I wish I could override my lizard/ape brain that feels this horror towards being nothing forever. I know intellectually that I've already non-experienced nothingness before I was born.
It's just that, now that I'm alive with an ego-self, I have everything to lose. I've been given involuntary attachment to conscious existence, even though I actually don't enjoy existing and regret being born. This is my "one precious life", even though it's objectively worthless and value is just a human imagining.
We spend most of existence being dead non-entities. I should be okay with it. But I'm not.
My personal experience on anesthesia was that I didn't even comprehend or experience myself becoming increasingly unconscious. I literally just was, and then I wasn't. So weird.
Although I did have a "blip" of becoming increasingly conscious again as I recall a moment where I heard nurses talk to me asking me to move and I remember it being extremely difficult trying to answer back. I also don't remember seeing anything or experiencing anything else with any of my other senses during this time. I then was unconscious again and then was suddenly fully awake again, although pretty zonked out, lol.
I'm not even sure if that blip of consciousness was actually real, but I've heard that the last of senses to go and also first to come back is hearing, so it makes sense if I was only really able to hear things during that blip.
Agreed. When I went under, there was no drifting off or anything else to indicate I wouldn’t be conscious. Just waking up somewhere else once it wore off.
How are you so full of self doubt in so many areas of your life, but so sure that death is nothingness?
You were born out of the universe. What does that tell you about reality?
Haha. Wow, you regret being born? You don’t enjoy existing? Do you have friends? Have you ever been rock climbing? Been to Italy? Fell in love? Played Zelda? Learned an instrument? Had a child? Solved a tough problem?
You don’t see this whole as an opportunity? You see it as a cruel game where someone gives you something only to take it away?
No our natural state is to be alive. Nature? And we never experience our own death, only the death of others.
> If yes, why are we so afraid?
A survival trait of higher animals. Also parents will die for their children.
> Saying goodbye to the whole world, everything you know, and knowing that within a few seconds and minutes you’ll slip into eternal, dark, vast never-ending nothingness.
No, you as likely as not will not slip into anything.
> How on EARTH are we supposed to be okay with this and be able to do this so easily?
Again a survival tool.
Why do you think after school, around 12 / 13 most kids stop being creative, or maybe no longer are, just endless computer games, then fixations on sex and materialism.
So before humans there was no time. There is a refutation of that in Quentin Meillassoux's book.
No big bang 13 billion years ago. No life on earth 4 billion tears ago, or dinosaurs 150 million years ago.
Energy can't be created or destroyed, what did you think exist? This claim imply infinity exist and energy always existed.
Define your definition of time? What you might be calling time might be just motion. We use time time to measure, basically a ruler
My definition is what I experience. I know there are others and Penrose thinks it require mass.
And I thought energy can become mass and visa versa, how atom bombs work.
But nothing to do with existentialism.
How do you know that for sure?
I have been following a lot of hospice workers (doctors, nurses etc) and all of them mention deathbed visions and people experiencing a loved one coming to "get them."
According to research there wasnt anything found though. And it can happen months before the person passes.
Theres even an article about a dying child who said he saw his mom and older brother come to get him (they had all been in a car crash). The boy had been in coma and did not know they had died.
So maybe youre right. But maybe it is also ok to assume that our death isnt the end.
Personally as someone who has hallucinated in the past, I can't put my beliefs on simply what someone has seen. If I do then goblins are seemingly likely to be real.
Thats up to you. Personally I do not see the point in going around fearing the nothingness. Even if Im wrong I still prefer believing there is more than we know.
If you believe there is no experience after death, it's not "eternal, dark, vast never-ending nothingness" or "terrifying nothing." People like to compare it to what it was like before you were born, which works because you don't have memories of that, so you can assume there was no experience. No experience isn't good or bad. It's nothing.
But also, there might be an experience after death.
We're hard-wired to anticipate "next moments" as a survival strategy and so many people struggle to comprehend a state in which there are no "next moments". The closest they can come is to imagine themselves suspended in a black void forever, which is a terrifying but fortunately irrational image. Medical science very strongly indicates that death is, in fact, the ultimate extinction of all sensation and agency. You stop breathing, the electrical energy that literally powered your life dissipates into the immediate atmosphere as heat, and you're done. Game over.
Most people are most definitely not okay with that. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book *The Denial of Death*, Ernest Becker argued that the fear of mortality, coupled with the human understanding that death is inevitable, has driven most of human psychology and basically all of civilization, starting with supernaturalist religions that promise afterlives of eternal bliss or reincarnation into new life.
The good news is that there are entire schools of philosophy (notably humanism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and existentialism) that teach how to be okay with the natural fact of mortality. Most of them begin with the premise that it is wise to accept the inevitable by learning to surrender to it gracefully - [https://alt-death.com/2023/09/21/drop-tower-shugendo/](https://alt-death.com/2023/09/21/drop-tower-shugendo/). Then they focus on teaching how to live worthwhile, meaningful and enjoyable lives while you still can - [https://alt-death.com/2020/07/21/have-a-child-plant-a-tree-write-a-book/](https://alt-death.com/2020/07/21/have-a-child-plant-a-tree-write-a-book/).
Hi! Terminal brain cancer patient here (glioblastoma). My situation is tricky in that for the moment I am doing very well but the average prognosis for my condition is shockingly bad (16 months), so I am somewhere in between the scenarios in which death is purely abstract and the one you present here of having only a few hours to live (in my case it seems to be months or at most years, but I would have to be a miracle to last a decade, and I’m young, 38). I try to take the situation with stoicism and black humor, but some days it is hard and I sense that the only strategy is accepting that it is hard: certain death goes against our primary, hard-wired biological imperative (evade death to stay alive) and our primary psychological instinct (not thinking about death). Have a nice day!
Thank you for the solidarity! The crazy thing is that as humans we adapt to almost all things, and this is my life now. Some days are hard, others less so. Right after diagnosis I felt that getting used to live with this would be impossible, but I am so far doing well, and an unexpected sense of normalcy has crept in.
Personally, I see it like this: I'm not afraid of death, I'm afraid of dying before accomplishing the things I want to do with my life. Once I've done them, I don't care if I live or die.
Same I’m afraid of dying young and not getting the one and only chance ever, to live out my life and enjoy it for long and do all the things I want to do and see the future and how far the world and technology develops
More like before we are us, our atoms are something else entirely, yet our natural state is unborn.
Then we are us, our natural state is alive.
Then we are no longer us to us, but there is an us we were to others, that is dead but living in memory.
Then we are forgotten completely, but our atoms are now a part of something else entirely.
The nuance of it all is more complicated than you're making it.
Our human ego and emotions drive how we think about these things and our place in the cosmos. We are cursed with the ability to think abstractly about our existence and mortality.
Death is a state of nonexistence and you stop being you upon death. Yeah your body is here and will eventually get recycled back into the universe, but *you* stops. So death can't be your natural state because you just don't exist. In that state of nothingness there is no you to even experience time and space or even being bounded by the laws of physics. Nothingness is truly nothing.
The thought of death is uncomfortable. We can approach it however it makes us feel comfortable, but regardless how we think about it the outcome will be the same.
We don't have to be okay with any of this. It is pretty fucked up. We could dwell on it and let it eat us from the inside. Or we can learn to accept it and take control. It's up to us to decide how to deal with it. It's your human mind assigning meaning to it and giving you this sense of anxiety.
With that said if leaving something behind after you die is important to you, then perhaps that is something you could do. The beauty of being human is that we decide what gives life meaning despite how seemingly pointless it is.
You know what I meant, not a state but the same void of non-existence that we can’t even comprehend with a human brain built to understand finite things
It is hard to comprehend for sure. None of it makes any logical sense to be honest. We are here for a few decades to be gone again for the rest of time, yet we are encoded with instinct to survive at all cost. We have a drive to reproduce yet the species itself is only temporary. Humans achieved consciousness and are clearly the only species that is different on this planet than the others, yet there were countless other species that have been here far longer and didn't evolve consciousness (i.e. any dinosaur species for example). I think we are missing a major breakthrough in understanding reality. I don't know if we ever get to that fact, but one thing I'm sure of, if we do it will be the time before that understanding and the time after.
Because there would have to be a soul, another world, and a vehicle or mechanism to get there. All of these are undetectable by our math and technology despite scanners of every kind and other means of discovery. But all those reasons are still secondary to the fact that there is no reason for all of that to exist except for our wishes.
I feel like the meaning of life is love. Its not to obsess over death, its not materialistic (wordly) things, so it only makes sense to me that we comfort each other through this weird process called life.
Not afraid of death, scared of it being sudden and painful. Scared of what it will do to my family. Scared they won’t thrive without me.
Consciousness is where all the terror is. That’s why we’re in this sub. No consciousness is a-ok with me.
Death has no memory of this. That’s what is scary. Not death itself. Personally I’m excited for it. I’ve experienced some weird things though so knowing things don’t actually end helps a lot. Understanding that I’ve been through it before helps. It’s like remembering something you forgot existed. These are my personal findings though, so anyone reading it without a grain of salt would be amiss to do so.
I was still clear enough with what I said. Your just hyper focused on the literal ‘surgeon’ example. You should be able to extrapolate that logic to many different fields that require a lot of focus. So saying I’m discriminating against surgeons is ridiculous to me. But I do think if someone is performing surgery they shouldn’t be looking at a patient thinking of something completely removed from the situation at hand. That says nothing of what they do with their time outside of surgery or what they decide to pursue. The context is people chasing dreams with very low success rates and ignoring building other valuable skills for their life while doing so. If it was confusing overall for you, my apologies, but I don’t see a 100 people on here telling me I was writing gibberish either.
This thread seems to be attempting to soothe your feelings by reframing death as something other than existentially horrifying. As much as you may want to be persuaded by such (well-intentioned) arguments, it is not reassuring or comforting to face the thought of an eternal and indifferent nothingness.
Have you even tried praying?
There is no naturalistic scientific theory that can account for the origin of the universe that does not break causality. In short, the physical universe can not have created itself and can not have existed eternally. That is science. As much as some want to deny it, the ONLY rational and logical option is that it was created by a Creator.
Have you tried praying?
We don't know everything about the universe. We may never know. You don't know that the universe could not have existed spontaneously. A Creator is just an attempt to explain existence because we don't have all the information. There will always be that bridge between knowing and not knowing. But the more we know the more we chip away the notion of a Creator.
I can still make the claim that this Creator could not create itself. It would have to come from something right? And to go on about how the Creator has always been there or that it *can* create itself is just our imagination. Well how is that different than the universe always existing or having been created from nothing? You don't see how the universe can do that, but you insist a Creator can exist without any evidence.
And suppose this Creator did create everything. It probably doesn't know we exist. We are but a tiny insignificant part of the universe. Yet people believe it cares about any of us? It wants us to worship it? Why? An all powerful creator doesn't need our help. It doesn't need to care about us. Praying may be comforting, but there is no transmission.
If you wish to believe in that that's your choice. But by no means is a Creator the *only* option.
Keep looking at what remains after everything that changes is gone. You found it!?! Does it change at all? Then let it go and keep looking. All the questions are answered
Our natural state is life I would say. Why? Because if you are dead then there is no you to be dead.
You will die but you will never "be" dead. Because once that happens there is no you to be anything.
A fire's natural state is burning. Not burning out, because once it burns out it is no longer fire but rather ash.
I’ve been telling my brother this since we were little, I remember floating through vast darkness with specs(stars?) everywhere, then suddenly entering consciousness. I’m assuming that darkness was before I was born. Maybe we return to that after
It’s a fair thing to assume that it is nothing after death, but here in this reality, there is still time and it progresses for the other observers in this world. Eventually, the universe will be reborn. The impossibly microscopic particle which contains ‘you’ and your consciousness, will find a new host one day, and you will be born again because matter cannot truly be created or destroyed.
I love this question!!!
To your ongoing perception, death will seem an explosion of experience, not the end of it. Let me paint a picture.
The earth is a ball of carbon that activated a game called biological life a couple of billion years ago. Consciousness operates like wifi around the earth with a sense of it all being One (it's not just one being at the next level of consciousness, but all that we are could fit into a single consciousness of a being at the next level, so it feels like it's "all beings" to us on an individual level) until it grabs a tiny bit of that earth (because the rules of the game said you could) and tries to control it for several decades until the earth takes it back. The earth almost always takes it back. That's gravity. That's what we are doing here, in a tiny nutshell, and when you take a break from it, you are swimming in the "All". It's not that there is no 'you'. You're in there somewhere. You just have the priority of the "All", so, yeah, your life is.. I mean, you know your life. I don't.
Death isn't a state, because separation isn't a state, it's the transition from one state to another. So, no. Not technically, is the answer to your question.
[But, it's like a death becomes musical.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baaK0vG6fhc)
No but now I have a soul, a body, a one and only life, family, friends, experiences, dreams and goals to lose. Now it’s everything to lose. Different to when we came into this world
Until that happens, what will you do?
Knowing that death could happen at any time is hardly rectifiable. It’s the most unnatural state compared to our knowledge of life.
My advice? It’s going to happen some day, best not to worry about it till it happens
No, death is inevitable but it is the end of us, not our natural state. Our consciousness only exists while we are alive, so being alive is our natural state.
I wish I could override my lizard/ape brain that feels this horror towards being nothing forever. I know intellectually that I've already non-experienced nothingness before I was born. It's just that, now that I'm alive with an ego-self, I have everything to lose. I've been given involuntary attachment to conscious existence, even though I actually don't enjoy existing and regret being born. This is my "one precious life", even though it's objectively worthless and value is just a human imagining. We spend most of existence being dead non-entities. I should be okay with it. But I'm not.
Have you ever experienced anesthesia? IMO I've already experienced death through anesthesia and going to sleep every night.
Anesthesia is a crazy experience.
My personal experience on anesthesia was that I didn't even comprehend or experience myself becoming increasingly unconscious. I literally just was, and then I wasn't. So weird. Although I did have a "blip" of becoming increasingly conscious again as I recall a moment where I heard nurses talk to me asking me to move and I remember it being extremely difficult trying to answer back. I also don't remember seeing anything or experiencing anything else with any of my other senses during this time. I then was unconscious again and then was suddenly fully awake again, although pretty zonked out, lol. I'm not even sure if that blip of consciousness was actually real, but I've heard that the last of senses to go and also first to come back is hearing, so it makes sense if I was only really able to hear things during that blip.
Mine was hearing too! I could hear the surgeon talking and then it was like I opened my eyes seconds later and I was in recovery.
Agreed. When I went under, there was no drifting off or anything else to indicate I wouldn’t be conscious. Just waking up somewhere else once it wore off.
I would not say sleep is like death
In all honesty I'd prefer this to an afterlife I have no control over
Facts, and logically AL make no sense nor can it exist
That was good
How are you so full of self doubt in so many areas of your life, but so sure that death is nothingness? You were born out of the universe. What does that tell you about reality?
Haha. Wow, you regret being born? You don’t enjoy existing? Do you have friends? Have you ever been rock climbing? Been to Italy? Fell in love? Played Zelda? Learned an instrument? Had a child? Solved a tough problem? You don’t see this whole as an opportunity? You see it as a cruel game where someone gives you something only to take it away?
“We die, and we do not die.” — Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki
No our natural state is to be alive. Nature? And we never experience our own death, only the death of others. > If yes, why are we so afraid? A survival trait of higher animals. Also parents will die for their children. > Saying goodbye to the whole world, everything you know, and knowing that within a few seconds and minutes you’ll slip into eternal, dark, vast never-ending nothingness. No, you as likely as not will not slip into anything. > How on EARTH are we supposed to be okay with this and be able to do this so easily? Again a survival tool. Why do you think after school, around 12 / 13 most kids stop being creative, or maybe no longer are, just endless computer games, then fixations on sex and materialism.
Our natural state is non-existence. It’s the state “we” have spent and will apparently spend the most time in
Something cannot exist in non-existence. And without existence there is no time. Time is the existence of things.
Time is a human construct, stop with the word play pal
So before humans there was no time. There is a refutation of that in Quentin Meillassoux's book. No big bang 13 billion years ago. No life on earth 4 billion tears ago, or dinosaurs 150 million years ago.
Energy can't be created or destroyed, what did you think exist? This claim imply infinity exist and energy always existed. Define your definition of time? What you might be calling time might be just motion. We use time time to measure, basically a ruler
My definition is what I experience. I know there are others and Penrose thinks it require mass. And I thought energy can become mass and visa versa, how atom bombs work. But nothing to do with existentialism.
Non-exisrence is not a state. It's the absence of any state of being. It's not simply the opposite of existence.
How do you know that for sure? I have been following a lot of hospice workers (doctors, nurses etc) and all of them mention deathbed visions and people experiencing a loved one coming to "get them."
Those are likely hallucinations as the brain releases powerful hormones to help make the transition from life to death more pleasant
According to research there wasnt anything found though. And it can happen months before the person passes. Theres even an article about a dying child who said he saw his mom and older brother come to get him (they had all been in a car crash). The boy had been in coma and did not know they had died. So maybe youre right. But maybe it is also ok to assume that our death isnt the end.
Personally as someone who has hallucinated in the past, I can't put my beliefs on simply what someone has seen. If I do then goblins are seemingly likely to be real.
Thats up to you. Personally I do not see the point in going around fearing the nothingness. Even if Im wrong I still prefer believing there is more than we know.
I am more bothered with what seems most true and not what seems most comfortable. I don't chose my beliefs based on what i would prefer to believe.
Why does your version seem more true?
Because I don't trust eyewitness testimony. And without that most supporting evidence for an afterlife falls apart.
True Believing whats most comfortable is mad copium but i rather stay away from belief system and wait for facts
What would be the evolutionary advantage of this release of powerful hormones to make transition more pleasant though, and how would it be selected?
Only your ego. You as a living thing have in essence been alive since life began.
If you believe there is no experience after death, it's not "eternal, dark, vast never-ending nothingness" or "terrifying nothing." People like to compare it to what it was like before you were born, which works because you don't have memories of that, so you can assume there was no experience. No experience isn't good or bad. It's nothing. But also, there might be an experience after death.
I remember floating though vast darkness with specs everywhere(stars?) then suddenly entering consciousness(earthly).
We're hard-wired to anticipate "next moments" as a survival strategy and so many people struggle to comprehend a state in which there are no "next moments". The closest they can come is to imagine themselves suspended in a black void forever, which is a terrifying but fortunately irrational image. Medical science very strongly indicates that death is, in fact, the ultimate extinction of all sensation and agency. You stop breathing, the electrical energy that literally powered your life dissipates into the immediate atmosphere as heat, and you're done. Game over. Most people are most definitely not okay with that. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book *The Denial of Death*, Ernest Becker argued that the fear of mortality, coupled with the human understanding that death is inevitable, has driven most of human psychology and basically all of civilization, starting with supernaturalist religions that promise afterlives of eternal bliss or reincarnation into new life. The good news is that there are entire schools of philosophy (notably humanism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and existentialism) that teach how to be okay with the natural fact of mortality. Most of them begin with the premise that it is wise to accept the inevitable by learning to surrender to it gracefully - [https://alt-death.com/2023/09/21/drop-tower-shugendo/](https://alt-death.com/2023/09/21/drop-tower-shugendo/). Then they focus on teaching how to live worthwhile, meaningful and enjoyable lives while you still can - [https://alt-death.com/2020/07/21/have-a-child-plant-a-tree-write-a-book/](https://alt-death.com/2020/07/21/have-a-child-plant-a-tree-write-a-book/).
Hi! Terminal brain cancer patient here (glioblastoma). My situation is tricky in that for the moment I am doing very well but the average prognosis for my condition is shockingly bad (16 months), so I am somewhere in between the scenarios in which death is purely abstract and the one you present here of having only a few hours to live (in my case it seems to be months or at most years, but I would have to be a miracle to last a decade, and I’m young, 38). I try to take the situation with stoicism and black humor, but some days it is hard and I sense that the only strategy is accepting that it is hard: certain death goes against our primary, hard-wired biological imperative (evade death to stay alive) and our primary psychological instinct (not thinking about death). Have a nice day!
Could be worse.
Defo.
I can't even begin to comprehend what you are going trough. Trying to see myself in your shoes that must be so hard. I'm so sorry.
Thank you for the solidarity! The crazy thing is that as humans we adapt to almost all things, and this is my life now. Some days are hard, others less so. Right after diagnosis I felt that getting used to live with this would be impossible, but I am so far doing well, and an unexpected sense of normalcy has crept in.
Personally, I see it like this: I'm not afraid of death, I'm afraid of dying before accomplishing the things I want to do with my life. Once I've done them, I don't care if I live or die.
Same I’m afraid of dying young and not getting the one and only chance ever, to live out my life and enjoy it for long and do all the things I want to do and see the future and how far the world and technology develops
I’m also afraid of dying and leaving my family and friends sad.
More like before we are us, our atoms are something else entirely, yet our natural state is unborn. Then we are us, our natural state is alive. Then we are no longer us to us, but there is an us we were to others, that is dead but living in memory. Then we are forgotten completely, but our atoms are now a part of something else entirely. The nuance of it all is more complicated than you're making it.
It’s all so terrifying
Nah. Remember what it was like before you were born? Nothing to be terrified of, and noone to be terrified.
Our human ego and emotions drive how we think about these things and our place in the cosmos. We are cursed with the ability to think abstractly about our existence and mortality. Death is a state of nonexistence and you stop being you upon death. Yeah your body is here and will eventually get recycled back into the universe, but *you* stops. So death can't be your natural state because you just don't exist. In that state of nothingness there is no you to even experience time and space or even being bounded by the laws of physics. Nothingness is truly nothing. The thought of death is uncomfortable. We can approach it however it makes us feel comfortable, but regardless how we think about it the outcome will be the same. We don't have to be okay with any of this. It is pretty fucked up. We could dwell on it and let it eat us from the inside. Or we can learn to accept it and take control. It's up to us to decide how to deal with it. It's your human mind assigning meaning to it and giving you this sense of anxiety. With that said if leaving something behind after you die is important to you, then perhaps that is something you could do. The beauty of being human is that we decide what gives life meaning despite how seemingly pointless it is.
>Is death our natural state? No. We didn't exist before we were born, we didn't have a state. We won't exist after we die, we won't have a state.
You know what I meant, not a state but the same void of non-existence that we can’t even comprehend with a human brain built to understand finite things
It is hard to comprehend for sure. None of it makes any logical sense to be honest. We are here for a few decades to be gone again for the rest of time, yet we are encoded with instinct to survive at all cost. We have a drive to reproduce yet the species itself is only temporary. Humans achieved consciousness and are clearly the only species that is different on this planet than the others, yet there were countless other species that have been here far longer and didn't evolve consciousness (i.e. any dinosaur species for example). I think we are missing a major breakthrough in understanding reality. I don't know if we ever get to that fact, but one thing I'm sure of, if we do it will be the time before that understanding and the time after.
How do we know we didn’t exist before we were born though…
Because there would have to be a soul, another world, and a vehicle or mechanism to get there. All of these are undetectable by our math and technology despite scanners of every kind and other means of discovery. But all those reasons are still secondary to the fact that there is no reason for all of that to exist except for our wishes.
I feel like the meaning of life is love. Its not to obsess over death, its not materialistic (wordly) things, so it only makes sense to me that we comfort each other through this weird process called life.
Not afraid of death, scared of it being sudden and painful. Scared of what it will do to my family. Scared they won’t thrive without me. Consciousness is where all the terror is. That’s why we’re in this sub. No consciousness is a-ok with me.
Death has no memory of this. That’s what is scary. Not death itself. Personally I’m excited for it. I’ve experienced some weird things though so knowing things don’t actually end helps a lot. Understanding that I’ve been through it before helps. It’s like remembering something you forgot existed. These are my personal findings though, so anyone reading it without a grain of salt would be amiss to do so.
What kind of things have happened to you
You know, honestly, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was having a bad day. And a lot of very bad things have happened to me actually.
I was still clear enough with what I said. Your just hyper focused on the literal ‘surgeon’ example. You should be able to extrapolate that logic to many different fields that require a lot of focus. So saying I’m discriminating against surgeons is ridiculous to me. But I do think if someone is performing surgery they shouldn’t be looking at a patient thinking of something completely removed from the situation at hand. That says nothing of what they do with their time outside of surgery or what they decide to pursue. The context is people chasing dreams with very low success rates and ignoring building other valuable skills for their life while doing so. If it was confusing overall for you, my apologies, but I don’t see a 100 people on here telling me I was writing gibberish either.
This thread seems to be attempting to soothe your feelings by reframing death as something other than existentially horrifying. As much as you may want to be persuaded by such (well-intentioned) arguments, it is not reassuring or comforting to face the thought of an eternal and indifferent nothingness. Have you even tried praying? There is no naturalistic scientific theory that can account for the origin of the universe that does not break causality. In short, the physical universe can not have created itself and can not have existed eternally. That is science. As much as some want to deny it, the ONLY rational and logical option is that it was created by a Creator. Have you tried praying?
We don't know everything about the universe. We may never know. You don't know that the universe could not have existed spontaneously. A Creator is just an attempt to explain existence because we don't have all the information. There will always be that bridge between knowing and not knowing. But the more we know the more we chip away the notion of a Creator. I can still make the claim that this Creator could not create itself. It would have to come from something right? And to go on about how the Creator has always been there or that it *can* create itself is just our imagination. Well how is that different than the universe always existing or having been created from nothing? You don't see how the universe can do that, but you insist a Creator can exist without any evidence. And suppose this Creator did create everything. It probably doesn't know we exist. We are but a tiny insignificant part of the universe. Yet people believe it cares about any of us? It wants us to worship it? Why? An all powerful creator doesn't need our help. It doesn't need to care about us. Praying may be comforting, but there is no transmission. If you wish to believe in that that's your choice. But by no means is a Creator the *only* option.
i hope so
Keep looking at what remains after everything that changes is gone. You found it!?! Does it change at all? Then let it go and keep looking. All the questions are answered
Our natural state is life I would say. Why? Because if you are dead then there is no you to be dead. You will die but you will never "be" dead. Because once that happens there is no you to be anything. A fire's natural state is burning. Not burning out, because once it burns out it is no longer fire but rather ash.
I’ve been telling my brother this since we were little, I remember floating through vast darkness with specs(stars?) everywhere, then suddenly entering consciousness. I’m assuming that darkness was before I was born. Maybe we return to that after
It’s a fair thing to assume that it is nothing after death, but here in this reality, there is still time and it progresses for the other observers in this world. Eventually, the universe will be reborn. The impossibly microscopic particle which contains ‘you’ and your consciousness, will find a new host one day, and you will be born again because matter cannot truly be created or destroyed.
Our natural state is not death *per se*. I would say our natural state could be better described as “not living”.
I love this question!!! To your ongoing perception, death will seem an explosion of experience, not the end of it. Let me paint a picture. The earth is a ball of carbon that activated a game called biological life a couple of billion years ago. Consciousness operates like wifi around the earth with a sense of it all being One (it's not just one being at the next level of consciousness, but all that we are could fit into a single consciousness of a being at the next level, so it feels like it's "all beings" to us on an individual level) until it grabs a tiny bit of that earth (because the rules of the game said you could) and tries to control it for several decades until the earth takes it back. The earth almost always takes it back. That's gravity. That's what we are doing here, in a tiny nutshell, and when you take a break from it, you are swimming in the "All". It's not that there is no 'you'. You're in there somewhere. You just have the priority of the "All", so, yeah, your life is.. I mean, you know your life. I don't. Death isn't a state, because separation isn't a state, it's the transition from one state to another. So, no. Not technically, is the answer to your question. [But, it's like a death becomes musical.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baaK0vG6fhc)
How is "nothing" terrifying? Was it terrifying before you were born?
No but now I have a soul, a body, a one and only life, family, friends, experiences, dreams and goals to lose. Now it’s everything to lose. Different to when we came into this world
Ok so this is why dying may be scary, but not being dead.
Why do you think dying is the scary part?
It's the only part we can experience... you can't experience nothingness.
Until that happens, what will you do? Knowing that death could happen at any time is hardly rectifiable. It’s the most unnatural state compared to our knowledge of life. My advice? It’s going to happen some day, best not to worry about it till it happens
No, death is inevitable but it is the end of us, not our natural state. Our consciousness only exists while we are alive, so being alive is our natural state.
Ego = don’t wanna die, fear of death is ego’s protection system activating
Nobody knows and it’s time to stop fronting