After reading the last post of Bob in the ‘God doesn’t exist: Post from an Atheist’ thread. I started thinking about death. Some people mourn those who have died but isn’t this a kind of selfishness in that we still wish them among the living? I have always held a different view of death from the Christians who I feel have profaned this most sacred thing. Is not death a release? Does not the fact that I will one day die lend incredible energy to my life? I feel that the postulation of an afterlife takes away from this life and poisons it, the only life we can be sure of.
I’ve always said, if there were an afterlife, that would be because our 'soul’s are eternal right? But if my ‘soul’ were eternal then why can i not recall any ‘moment’ up until i was born? I personally think that if there really is an ‘I’ then it most certainly requires this body, so when i do die, ‘I’ will no longer exists as ‘I’ requires my body. Death is not a point in life, it just disconnects you from it.
this morning after the church service I spoke to a lady who told me how she had spent her Saturday. Years ago there was a group of mothers who met over a decade or so and the group started to be visited by the grown daughters. It was an informal social affair and driven by the mothers who in turn invited their daughters along.
A decade later all the mothers had died and the group ceased to be, since the daughters had been guests, not the incumbents of the meeting. But, as coincidence would have it, the daughters, now with grown daughters of their own, decided to meet in a similar way to their mothers and invite their daughters along.
They started talking about how the group had started and about the first mothers who had died. They spontaneously decided to visit the graveyards where the mothers lay and put a rose on the grave and sing the songs they remembered that each of the mothers had liked to sing. There were tears of course, but they all said that they would like to meet once or twice a year to remember the dead and also talk about where life was taking them.
I think that women have a talent for this kind of community but that it would do us men good too. All of the women are Christians and trust in the ressurection, but this mourning was about loved ones and precious moments lost in the course of time, about intimacies and mutual compassion.
Of course death is a release, but it takes something away that was valuable to us and which was inimitable. The Christian approach is in fact the postulation that this life is indeed valuable and that it should not be thrown away. But at the same time, Christians say that the hope of the resurrection means that I don’t have to bow down to those who threaten my life in order to prevent me from doing what I conceive to be right.
If you find modern Fundamentalists going on about ‘rapture’ and picturing how the next life will be, then you are witnessing a perversion of the hope that should less be dogmaticised as simply held onto as a hope. And if it is a perversion, then of course in poisons this life. Alone the gloating of Fundamentalists over the fate of a world in a supposed apocalypse is perverse and disgusting, but that is humankind for you.
I believe that this passage comes close to my own attitude about death. Krishnamurti talks about the fear of death and the necessity of not clinging to the past. To me death is a precious part of life.
I think te ain aim of your post was to try and make it sound as beautiful as possible, or as most interesting as u could imagine. My fear of detah consists of of my obsession of life. Everything that you do in life is ‘obsession’ driven. The ‘love’ for somebody, all different types of attachments are just obsessions and the biggest obsession of all is life itself, or maybe my obsession is ‘I’…or maybe both. Either way, i don’t want to be without. But sadly it’s not my choice.
[i]"Everyone will succumb, to time’s smothering glove
Then death will spark a storm in your skull ~
After static grips your cardiovascular
The countdown begins and slows the blood
The regrets creep,
Which sea will sweep you into sleep?
Memories you wish you could stop re-membering
As you drift ~
Neural connections severing swift.
While the brain is drained, unplugged,
With one last chemical hug,
She blossoms and emits the last of her drugs.
Its been 12 minutes, are you infinite or finished?"[/i]
I believe that death will be beautiful in it’s totality, but I have yet to see the end (Objectively, though, I understand the associated beauty). For several minutes, our brains will keep functioning post mortem unless you’re skull has been decimated somehow. (i.e. having an anvil fall on your head or being caught in a massive trash compactor)
This is the time that I fear. I wonder what thoughts will manifest in my head as my unconscious swims in a psychotropic wash. Will my last minutes be of panicked despair, or will they be a proverbial hug from god?
If my subconscious is alive, but my Earthly consciousness has vacated, where will I be?
Life seems to be one big question; I hope that Death will be the equalling answer.
Lifes a big question as u say because everything is so random, it’s so random because it hasn’t been organised, it hasn’t been organised because ‘nobody’ actually set it up. I’ve never come across anybody other than ‘alien corpse bath’ who gave good enough reasons to actually believe in some kind of afterlife, i still fail to believe in an afterlife but alien corpse bath gave good enough reasons for me to be able to disprove him, other than one point that is.
‘I’ am not eternal, otherwise ‘I’ would have recognised myself before birth. Since there was no ‘I’ before birth, i ask u the same question yet again…why would anything be different in the end?
I am going to take a risk here and say that I am a bit of a “death expert” haha!
I say that because, at night, when most people are asleep… I am assisting people who have died, and help them handle their new found situation and move them on to better - more stable places.
(I’m happy to answer questions on the mechanics of this, and how it all started, but I’ll do that personally for those who care, but for now I’ll just give my opinion & stick to the original question.)
There is no death in the sense that your consciousness does indeed continue beyond body.
You can’t “kill” consciousness. It exists and always will.
After physical death you will be just as you would be if you were dreaming… The lucidity depends on many things.
You will create your own environment based on your conscious/sub conscious beliefs. This could be a hell or a heaven if you believed you were meant to go there. (Getting a person to realise that they don’t HAVE to be there is one of my trickiest jobs!)
The dead person will remain in this state for as long as it takes, sometimes not long at all, other times ages. When they are ready to move on they will do. In fact it’s just the same as it is now.
They basically move on to more pleasant levels where there is less fear and more “light†(light being awareness)
One thing to remember is that to them, these places are real and solid – just as real as Earth seems right now to us.
The funny thing to realise is that, from the perspective of those in the aware-spirit realms, it is actually US Earth dwellers who could be considered more “deadâ€
This idea of eternal energy/consciousness/light/being is based on the supposition that consciousness is generated by the brain and is not the brain, but is the underlying energy (that may or may not be connected to a parallel) that some may refer to as the soul.
I like to call it my little piece of perfect.
The dreams that follow the point we call death could go on for eons it seems considering how grossly time is distorted in the realm of the subconscious. 5 minutes asleep, but yet you’ve dreamt an elaborate adventure floating on the fragments of symbolic and emotional consciousness. It seems to have some type of eternal quality.
We’ll never know until life is answered with death.
I am saying that yes. In fact I would go so far as to say that your body is created BY consciousness.
Imagine a robot exploration device on Mars. The robot is a rover controlled by you back on Earth. You put on a VR headset that enables you to see what the robot sees, hear what the robot hears. In fact, all the robots senses are transferred directly to you. To move the robot you have a joystick that you push in various directions.
You spend much time exploring Mars in your robot. Eventually you are so engulfed by the whole experience that your forget you are back on Earth and start to believe you are really there on Mars. Your conscious awareness has changed focus. You become the robot rover (which is really a “false (ego) self”)
What happens when the robots cpu dies (it’s brain) do your consciousness cease? No. why? because you arn’t the robot. The same way as you are currently not your body - brain included.
Of course my words alone can’t convince you… you need to experience your true, deepest nature and core for yourself. And then you’ll know.
i-zachariah. I find that a lot. People that don’t fear death as much as dying. I can understand that attitude. Surely the body rebels at that moment of death. And where the body goes the mind will follow (at least on this side of the void).
This post is pointless because as far as I am concerned. I’ve never meet anyone who has died and came back to life. It is a mystery and will remain so, until you die yourself.
The majority of the comments here are simply groundless speculations.
But the anticipation of death does re-orientate one’s priorities in life, and reveal what is the most important. It is a good thing that people are discussing death and sharing their speculations.
There is no need to quote others, or try to prove other’s theory about death is wrong. Because you are just like blind men discussing the shape of an elephant.
I don’t kill myself because I’m afraid of the consequences. I feel that it will be a release, but only a peaceful release if my thoughts are calm, which is hard to imagine, for me, considering my concept of the last moments of life. Especially, when I ponder the desperate chaos that would ensue in the mind of someone who is about to do themselves in. I don’t have the mental strength, endurance, or skill of the Buddhist monk who protested by burning himself alive. You are dying. A broiling excitement of the nervous system begins, ready to send you through torment or serenity for the last few moments of Earthly existence. I do my best to make good decisions so I don’t have to clean up more regret before I pass. Plus, I feel that I need to give back since my ancestors toiled to get this far. Can’t let them down! It is my duty.
There is something that is triggered in a man’s mind at the moment of death that let’s loose emotion and understanding, If one’s mind hasn’t already deteriorated (i.e. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Syphillis, etc…). This is what I fear. The fact that consciousness will, at the very least, last longer than the estimated 6-12 minutes of brain activity, is a frightening revelation. I don’t want to have a list of people I’ve harmed to think about when I’m drifting alone on the current of my thought. Even more so if the allotted time has no defined end point.
I suspect that the fear of death is really just fear of not-being. We have concluded that our sentience, our “I” or “me” is the bedrock of existence. Even though we can conceptualize other modes (not corporeal) of existence, I and me are never removed from the conceptual framework. It is as if we must have a closed system, a circle with beginning and ending points with “me” at the locus.
It would be better, or perhaps less stressful, if existence could be viewed as a process with no known beginning or end. There is nothing that suggest’s that sentience is on-going other than wishful thinking.
Experiencing the death of others is an opportunity to watch a small piece of that process. Our emotional response to a death is negative in that the sentience of another human is no longer with us. No matter all the rationale for accepting another’s death, we feel pain and loss, and so contemplating our own death is pain and fear of loss. We aren’t very good at grieving our loss and holding the fact of life process in our heads at the same time. That’s good. It’s probably one of the few times in our lives that we give our capacity for humanity full rein. Still, butterfly or human, it is part of a process. That we cannot ‘know’ death isn’t any different than saying that we cannot ‘know’ life. They are one and the same.
I have attended many people whilst they were dying and ask myself whether the average person can even imagine ‘not-being’ - and therefore have no fear of it. On the other hand, if doubts exist or plaguing guilt, then the fears are greater, suggesting that the unknown is just that, but that the imagination could cause the greatest fears.
Most people who I have seen die go through the classic process, they take varying amounts of time but it was usually within days or at the most weeks. The sensibility of the dying grows and especially the fear of being left alone increases. They hold on to hands at first, often saying nothing. The music we played was extremely quiet but could even then be too much sometimes.
There is an increased awareness of spiritual and/or religious issues - whether grasping the faith that had only been latent throughout the persons life, whether desiring to hear prayers and scripture being read, or having the rosary in their hands. It wasn’t uncommon to find that those who had been religious all their lives were particularly quiet.
It is important that those who have been non-religious all of their lives are not subjected to religious symbolism, which can cause distress which has very often been mistranslated as guilt. Very often it is the palsy that prevents them from complaining as they would have otherwise, instead they weep.
Whilst we experience a withdrawal from family and friends, there seems to be a fear of ‘leaving them in difficulties’, choosing the ‘easy way out’ and ‘deserting’ them. Sometimes, when people have struggled a long time, I have whispered assurance that everything is OK and that their daughter or son would manage quite well without them. I urged the relations to say the same.
With increased weakness there is more need of assistance with care, although there is no need to pay too much attention to them being clean, more important is that they are comfortable and there is no danger of complications causing pain. Palliative care avoids too much movement, although the risk of decubital ulcers does mean that we have to move them slightly to reduce pressure on the skin - especially where the bones protrude.
There can be an increase or decrease in pain - some people have cried out despite the strongest painkillers and some have slept into death, some were very drousy in the last hours. Palliative care tries to eliminate the acute complications that can occur, allowing a peaceful but concious slide into death.
Because we very often experience a decreased swallow reflex, we have to be careful about how much fluid we give them. It is often advisable to lay a slow infusion in the bowel, if the person suffers from a dry tongue. Then we can use various swabs with various fluids to induce saliva or freshen the mouth. Quite naturally the dying experience a decreased desire for food or fluids, so we have to be aware of what we are trying to achieve.
There is very often a phase where the dying seem to get better, where they may even sit up or eat something, but shortly afterwards their circulation breaks down and they die abrubtly.
There is always the mirror perspective in death, but how we react emotionally is very dependant upon the degree of relationship or friendship, or even the circumstances of death. Those people who have had a difficult death, with pain or long bouts of uneasiness, suffering psychotic disorders and phobia, are very often felt to have been released and their death is almost celebrated.
I have had patients that were hardly recognisable after their death because their features were suddenly peaceful. There were people we missed of course, who had made us smile and had the kind of nature you would want your Grandmother to have. But most of the dying were said to have ‘made it’.
For Relations of course this is a completely different situation and these people have to go through their own ‘process’ and take their leave at the end of the process. Although many modern people avaoid it, it is helpful to see the person in their coffin. That way the mourning process can take less time.
