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Scared of death and dying

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cyberdad
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20 Aug 2022, 2:44 am

auntblabby wrote:
carl sagan found himself wandering alone, without a care in the world, through otherworldly vista after vista, each new one more beautiful than the last, and he was troubled because he thought he was supposed to be dead and gone, yet here he was in his gorgeous new land not knowing where he was, until he met a long-gone colleague who told him, "carl, you're in heaven."


Did Dr Carl take shrooms?



auntblabby
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20 Aug 2022, 2:49 am

cyberdad wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
carl sagan found himself wandering alone, without a care in the world, through otherworldly vista after vista, each new one more beautiful than the last, and he was troubled because he thought he was supposed to be dead and gone, yet here he was in his gorgeous new land not knowing where he was, until he met a long-gone colleague who told him, "carl, you're in heaven."


Did Dr Carl take shrooms?

possibly, can't know for sure, but it is common knowledge that he smoked pot all his adult life. i strongly suspect that is behind the unique blood cancer [MDS] that killed him.



r00tb33r
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20 Aug 2022, 3:09 am

cyberdad wrote:
r00tb33r wrote:
I mean, I'm afraid to not exist. I'm not talking about the moment of death, I mean thinking about it happening in the future is scary.


Before responding to the rest of your post. I think this fear your experiencing represents what is fairly common in a our western world. A fixation with the ego of self. This doesn't necessarily apply to you but for many who thrive on attention from their fellow humans its a fear of being forgotten and not being relevant anymore.

Put the shoe on the other foot. If Marvel's Thanos came to earth right now and did his thing (clicked his fingers) and this time every person on earth disappeared and you were the only one left. Suddenly you are all alone. The fear of not existing shouldn't really be a problem now because your existence is only for yourself. There's nothing at stake. Whether you exist or not makes no difference, That's how it was before you were born, And that's how it will be after you are gone.

Honestly, that's almost insulting. I've been a loner all my life. In my thoughts I existed to exist, and to have those thoughts, not to be surrounded by others. In fact, the rest of my post implies the expectation of being alone in the future.

Now, there are theories that we live in a simulation. I have a theory of my own. What if there's no "we". What if everything that I'm experiencing including you is a set of mental constructs for my mind to interact with itself, and the whole universe is inside my mind.



cyberdad
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20 Aug 2022, 4:26 am

r00tb33r wrote:
Now, there are theories that we live in a simulation. I have a theory of my own. What if there's no "we". What if everything that I'm experiencing including you is a set of mental constructs for my mind to interact with itself, and the whole universe is inside my mind.


Have you watched the matrix?



cyberdad
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20 Aug 2022, 4:27 am

auntblabby wrote:
possibly, can't know for sure, but it is common knowledge that he smoked pot all his adult life. i strongly suspect that is behind the unique blood cancer [MDS] that killed him.


For somebody who smoked pot, he seemed closed minded



r00tb33r
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20 Aug 2022, 4:38 am

cyberdad wrote:
Have you watched the matrix?

I've read short stories and novels by William Gibson. The Matrix is a derivative work. But, yes.



lostproperty
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20 Aug 2022, 5:40 am

r00tb33r wrote:
What if there's no "we". What if everything that I'm experiencing including you is a set of mental constructs for my mind to interact with itself, and the whole universe is inside my mind.


Replace "my mind" with "the mind" in the above and I think this is right, "the mind" being universal consciousness.

It's not being dead I'm worried about, it's the process leading up to it. My big fear is dying in a nuclear war, because I'm unlikely to be vaporised in an instance, where I live.



cyberdad
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21 Aug 2022, 2:21 am

The underlying premise of the "matrix" is that we are all conditioned to be connected to the same virtual reality. It's called a social construction which is a "gestalt" made up of the sum of the parts where each part is an individual social construct we accept as reality.

Even the light that hits our eyes inverts objects in the material universe upside down. Our brain has to re-orientate the image we see. Also objects don't exist in full colour, our brains reconstruct matter in terms of light reflection.

To give you an example something as simple as your favourite brown chair doesn't actually exist. It's an object usually made of wood that is man-made to serve a specific function. Our brain recognises it as a chair. But to an alien its objectively pieces of cut/treated/varnished and polished wood nailed together. We humans give it it's existence.

Being alone, not having friends, not having somebody to share your thoughts doesn't mean you are not part of the matrix, Everything that makes you who you are (even if you live off the grid) is a product of somebody else. You are are product of other people and your existence is only meaningful when you try to look at yourself through other people's eyes.

The first step in accepting death is understanding that the "you" that you understand yourself to be is a temporary construction to protect/self preserve the body you find your projection of your "self" connected to. So this is what I mean that the attachment (so common among western people) to our physical body is what drives the fear of not knowing what its like to finally be separated from our body.



r00tb33r
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21 Aug 2022, 3:43 am

^I'm not attached to my body. In fact, if you paid attention to my earlier posts I said I thought of my existence (consciousness) in this body as being temporary. And I'm distressed by the thought that I might not get a chance to leave it behind for something else.

Honestly, we're having 2 conversations here, and our words just don't intersect.



cyberdad
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21 Aug 2022, 4:30 am

r00tb33r wrote:
And I'm distressed by the thought that I might not get a chance to leave it behind for something else.


What do you mean?



r00tb33r
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21 Aug 2022, 1:00 pm

cyberdad wrote:
r00tb33r wrote:
And I'm distressed by the thought that I might not get a chance to leave it behind for something else.


What do you mean?

My consciousness in a non-human host.



cyberdad
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21 Aug 2022, 5:13 pm

r00tb33r wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
r00tb33r wrote:
And I'm distressed by the thought that I might not get a chance to leave it behind for something else.


What do you mean?

My consciousness in a non-human host.


inanimate object, somebody's computer or robot or alien?



r00tb33r
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21 Aug 2022, 6:54 pm

cyberdad wrote:
r00tb33r wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
r00tb33r wrote:
And I'm distressed by the thought that I might not get a chance to leave it behind for something else.


What do you mean?

My consciousness in a non-human host.


inanimate object, somebody's computer or robot or alien?

Some kind of life form other than human. Animate.



cyberdad
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21 Aug 2022, 9:52 pm

if one's consciousness does manage to move into an animate form then I suspect it would have happened before this current existence.

Logic dictates you will have no memory of "you"



r00tb33r
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21 Aug 2022, 10:12 pm

cyberdad wrote:
if one's consciousness does manage to move into an animate form then I suspect it would have happened before this current existence.

Logic dictates you will have no memory of "you"

Well, that's the whole thing about the gradual replacement of the brain is about. Do you survive or do you die, and what would be the way to verify?



cyberdad
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21 Aug 2022, 11:57 pm

r00tb33r wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
if one's consciousness does manage to move into an animate form then I suspect it would have happened before this current existence.

Logic dictates you will have no memory of "you"

Well, that's the whole thing about the gradual replacement of the brain is about. Do you survive or do you die, and what would be the way to verify?


There is a third option which is transformation. The concept of energy/force moving from on life form to another but not retaining identity.

One of the things that amuses me about past life regression is the common pattern that people tend to think they lived as another person in a past life but that the person is culturally similar background to themselves (which seems convenient). Where the past life is non-western then it's an Egyptian pharoah or a Chinese emperor but the person claims while they remember their past life but strangely have no memory of the language they spoke :roll: