the existence of evil. Theology points toward divine purpose, psychology toward unconscious development, philosophy toward flawed creation, and sociology toward civilization's need for moral order. Each answers one question while creating another.

Perhaps the greatest mistake is believing that evil has a single origin. It may emerge from the human mind, from social structures, from unquestioned obedience, from trauma, or from the way we imagine the divine itself.

In the end, the mystery of evil may reveal less about the universe than about ourselves. Every attempt to explain cruelty forces us to confront a deeper question: are we searching for the origin of evil, or are we searching for someone to blame?

Maybe our bodies are trapped within, and manipulated by, our minds!

Human beings never experience reality directly. We experience our interpretation of reality. Every sensation, memory, belief, expectation, fear, and desire passes through the mind before it becomes our experience. Cognitive biases constantly filter what we notice, what we ignore, and what we believe to be true. We do not simply observe the world; we construct a version of it.

This makes me wonder whether the mind has become the private god. Not because it creates the external world, but because it governs the only world we can ever truly inhabit: the one we experience. It assigns beauty, cruelty, hope, despair, purpose, and emptiness. So each of us lives under a different "god" , that are our own mind, rather than under one and only Transcendent entity.

Carl Jung once wrote, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." That idea seems to reinforce this thought. Much of what we call destiny, luck, or even personality may simply be the invisible workings of the unconscious. Our fears, desires, unresolved conflicts, and forgotten experiences quietly shape our choices while we imagine ourselves to be acting freely or destined under god's fair choices. The more unaware we are of these hidden forces, the more authority they have over our lives.

The same rain can feel like a blessing to a farmer, an inconvenience to a traveler, or a reason to cry for someone grieving. The rain has not changed; only the mind through which it is experienced has.

Of course, this does not mean reality is infinitely malleable. The external world exists independently of my thoughts. A mountain remains a mountain whether I love it or fear it. Thought alone cannot rewrite the laws of nature. What changes is not reality itself but my lived experience of reality.

Perhaps this is the fundamental tension of being human: we inhabit an objective world, yet we can never encounter it without passing through the architecture of the mind. We are not imprisoned by the world as much as we are imprisoned by interpretation.

So perhaps the modern god is no longer outside us, but within us. The mind does not create existence, but it creates the meaning existence has for us. And maybe the greatest freedom we possess is not to control reality, but to become conscious of the mind that interprets it.

In that sense, preservation becomes more than nostalgia; it becomes a quiet attempt at proxy immortality a way of resisting the fact that everything including ourselves, is temporary.

Setting religion aside for a moment. since every tradition offers a different answer about what comes after life, whether heaven, hell, reincarnation, or nothing at all, we simply don't know what death truly is. If its nature remains uncertain, why do we instinctively assume it is something tragic?

After all, life is hardly free from suffering. It is filled with pain, loss, loneliness, and the cruelty human beings often inflict upon one another. If life is such a complicated experience, why do we feel so devastated when someone leaves it?

Perhaps the answer lies in distinguishing between two forms of sympathy:

objective and subjective sympathy.

Imagine the same tragic event being shared with two people: a complete stranger and someone deeply connected to the person involved. The stranger may feel genuine sorrow simply because another human being (as himsf) has died. Their compassion is directed toward the individual. It is detached from personal interests and, in that sense, relatively objective.

The loved one, however, their grief is always inseparable from their own loss, the absence they will now live with, the memories that have suddenly become finite.. indeed their pain is sincere, yet it is also deeply personal.

Personally i think  The difference is not the intensity of compassion, but the presence of personal loss.

Perhaps this may explain why mourners are filled with such profound sadness. Their grief is not only for the person who has died, but also for the part of their own lives that disappeared with that person.

In this sense, mourning is not merely an expression of love for the deceased. It is also an expression of the life the living have lost.