"Thanks I'm cured", right? I didn't believe it would help when I first learned the technique. I heard it from a researcher who studied death anxiety in Tibetan Buddhists. He found that their culture makes it an overwhelming priority to be constantly conscious of one's mortality. He found that this imperative was inculcated from the very earliest age, and he found an unusually high correspondence in those beliefs to symptoms of anxiety. It was startling to him, as to me, because he thought the whole idea of Buddhism was "go with the flow dude, everything is gonna be alright", but in the teachings emphasized in the culture, it morphs into some sort of spiritual specter always haunting the waking lives of these people. It resonated with me, because Western existential philosophy also makes death-awareness an ideal to strive for, with the concomitant devil's deal of constant anxiety.

He concluded that extinguishing or minimizing the idea of one's mortality ends up freeing one from the existential terror it can cause. I remember being in my living room cleaning as I listened to the report, and I stopped in my tracks and put the vacuum down. "There's no fucking way that works."

It WORKS. It started working almost right away. If the thought of dying came up I just would grab the thread and shake it and say to myself, "Ok, so what? You have to wash the dishes man." I don't think I've lost any of my cynicism or me-ness or critical faculties in the ensuing years. That constant death anxiety is almost completely gone now, except for the most inopportune lulls before sleep or in idleness. I keep coming back to it. "Oh my God. I'm going to die one day. No. No. No. Please no... Hey! Who fucking cares?! Think about your puppy, look how cute she is laying there so innocent. Think about renewing your car registration. Literally everything is more important than that insignificantly tiny moment in the future. You're ok right now."

I hope that helps.

I definitely value freedom of thought above ritual. That's an aspect of the decision I had set aside as a conceit in order to allow myself to entertain it at all. I too was raised (loosely) Catholic, and a lot of my initial pain around morality and life stemmed from my literal interpretation of those teachings.

I hope that some sort of ongoing comparative discussion of religion and the purpose it can serve would help a child make their own best conclusions. The way I've been thinking of it at the moment is, the tension at the heart of this, is "Would 'depriving' someone of those rituals be more harmful than helpful?" I'm leaning toward it being negligible, but exposing them to ritual might bring an individual closer to a healthy path of spirituality on their own terms. I would definitely keep the aspect of autonomy front and center if I did introduce my child to religion. "They talked about Jesus today. Do you want to sit with me and find out what other people think of him?"