@Georg Andexler Andexler Idk I'm just absolutely terrified at the thought! I think about it every single day. I just hope there is something after. The thought of that being the end is so depressing!
@@DrSlippyFist86It's a tricky one to deal with, death. But there are some things worth thinking about. (1) In nature, everything changes and is always changing. Every atom, every molecule, every person, animal, every idea, every concept, everything that has ever been, and everything that ever will be, is impermanent - that is, everything is changing. Because of time. Death, as a notion and a state, doesn't change. It is perhaps the one exception. But as humans, we have the tendency to fight against change. We become attached. To our friends and relatives. To our possessions. To our own lives, and to ourselves. This causes us to suffer. We don't want to grow old, or get sick, and we don't want to die. But the only way to live a life that's free of suffering, is to accept that change is integral. Physical pain is a sensation, and transient. I've been in prolonged physical and mental pain, so intense I thought it wouldn't stop. But it does. When we learn to observe pain, we can see that it's just another sensation. Sometimes it feels cold. Other times hot. Perhaps we get bitten by a snake: we are sweaty, woozy, nauseous. But if we learn to view these sensations differently - if we sit, and watch them, feel them, instead of trying to escape them, we can endure them, but even better, recognise that they're part of life. They'll come and go. Some people live their entire lives in immense physical pain and learn to accept that pain is not something to run from, to escape, but rather to be accepted. It needn't stop us from living good lives - even if I was confined to a wheelchair say, I would still be able to live a good life within the confines of that discomfort. Pain is part of life. Sickness is part of life. Death is part of life too. It's necessary. Being frightened of death is natural, but the true problem - as this very Twilight Zone episode discusses - is the fear. Fear is an uncomfortable sensation. But it comes and goes too. Fear of death can be very confronting. So, when you are feeling frightened, simply sit, and watch your thoughts. They rise, they stir up emotions and physical sensations, and then, they go, to be replaced by other thoughts. Ruminating on the fear of Death, then, something that nobody can change. I'll die. So will you. So will everyone you know. So meditate on death, and meditate - that is, sit and observe your thoughts and sensations - on your fear of death. Accept the feeling of fear. Recognise it is not something you can change. What you CAN change is your response to the fear. If you allow your fear to command your actions, soon, you'll be like I was. Your world will become very small. Your bedroom, if you're fortunate enough to have one, will become your entire world. You want to do things, see things, learn things, meet people, do good things - do not let fear, or more accurately your conditioned response to fear, prevent you from doing anything you want to do. You must see fear, like pain, or sadness - it's a sensation, a thought, linked sometimes to emotions, which themselves are passing sensations too. If a person is frightened or depressed for a year, or ten years, they may think each day, "this will never go away". It will. It might return. But regardless, you can still live the life you want. It's a matter of perspective. Fear, depression, even happiness, they're all sensations, and we apply labels to them. We want to escape fear, to run from it's source, to avoid it. We want to grasp happiness and keep it. Neither is realistic. Happiness can not be kept, nor can sadness. In fact, sadness is not worse or better than happiness. If you look very closely, if you observe your thoughts and your emotions very, very closely, and practice looking at these thoughts and sensations, you'll recognise that they are just like an itch. An itch compels us to scratch it. We want to get rid of it. Why ? Because it's uncomfortable. Why ? Because, we want to be comfortable. When someone says, "try to be happy", it's not much different than if they said "try to be sad". They're just bundles of thought, emotion and sensation, wrapped up, and they always rise and disappear, recur, then leave. It's our job as humans to unravel these bundles. Happiness is not a realistic goal in life. So what is ? To strive for freedom from suffering, and to help others be free of suffering too. How ? By being kind, compassionate, and giving, to ourselves, and to others. We do this, by, as I said, by thinking, and observing our minds and bodies. If you do this for an hour, you'll see how closely your fears, even your faintest fears, are connected to your actions. Often, even semi-conscious thoughts, thoughts or feelings we don't even notice, can drive our behaviour. We might choose to do something, or not to do something, and not know why - until we scrutinise our minds. You can do this at any time. As long as you're in a place where you'll be free from distraction. So your fear of death isn't a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It's just a sensation. When you practice observing your thoughts, you'll see this for yourself. This is not excessively deep, or demanding stuff. It is simple. It's not easy, but it is simple. Nothing in life is easy, but as the Irish poet and playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Life is not meant to be easy. But take courage, for it can be delightful."
@@DrSlippyFist86(2) In my first comment, I spoke about how everything in nature and life, everything in the physical universe, is always changing, and about how emotions and thoughts change too. About how you can observe your mind, and see that fear is not something to be avoided, nor even endured, but to be accepted wholeheartedly like all emotions, to be recognised, and analysed. Break it down. Your heart rate might go up. You might breathe faster. You might sweat or feel clammy hands. Your thoughts night fixate upon death (or other fears). You might think "I don't want to die", or "why do I have to die ?" Or "what will happen after I die ?" Your mind will show you a million, a billion of these thoughts. They'll constantly come into your head, but they'll also leave too. Don't avoid them. Don't distract yourself. The ultimate goal, is to see fear for what it is. A combination of feelings and thoughts. It's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. If we can fear bad, and try to avoid it, we'll never understand it. We'll never realise fear is similar to an itch. Or a headache. (Or for that matter, it's similar to any and every other feeling, in that, it is just a feeling.) It has physical aspects, like increased heart rate, it has mental aspects, and emotional ones too. You can try to avoid fear, but to do so, you'll need to change your behaviours. You'll can never be rid of fear. You can't wish it away. You can drink alcohol, but then, the fear will return again. Attempts to flee from what we incorrectly perceive as negative emotions, will cause far more harm to us and to others, than acceptance. So I've talked about the fear of death. What about death itself ? That's a very interesting topic. Imagine if you never died. You would still watch your loved ones and friends die. You would eventually watch the planet itself die, and be reborn in some other way, some other form. But you'd suffer constantly. Even if you didn't age, you would watch everything else age, and die. But ultimately, after the sun burns out and the solar system changes, you'll either live on a rocky wasteland, or, in absence of gravity will float through space for millions, perhaps billions of years, burned by the intense heat of stars, frozen by the intense cold of space. The suffering you'd endure would be intense, and you'd want to die. If you were immortal, you'd probably want to die after a few hundred years, but it depends. Now, if NOTHING died - let's say every person and living creature is immortal - then life would be meaningless. Because the meaning we get from life, is from moments. A day at the beach with friends. Your first dinner with a girlfriend. The day your child is born. All of that becomes meaningless, because if nobody dies, then, no moment is more, or less special than any other. Salience is the notion that humans become accustomed to most things. When we see our first child born, we're filled with emotion and joy. It's a unique experience. The same even extends to 2nd, 3rd or even, say, 20th child. But the feeling reduces. You might still love your 300th child, but after a while, the joy will be reduced to the point where having children is as chore. The same goes for every experience. Seeing a new city for the first time. Climbing a mountain. Conquering a fear. Exhilarating for the first time, the second or third, after the thousandth time, it'll be like putting on your shoes. You probably felt incredible the first time you put on your shoes. Now, you're used to it. Without death, life itself will become stale. So one perspective is, we need death to give our lives meaning. Other perspectives are numerous and depend on your beliefs or convictions. A Christian (as we saw in the comments here) takes solace in Christ. Who knew that our lives are temporary, that we all must die, and who said that, if we follow His principles, we will achieve an eternal joy - we will have an afterlife in which there is no such notion as suffering. Perhaps in Heaven, every day is like being born again, or each day is like a perfect childhood day. Perhaps days and temporality just aren't notions we can apply to Heaven. In Buddhism, practitioners believe that we are all trapped in an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and that to break out of this cycle we need to become truly aware None of us chose to be born (so far as we know). We were given the opportunity to live. We were given our lives. Our lives are not ours, really - we just think they are. But if you look very closely, you'll come to an understanding. Our bodies are not our own. We move them, by sending electrical impulses to our nervous systems. But we didn't conceive of this very system. An atheist would say, evolution over millions of years caused DNA and cells to change, to progressively confer on us, a central nervous system. The capacity for thought. For self awareness. A Muslim might say God (or Allah, which means God in Arabic) gave us our lives. Whatever way you look at it, we didn't choose our lives. And a Buddhist would say that in reality, the concept of "self" is just as illusory as the idea that we should detest and avoid fear and other discomforts. A Buddhist would say, are you the same person as you were when you were 4 years old ? Certainly, we have attributes and behaviours that might stay the same, but in the Buddhist view of the world, all things are connected. This matches physical reality, in that all atoms, and molecules change form and state, bind to each other, to form new molecules, become unbound, ionised, atoms are wrenched from molecules to become ions, electrons shift, the air we breathe is like an ocean of swirling, changing particles. The ground we walk upon changes more slowly but it's the same idea. Surface reactions happen all the time. You can trace an atomic path from the place you are standing, to any other place on earth. The aroms you're built of, were once part of, say, a building in the Roman Empire. You might breathe the same O2 molecule, that Julius Caesar once breathed - perhaps one of the oxygens is the same, and the other was in the water he drank. Or was in his bloodstream. Physically, we are all made of the same stuff. So is everything in the known universe. So what we believe to be ours is not. It has no owner. It may or may not, depending on your beliefs, have a creator. In that purely atomic sense, every human, every plant, every animal, every planet and star in the sky, is connected - the connections are much closer, the closer you are. So, when we die, whether our minds continue or not, whether we continue experiencing something after death, whether we go to Heaven or whether we are reborn, or even if our final thought is like passing out, our bodies will return to the air and the sky and water and to space, and parts of our bodies, tiny particles, might travel further. I personally find that a comforting thought.
@@DrSlippyFist86(3) So all in all, you might not decide to view your fears and thoughts as transient. You might stay frightened of death (and that's understandable). You might do things to distract yourself from the fear, or to lessen it, or avoid it. That's alright too, it's not optimal, it will lead to further suffering, but it's a common approach - it's challenging to view your thoughts and emotions and cease labelling them as good, or bad. So here are some things I've experienced that might help you: - Do not try to live a life of constant joy. Do not try to live in discomfort. Recognise, observe, and learn that your thoughts and emotions will rise, fall, and the process will recur like all things do. So live your life, do the things you want to do, don't let fear stop you. Accept fear and in a way, become friends with it. - Time is a matter of perception. You can live a whole life in a dream, that, from an observers point of view, lasts just minutes. When you're doing strenuous exercise, time likely seems to go slower. Watching CZcams, it goes faster. If you can perceive time as slower or faster, then, as a philosophical question, could time not stand still ? Could you dream forever ? Perhaps that explains the afterlife. Perhaps as our last neuron fails, the last electrical signal flows through to the nervous system, stimulating a thought, or a sequence of thoughts, that we experience as eternal. - I personally have had many experiences that have taught me there is a greater consciousness, an aggregate of all those who have ever lived, which we become part of when we die. - There are places beyond the physical universe, and certain ways to get a fleeting glance of these. - Hope springs eternal: perhaps we can imagine our own personal heavens, and live in those places forever. - Perhaps we die, and are reborn until we achieve a state of nirvana, that is, a state where there is no suffering. - Perhaps we die and are reborn, then return to an afterlife, then return to humanity, or to some other form of consciousness. - Maybe our entire lives are an advanced simulation, each one of us programmed thousands of years in the future, as part of an incredibly advanced multi-user hallucination. You can speculate endlessly about this type of thing. There's no real proof until you reflect for so long and with such immense concentration, that you break through and you see that the notion of a linear life is very different from the reality. - All things are illusory, all things are transient. I was a physical scientist (a radiopharmaceutical chemist) for many years. Even the most meticulous scientific tools are illusory: a proton NMR machine uses the physical properties of hydrogen atoms to help you understand the structure of an unknown molecule. Or to confirm a molecule. But 1H-NMRs are actually, when you get to a high level of scientific research, very tricky. Sometimes, test outputs depend on the viewer's perception, knowledge, and the limits of their imaginations. In fact, that happens frequently in scientific research. All in all, I am about the most empirical person you could meet, I aim to be rigorous of thought, skeptical and questioning. But: - I have had the fortune to be granted many very intense experiences, some quite painful and others quite wonderful, that have allowed me to understand that there's far far more to life and to death than we can comprehend. That the Christian view of the world, the Muslim view, and the Eastern views, particularly the Buddhist, are all quite similar in many ways. Only the theologians, monks, bishops and even Emperors who came after Christ added various rules and regulations - as humans are wont to do. But in their general aspects these religions, and most human spiritual beliefs, even animistic beliefs like those practiced by different tribes in the Amazon or Aboriginal Australians, share significant similarities. They harmonise. The Australian Aboriginal religions are compelling. They, like Native American Indian tribes, confer great power upon nature and the natural world. Yet they still believe in deities, many believe in a great spirit, coincident, if you do not restrict yourself, with the God of Abraham and Isaac. - The point is, humans long for an afterlife. Some of us have had the blessing to experience it, just a glance. Not to understand it, but to know it's there. Imagine a square had some consciousness, and could see and think. A square is a 2-dimensional Euclidean object. Imagine this square was able to see, for a brief time, a 3-dimensional object, say, a cube. The square cannot visualise the cube because he doesn't know that height exists, until, he sees it, just briefly. Now, he knows the cube exists. He knows it's there, even if all the other squares refuse to believe in a 3rd dimension. For the square, there's no evidence of height. But it's there. And the square who has seen the 3rd dimension may forget the particulars, but he knows there's a 3rd dimension, even if he doesn't understand what that dimension is. This is like seeing and experiencing the afterlife, from a human perspective. The viewer, the person having the experience, is limited by their human faculties. To truly see the unlimited, we must die. By no means is death the end. It's a physical process. It is, I certainly believe, much more than that too. But it's impossible to prove. Fearing death is natural, but if you can learn to accept the discomfort that comes with fear, if you can learn to understand that fear shouldn't be avoided, and if you can apply that same thinking to all emotions and thoughts, you will be much better off for it. You'll leave a note satisfied life. A life free of the unnecessary suffering we too often impose on ourselves.
Thanks for the bedtime stories, love twilight zone.
❤ this episode. Thanks for sharing
"Miss Dune, it's Doug James speaking". I just loved that variation on the outro
I feel sorry for her this is way better than the tv show for once i cant sleep without this on lol
This is one of my favorites! I'm absolutely terrified of death, so this one hits home!
I use to be that way until I accepted Jesus. Really brought me peace
@Georg Andexler Andexler Idk I'm just absolutely terrified at the thought! I think about it every single day. I just hope there is something after. The thought of that being the end is so depressing!
@@DrSlippyFist86It's a tricky one to deal with, death. But there are some things worth thinking about.
(1) In nature, everything changes and is always changing. Every atom, every molecule, every person, animal, every idea, every concept, everything that has ever been, and everything that ever will be, is impermanent - that is, everything is changing.
Because of time.
Death, as a notion and a state, doesn't change. It is perhaps the one exception. But as humans, we have the tendency to fight against change.
We become attached. To our friends and relatives. To our possessions. To our own lives, and to ourselves.
This causes us to suffer. We don't want to grow old, or get sick, and we don't want to die.
But the only way to live a life that's free of suffering, is to accept that change is integral.
Physical pain is a sensation, and transient. I've been in prolonged physical and mental pain, so intense I thought it wouldn't stop.
But it does.
When we learn to observe pain, we can see that it's just another sensation. Sometimes it feels cold. Other times hot. Perhaps we get bitten by a snake: we are sweaty, woozy, nauseous.
But if we learn to view these sensations differently - if we sit, and watch them, feel them, instead of trying to escape them, we can endure them, but even better, recognise that they're part of life. They'll come and go. Some people live their entire lives in immense physical pain and learn to accept that pain is not something to run from, to escape, but rather to be accepted. It needn't stop us from living good lives - even if I was confined to a wheelchair say, I would still be able to live a good life within the confines of that discomfort.
Pain is part of life. Sickness is part of life.
Death is part of life too.
It's necessary.
Being frightened of death is natural, but the true problem - as this very Twilight Zone episode discusses - is the fear. Fear is an uncomfortable sensation. But it comes and goes too.
Fear of death can be very confronting.
So, when you are feeling frightened, simply sit, and watch your thoughts. They rise, they stir up emotions and physical sensations, and then, they go, to be replaced by other thoughts.
Ruminating on the fear of Death, then, something that nobody can change.
I'll die. So will you. So will everyone you know.
So meditate on death, and meditate - that is, sit and observe your thoughts and sensations - on your fear of death.
Accept the feeling of fear. Recognise it is not something you can change. What you CAN change is your response to the fear.
If you allow your fear to command your actions, soon, you'll be like I was. Your world will become very small. Your bedroom, if you're fortunate enough to have one, will become your entire world.
You want to do things, see things, learn things, meet people, do good things - do not let fear, or more accurately your conditioned response to fear, prevent you from doing anything you want to do. You must see fear, like pain, or sadness - it's a sensation, a thought, linked sometimes to emotions, which themselves are passing sensations too. If a person is frightened or depressed for a year, or ten years, they may think each day, "this will never go away".
It will. It might return. But regardless, you can still live the life you want.
It's a matter of perspective. Fear, depression, even happiness, they're all sensations, and we apply labels to them. We want to escape fear, to run from it's source, to avoid it. We want to grasp happiness and keep it.
Neither is realistic. Happiness can not be kept, nor can sadness. In fact, sadness is not worse or better than happiness. If you look very closely, if you observe your thoughts and your emotions very, very closely, and practice looking at these thoughts and sensations, you'll recognise that they are just like an itch.
An itch compels us to scratch it. We want to get rid of it. Why ? Because it's uncomfortable. Why ? Because, we want to be comfortable.
When someone says, "try to be happy", it's not much different than if they said "try to be sad". They're just bundles of thought, emotion and sensation, wrapped up, and they always rise and disappear, recur, then leave. It's our job as humans to unravel these bundles.
Happiness is not a realistic goal in life.
So what is ?
To strive for freedom from suffering, and to help others be free of suffering too.
How ? By being kind, compassionate, and giving, to ourselves, and to others.
We do this, by, as I said, by thinking, and observing our minds and bodies. If you do this for an hour, you'll see how closely your fears, even your faintest fears, are connected to your actions. Often, even semi-conscious thoughts, thoughts or feelings we don't even notice, can drive our behaviour.
We might choose to do something, or not to do something, and not know why - until we scrutinise our minds. You can do this at any time. As long as you're in a place where you'll be free from distraction.
So your fear of death isn't a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It's just a sensation. When you practice observing your thoughts, you'll see this for yourself.
This is not excessively deep, or demanding stuff. It is simple. It's not easy, but it is simple. Nothing in life is easy, but as the Irish poet and playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Life is not meant to be easy. But take courage, for it can be delightful."
@@DrSlippyFist86(2) In my first comment, I spoke about how everything in nature and life, everything in the physical universe, is always changing, and about how emotions and thoughts change too.
About how you can observe your mind, and see that fear is not something to be avoided, nor even endured, but to be accepted wholeheartedly like all emotions, to be recognised, and analysed. Break it down. Your heart rate might go up. You might breathe faster. You might sweat or feel clammy hands. Your thoughts night fixate upon death (or other fears). You might think "I don't want to die", or "why do I have to die ?" Or "what will happen after I die ?"
Your mind will show you a million, a billion of these thoughts. They'll constantly come into your head, but they'll also leave too.
Don't avoid them. Don't distract yourself. The ultimate goal, is to see fear for what it is. A combination of feelings and thoughts.
It's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. If we can fear bad, and try to avoid it, we'll never understand it. We'll never realise fear is similar to an itch. Or a headache. (Or for that matter, it's similar to any and every other feeling, in that, it is just a feeling.) It has physical aspects, like increased heart rate, it has mental aspects, and emotional ones too.
You can try to avoid fear, but to do so, you'll need to change your behaviours. You'll can never be rid of fear. You can't wish it away. You can drink alcohol, but then, the fear will return again.
Attempts to flee from what we incorrectly perceive as negative emotions, will cause far more harm to us and to others, than acceptance.
So I've talked about the fear of death. What about death itself ?
That's a very interesting topic.
Imagine if you never died. You would still watch your loved ones and friends die. You would eventually watch the planet itself die, and be reborn in some other way, some other form.
But you'd suffer constantly. Even if you didn't age, you would watch everything else age, and die. But ultimately, after the sun burns out and the solar system changes, you'll either live on a rocky wasteland, or, in absence of gravity will float through space for millions, perhaps billions of years, burned by the intense heat of stars, frozen by the intense cold of space.
The suffering you'd endure would be intense, and you'd want to die. If you were immortal, you'd probably want to die after a few hundred years, but it depends.
Now, if NOTHING died - let's say every person and living creature is immortal - then life would be meaningless. Because the meaning we get from life, is from moments. A day at the beach with friends. Your first dinner with a girlfriend. The day your child is born.
All of that becomes meaningless, because if nobody dies, then, no moment is more, or less special than any other.
Salience is the notion that humans become accustomed to most things. When we see our first child born, we're filled with emotion and joy. It's a unique experience. The same even extends to 2nd, 3rd or even, say, 20th child.
But the feeling reduces. You might still love your 300th child, but after a while, the joy will be reduced to the point where having children is as chore.
The same goes for every experience. Seeing a new city for the first time. Climbing a mountain. Conquering a fear. Exhilarating for the first time, the second or third, after the thousandth time, it'll be like putting on your shoes.
You probably felt incredible the first time you put on your shoes. Now, you're used to it.
Without death, life itself will become stale.
So one perspective is, we need death to give our lives meaning.
Other perspectives are numerous and depend on your beliefs or convictions. A Christian (as we saw in the comments here) takes solace in Christ. Who knew that our lives are temporary, that we all must die, and who said that, if we follow His principles, we will achieve an eternal joy - we will have an afterlife in which there is no such notion as suffering. Perhaps in Heaven, every day is like being born again, or each day is like a perfect childhood day. Perhaps days and temporality just aren't notions we can apply to Heaven.
In Buddhism, practitioners believe that we are all trapped in an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and that to break out of this cycle we need to become truly aware
None of us chose to be born (so far as we know). We were given the opportunity to live. We were given our lives. Our lives are not ours, really - we just think they are. But if you look very closely, you'll come to an understanding.
Our bodies are not our own. We move them, by sending electrical impulses to our nervous systems. But we didn't conceive of this very system. An atheist would say, evolution over millions of years caused DNA and cells to change, to progressively confer on us, a central nervous system. The capacity for thought.
For self awareness.
A Muslim might say God (or Allah, which means God in Arabic) gave us our lives.
Whatever way you look at it, we didn't choose our lives.
And a Buddhist would say that in reality, the concept of "self" is just as illusory as the idea that we should detest and avoid fear and other discomforts.
A Buddhist would say, are you the same person as you were when you were 4 years old ? Certainly, we have attributes and behaviours that might stay the same, but in the Buddhist view of the world, all things are connected. This matches physical reality, in that all atoms, and molecules change form and state, bind to each other, to form new molecules, become unbound, ionised, atoms are wrenched from molecules to become ions, electrons shift, the air we breathe is like an ocean of swirling, changing particles. The ground we walk upon changes more slowly but it's the same idea. Surface reactions happen all the time.
You can trace an atomic path from the place you are standing, to any other place on earth. The aroms you're built of, were once part of, say, a building in the Roman Empire. You might breathe the same O2 molecule, that Julius Caesar once breathed - perhaps one of the oxygens is the same, and the other was in the water he drank. Or was in his bloodstream.
Physically, we are all made of the same stuff. So is everything in the known universe.
So what we believe to be ours is not. It has no owner. It may or may not, depending on your beliefs, have a creator.
In that purely atomic sense, every human, every plant, every animal, every planet and star in the sky, is connected - the connections are much closer, the closer you are.
So, when we die, whether our minds continue or not, whether we continue experiencing something after death, whether we go to Heaven or whether we are reborn, or even if our final thought is like passing out, our bodies will return to the air and the sky and water and to space, and parts of our bodies, tiny particles, might travel further.
I personally find that a comforting thought.
@@DrSlippyFist86(3) So all in all, you might not decide to view your fears and thoughts as transient. You might stay frightened of death (and that's understandable). You might do things to distract yourself from the fear, or to lessen it, or avoid it.
That's alright too, it's not optimal, it will lead to further suffering, but it's a common approach - it's challenging to view your thoughts and emotions and cease labelling them as good, or bad.
So here are some things I've experienced that might help you:
- Do not try to live a life of constant joy. Do not try to live in discomfort. Recognise, observe, and learn that your thoughts and emotions will rise, fall, and the process will recur like all things do.
So live your life, do the things you want to do, don't let fear stop you. Accept fear and in a way, become friends with it.
- Time is a matter of perception. You can live a whole life in a dream, that, from an observers point of view, lasts just minutes.
When you're doing strenuous exercise, time likely seems to go slower. Watching CZcams, it goes faster.
If you can perceive time as slower or faster, then, as a philosophical question, could time not stand still ? Could you dream forever ? Perhaps that explains the afterlife. Perhaps as our last neuron fails, the last electrical signal flows through to the nervous system, stimulating a thought, or a sequence of thoughts, that we experience as eternal.
- I personally have had many experiences that have taught me there is a greater consciousness, an aggregate of all those who have ever lived, which we become part of when we die.
- There are places beyond the physical universe, and certain ways to get a fleeting glance of these.
- Hope springs eternal: perhaps we can imagine our own personal heavens, and live in those places forever.
- Perhaps we die, and are reborn until we achieve a state of nirvana, that is, a state where there is no suffering.
- Perhaps we die and are reborn, then return to an afterlife, then return to humanity, or to some other form of consciousness.
- Maybe our entire lives are an advanced simulation, each one of us programmed thousands of years in the future, as part of an incredibly advanced multi-user hallucination.
You can speculate endlessly about this type of thing. There's no real proof until you reflect for so long and with such immense concentration, that you break through and you see that the notion of a linear life is very different from the reality.
- All things are illusory, all things are transient. I was a physical scientist (a radiopharmaceutical chemist) for many years. Even the most meticulous scientific tools are illusory: a proton NMR machine uses the physical properties of hydrogen atoms to help you understand the structure of an unknown molecule. Or to confirm a molecule. But 1H-NMRs are actually, when you get to a high level of scientific research, very tricky. Sometimes, test outputs depend on the viewer's perception, knowledge, and the limits of their imaginations. In fact, that happens frequently in scientific research.
All in all, I am about the most empirical person you could meet, I aim to be rigorous of thought, skeptical and questioning.
But:
- I have had the fortune to be granted many very intense experiences, some quite painful and others quite wonderful, that have allowed me to understand that there's far far more to life and to death than we can comprehend.
That the Christian view of the world, the Muslim view, and the Eastern views, particularly the Buddhist, are all quite similar in many ways. Only the theologians, monks, bishops and even Emperors who came after Christ added various rules and regulations - as humans are wont to do.
But in their general aspects these religions, and most human spiritual beliefs, even animistic beliefs like those practiced by different tribes in the Amazon or Aboriginal Australians, share significant similarities. They harmonise. The Australian Aboriginal religions are compelling. They, like Native American Indian tribes, confer great power upon nature and the natural world.
Yet they still believe in deities, many believe in a great spirit, coincident, if you do not restrict yourself, with the God of Abraham and Isaac.
- The point is, humans long for an afterlife. Some of us have had the blessing to experience it, just a glance. Not to understand it, but to know it's there.
Imagine a square had some consciousness, and could see and think.
A square is a 2-dimensional Euclidean object. Imagine this square was able to see, for a brief time, a 3-dimensional object, say, a cube.
The square cannot visualise the cube because he doesn't know that height exists, until, he sees it, just briefly.
Now, he knows the cube exists. He knows it's there, even if all the other squares refuse to believe in a 3rd dimension. For the square, there's no evidence of height. But it's there. And the square who has seen the 3rd dimension may forget the particulars, but he knows there's a 3rd dimension, even if he doesn't understand what that dimension is.
This is like seeing and experiencing the afterlife, from a human perspective.
The viewer, the person having the experience, is limited by their human faculties. To truly see the unlimited, we must die.
By no means is death the end. It's a physical process. It is, I certainly believe, much more than that too.
But it's impossible to prove. Fearing death is natural, but if you can learn to accept the discomfort that comes with fear, if you can learn to understand that fear shouldn't be avoided, and if you can apply that same thinking to all emotions and thoughts, you will be much better off for it. You'll leave a note satisfied life. A life free of the unnecessary suffering we too often impose on ourselves.
So kool
I like how the begining shows us how she pictures death to contress how death really comes to her
Contress?
Luv this eps but im not scared of death