Philosophy and death

Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.

This sounds more like something out of a crackpot New Age philosophy. “The Dao possesses infinite power without being powerful”. Really, what alternative is there then but for me to ask those who believe this themselves to note how this actually unfolds given their own life and their interactions with others. It’s like arguing that God is omnipotent but lacks any actual power? To me, it’s a purely “mystical” assertion that for all practical purposes might just as well be meaningless. But for those who believe it the comfort and the consolation are still the same.

And in particular how they come to reflect on this in regard to their own existential death. The Dao when it comes down to that…in the weeks, days, hours before a death, the death, their flesh and blood death is at hand.

I’m speechless. What on earth does this mean in regard to death? Your death. Here and now. Death, of course, is an inherent part of nature. And some speculate that after death “I” returns to the nothingness that it was before one is born. Oblivion on both sides of our 70 odd sojourn in the middle. What of effortless action and breath control then?

And, okay, I’ll admit it: my “sneering” reaction to all of this is derived in part from how badly I wish I could acquire it myself. Being able to think myself into actually believing this makes any sense when confronting the abyss. They actually have this comfort and consolation. I don’t.

That part I always get.

Yes, that’s what it always assumes. Meditation and the mystical. Something “wholly other” than oblivion and nothingness. Death as a “transformation”.

And the reality is…

Of course: you tell me.

Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.

How convenient.

In other words, if someone is trying to grapple with the Dao so as to grasp its relevance to and significance in their own actual life and death, words are there only to reveal that anything exposed will always be accompanied by its opposite. Whatever that means.

In fact these are precisely the sort of words that [to me] configure the Dao into a psychologism. What counts with any words that you are able to come up with is not what they convey in the way of meaning but how the words convey a psychological reaction to the world instead.

Nothing can really be pinned down. But that’s the point. What you are experiencing instead is a “sense” of reality. And who can really probe that beyond the psychological sense itself. To me it’s not all that far removed from the opaque narratives of the New Age gurus.

As in, “we are all at one with the universe”? And, again, the beauty of descriptions like this is that they can can mean anything to anyone. You can’t get it wrong because there is no way in which to test your assumptions. There’s the universe and there’s you. And whatever happens between them is the embodiment of the Dao?

Which, from my own interpretation, means that, really, we can have any viewpoint at all. No viewpoint is the wrong one because it’s your viewpoint. We don’t know what we see out in the world with others. Instead, we see only what we already know.

Now, sure, I might be completely misunderstanding the Dao here. But that’s the point. Unless I can discuss the Dao with others as they actually experience it, not only might I be getting it wrong, it’s almost as though that is perfectly okay because in the end, I, like everyone, else am still at one with the universe.

Only what on Earth might that actually mean?

Or, for example, given the life that Daoists live, what does this…

…mean?

And then connect the dots from that to your own death. The ultimate “deconstruction” of a life.

Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.

Again: way, way, way up in the intellectual/spiritual stratosphere. Thus there is trying to grapple with its meaning here and now given your current set of circumstances…and then imagining yourself grappling with it at a time in the future when you find out that you are very close to death yourself.

How many of us do grasp the “nature of things” in regard to before death, death, after death? Instead, given “I” here as the embodiment of dasein, we will all have different — sometimes very different – reactions to Nature/nature as we have come to understand it.

So, is there anyone here who is following the natural course of his or her own imminent death? Not a death out there down the road but one just around the corner. How in some detail has this natural course allowed you to “avoid being affected by sorrow or joy” through reason and understanding.

Instead, we get this:

Rain in Classical Daoist Thought?

Sure, to the extent that, given your imminent death, following the Daoist path does “for all practical purposes” permit you to “avoid being affected by sorrow or joy through reason and understanding”, it works and that’s the bottom line. Or it could be any number of other religious/spiritual paths.

There’s really nothing I can say here but this: that, here and now, I wish I were able to rethink myself into finding the path that I was once on all those years ago.

But there is simply too much that I would have to believe in turn about being on a One True Path that I no longer am able to.

Here and now.

Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.

Again, this is typical of what happens when things like death are taken over by the philosophers. This attempt to “capture” it in an “assessment”. An intellectual or spiritual conjecture such that it can be pinned down to what extent one should be indifferent towards it…and how far removed the “common practice” where you happen to resides is from that of the sages.

Okay, so given your own actual existential death, has anyone here been well taught to “disperse emotion with reason”.

On the other hand, how can one be reasonable about something they know absolutely nothing about? Unless, of course, they were taught in turn that if they are on the right path religiously or spiritually, “I” continues on for all the rest of eternity comfortably ensconced in one or another rendition of paradise. Provided that, on this side of the grave, they toed the line and earned that salvation.

Okay, for him, then and there, given the manner in which he had been able to think himself into accepting the death of his wife… and given the manner in which death itself was believed by him to be just another “season” in our lives…this worked for him.

So, will it work for you when someone you dearly love has just died? Or when you yourself are on your deathbed?

Maybe. It depends on what you yourself have managed to think yourself into believing about death. Or on what you have managed to think yourself into believing about life or no life after death.

But: tell me that isn’t profoundly [and very much problematically] rooted in the manner in which I construe the meaning of human identity and dasein in regard to things like death.

Where’s Biggie’s Gadot? I too wish he’d visit the smartest man on the internet for a ‘Groot together.’

Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.

Where were we? Oh, yeah, up in the spiritual clouds where one’s reaction to death becomes a series of psychologisms. Like Maia’s reaction to Nature. Putting words together to encompass a general description of life and death such that merely in believing what you think the words mean is comfort and consolation enough.

Thus:

Nothing here about your own actual existential death. Nothing about fearing the loss of all the flesh and blood people that you love and cherish for all the rest of eternity. Nothing about grieving the loss of all the things that bring you enormous fulfilment and satisfaction for all the rest of eternity. Instead, death is “natural”. And if the dying part itself is filled with great physical and emotional pain and suffering? Well, that’s natural too.

Sure, if Daoists or Buddhists or Pagans or any number of others on their own One True Spiritual Path manage to think themselves into sustaining these soothing frames of mind all the way to the grave, then all the better for them.

I only confront them here by and large because this is a philosophy venue and we are expected to dig a little deeper into why we believe some things and not others.

And, even if you are not quite able to convince yourself that your own spiritual path does lead to the next chapter of “I” on the other side of the grave, it’s still no less natural that we become food for worms and do our bit to replenish the planet for the next generations.

Again, some of us are able to accept that as balancing out all the things that we lose when we tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion.

And some of us are not.

The part I factor into dasein.

Or, sure, being in the Coalition of Truth, you can reduce it all down to this:

Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.

And, really, in regards to death, how much difference can there possibly be between butterflies and human beings?

Who thinks these things up?!

Other than those who, in my view, need to reduce the fact of death – oblivion – down to comforting psychologisms of this sort. You’re faced with the imminent demise of your own life. Everything and everyone that you love dearly and, as well, provide you with enormous amounts of joy, fulfillment and satisfaction are about to tumble over into the abyss that is nothingness for all of eternity. So, of course, become the butterfly and just go with the flow.

Oh, and, in turn, you have the Dao/Tao that in ways which are not quite explicable allow you to believe that on the other side of the grave something like this…

“Taoism teaches that it is in this life that we’re eternal. Rather than transitioning from the living world to an afterlife, Taoism believes the afterlife exists within life on Earth. As a living person, you exist as part of the Tao, and when you die, you exist as part of the Tao.”

…happens.

I truly do challenge someone to make an attempt to demonstrate how this actually works in regard to “I” here and now.

Instead, in my view, any number of those here inclined toward one or another religious or spiritual rendition of the One True Path path will reconfigure their own “fear of death” into a psychologism of this sort:

And all one need to do here is to believe it. And, sure, my own at times hostile reaction to those who still can revolves at least in part around the fact that I am no longer able to dupe myself into believing it.

If “dupe” is the right word of course.

There is a view that entails the idea that experience is merely the realization of a cosmos ultra rich in metaphor. Not the other way around.

Reality is merely a description of that appearent up-side down wirld in terms of. and within the either or world.

As Mark Twain said, “I was dead for billions of years before I was born, and it didn’t inconvenience me in the slightest.”

That’s my take on philosophy and death.

On the other hand, before we are born, there is no one in our life that we love dearly; and no things that bring us boundless satisfaction and fulfillment. People and things that are obliterated along with “I” for all of eternity in a No God world where immortality and salvation are merely the embodiment of leaps of faith that some are able to make and others not.

Why on earth do you suppose we invent the Gods? Why on earth do you suppose that some are terrified of death, oblivion, nothingness?

And: How on earth is that not reasonable if you truly do love your life and must come face to face with the prospect of the obliterated “I”?

Again, if those like pood are able to think themselves into approaching their own existential demise in a comforting psychologism like his above, more power to them. It sure beats my own frame of mind.

But then, here and now, how close is he to his own actual flesh and blood death?

Rather than a…philosophical death?

You know, if you can fit all of this on the headstone.

Beats me. See Twain.

Because when my “I” is obliterated I won’t know or care. Again, See Twain. No inconvenience,.

Pretty close, I reckon.

As my friend in California and I used to say, “Life sucks, you eat a lot of Mexican food, and then you die.” The dying and the Mexican food are the good parts, provided the food is prepared in the authentic Mexican style.

I should amend to say, “the dying and Mexican food are the good parts, providing the food is prepared in the authentic Mexican style and the dying is quick and painless.”

Being afraid of dying seems quite reasonable to me, as it is often prolonged, painful and messy. Being afraid of death (non-being) does not seem reasonable to me. As the atheist Ayn Rand said when pressed on this point, “you won’t be there,” which is exactly right and even more succinct than Twain.

My point is to note how, for many/most, there is a rather substantial gap between contemplating “I” before they were born…the part where they have absolutely nothing to lose…being born, accumulating relationships that are near and dear to them, accumulating experiences that bring them enormous fulfillment and then being told by the doc that they have just days to live.

Sure, some are able to think themselves into comforting frames of mind that manage to subsume the loss of the life they love in something akin to what I construe to be a TwainSpeak psychologism.

And indeed if their life actually sucks, the pain and the suffering can reach the point where death itself is the comforting thought. That’s all rooted in dasein of course. Each of us on our own unique path. But as per usual pood seems more intent on confronting his own death smugly.

He’ll show death!

Now, perhaps he will offer up some details as to how close he did come to death.

Also, note that his own life does contain plenty of loving relationships and precious experiences that will tumble over into the abyss with him. Perhaps he can afford to be more “philosophical” about it because he really doesn’t have all that much to lose anyway.

You really just can’t have a normal conversation with anyone, can you?

There you are again, twisting my words, and changing the meaning of a question you asked to which I replied, but now it’s a different question!

Whatever, dude!

I’ll go with Oscar Wilde, who reportedly on his deathbed said, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

They didn’t change the wallpaper, so he went!

I’ll stick with this:

And yet, the energy of the mind-spirit-soul recalls. Recalls lights that are an appearent sign of some phenomenal certainty in the sense of Descartes, as he faced the uncertain in the conviction of the eternal extension , which before the earth was apprehended became a universally extended flat surfaced eternal infinity

That was before Einstein-Galileo earth became the globe, and people started to fear what happens when they reach the end.

The atomistic globists, out of fear, had to find out what happens when you reach the end and fall off , existentially fall off the precipice, so they tried jumping off things, airplanes, diving boards, to see what happens.

But just because extension encircled reality and wraps it’self into a little prebirth womanlike bubble, doesen’t mean anyone can simulate himself to appear to climb back into the womb.

Although they do in the act of intercourse climb back from out of it, and come, back out of it to think they will live again, but will they?

What about the ones who don’t have kids? Can they live again in the bubbly world?

Yes they can because each one of them, are into one another, their types are very similar to a degree.

Their genes are not so unique when differentiated from other species, and mixing genes among species are uncommon between men and animals.

So what of eternity?

Ecmondu is right in holding that trillions to the trillionth power, and that to the trillionth can produce intergalactic spires of spirited bodies, who are willing to sustain human existence regardless of how the look, think

They are sustained by vast buildup of energy, so powerful that it can bind extasis into the flashes of light of pickets or phenomenal reality that we jump into, on the way out, jump in, take a chance with a minute portion of energy, coming thru the tiny vibrating slit that determines which slit most accords and determines the next phase of fate of even the least desirable

This is what happened to the one tiny point vanished into a virtuality, that the civic black hole emphatically transformed into just one metaphor into myraid, and light up the sky in a blazing explosion of images, some with a big bang.

If this was mot the case, evolution of species could not take place, and thenidentity we harbor could never be comprehensibly be integrated in the first place before the word was given

PS this is trying to be some kind of 3 am allegory to sooth . other than that it is a fictional account to the question : is life but a dream.

" boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear

Long has paled that sunny sky;
Echoes fade and memories die;
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die;

Ever drifting down the stream
Lingering in the golden gleam
Life, what is it but a dream? "

Lewis Carol

You know, if you can fit all of [b][u]this[/b][/u] on the headstone.

Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.

A mystic explanation indeed. And, really, think about sustaining a frame of mind like this from day to day to day in your own life. Instead, it only seems feasible to me if you abandon altogether the life that the overwhelming preponderance of us live and isolate yourself in a community of like-minded Daoists. You come up with a way to pay the bills for all of the things you need to actually subsist from day to day to day and then concentrate solely on all the spiritual stuff.

Yes, for a tiny fraction of us that’s an option. But how on earth is all this mystical thinking relevant to the lives that the vast majority of us live? With jobs and families and obligations to any number of others? And that’s just in regard to living itself. Dying? Again, if you are able to convince yourself that the mystical thinking of the Dao here is the real deal, great, end of story. And that’s the beauty of being on a spiritual path. If you believe something that makes it true. Just stay away from sites like this where you are likely to find those who challenge what you believe. Who ask for more substantial evidence in order that you demonstrate that what you believe about living and dying is a reasonable assessment.

I’m sorry but before flesh and blood human beings contemplate how they ought to live as part of Nature they need to confront the fact that in order to subsist in Nature they need to come up social, political and economic rules of behavior that will necessitate them interacting with others in families, in relationships, in communities…both on the job and off.

Countless responsibilities and obligations that over and again can confront them with conflicts in which spiritual bromides alone will never be enough to sustain the community.

Again, sure, unless you sever your ties with the realities the overwhelming preponderance of us deal with and nestle down comfortably in a religious community.

And how close or how far are the spiritual mantras going to be from abstractions? In regard to both life and death.

Death and the Human Animal
Mary Midgley questions the superficial allure of endless life.

The first thing that always pops into my head when encountering a “philosophical” assessment of death like this one is: did he believe in God? Did he believe in life after death?

You tell me: indiatoday.in/technology/fe … 2018-11-24

Then the part where the question of death revolves around someone like Jobs. In other words, someone who lived what can only be described as an extraordinary life bursting at the seams with all manner of accomplishments. In other words, much more than many… he had that much more to lose.

The celebrity syndrome let’s call it. Lives that are awash in experiences that most of us can only dream of. But: the more you live this life the more unbearable the reality of death can become. I always come back here to Steve McQueen.

“In 1979, shortly after filming The Hunter, McQueen was diagnosed as having mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer often caused by exposure to asbestos. Told the condition was inoperable, he secretly checked in to a controversial Mexican clinic run by a self-promoting Texas dentist with no medical degree. There he underwent an arduous, three-month regimen involving coffee enemas, animal-cell injections, laetrile (a substance derived from apricot pits), and more than 100 vitamin and mineral pills a day — as well as a born-again experience. But his health only deteriorated, and on Nov. 7, 1980, Steve McQueen died from a heart attack following surgery to remove a tumor — a fighter and renegade to the bitter end.”

Next up: your death.

Too bad for us though, right? This all may well happen sooner than most people think, but how many here think it will happen in their own lifetime? So, before we take death into the philosophical realm of “would you want to life forever”?, there’s still that pesky problem of “can you live forever?”

And of course the part where the older you get the more the body can make you wish you were dead anyway. No, we need a science able to allow us to pick the age we no longer want to stop aging…with a body that toes the line with respect to all of the ghastly afflictions it can pummel us with. Also, the part where others are not able to go about the task of ending out life themselves.

Bottom line: Not just the best of all possible worlds deathwise but the one perfect world both lifewise and deathwise.

Well, they don’t call it science fiction for nothing.