Hard time imagining death

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Over the past day or so, I've been obsessing on what would happen if something came and crushed my cranium. All of my seeing and hearing and thinking would cease forever! That is such a difficult thing to comprehend.

I cannot imagine myself being dead, no longer seeing, hearing, and thinking things.

yeah! it boggles the mind. like sometimes i get those dreams where i die and it is weird to explain. i usually just wake up.

there are much better ways to die than via crushed skull. heaven will exist no matter how soon or how dilatory our departure from the mortal plane.

Just compare it to the time before you were conceived, its probably pretty much the same.

Do you mean heaven literally (as in the heaven espoused by the major religions) or figuratively? If it is the former, I would observe that you feel comfortable delivering dogma as if it were fact and would consequently wonder if you are aware that some people may find this redolent of ignorance and indoctrination. If it is the latter. perhaps you would expand?
In either case, I refer you to the words of Isaac Asimov - a man of sober and considered thought;
"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all... I personally resent it bitterly."

<--- Asks himself frequently, "Death, where is thy sting?"

I make myself the "guide and leader" of nobody. but I reserve the right to speak what is on my mind, even if you don't agree with it. you have the right to espouse no heaven, and I have the right to espouse heaven. so we're even. freedom of speech. if "ignorant and doctrinaire" i'm to be, then I will make the most of it.

We are made of stardust and we will return to stardust. If you look at it that way then we have been here when the universe began and we will be here until it ends. It's hard to imagine what happens to our consciousness after brain death. I like to think that the universe is conscious and I will always be part of that greater consciousness.

I wish I were a rock, but a locomotive rock, so that I could just sit and observe. It'd be just about the same as now, just sitting and observing, but at least I would not have to deal with my observing being cut short.

I feel kinda like a vampire, not really part of life, but I still observe, while pretending to be part of life. I heard this analogy a few years back on a web page of someone with both ASD and GID, and I thought it applied to me well. We are to observe, but not touch, not to fully participate in life. It's just that, for this vampire, why is death on my way? Why can't I be like the vampires in the movies where I live forever?

I find complete nothingness really hard to wrap my head around, too.

In fact I read a scientific paper on this a while ago that postulated that this might be why people all over the world tend to believe in the afterlife-- we've got a cognitive bias towards believing we will always exist. It's near impossible for people in general to imagine someone not-existing at all, even to the point where people who don't believe in afterlives will attribute things to dead people which are impossible (like that a dead person can still know things, etc.)

It's here if anyone is interested: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/Instituteo ... 244,en.pdf

Thanks. I can't tough it out like those skeptics and atheists, LOL.

you and me both. I can't handle the thought that after a lifetime struggle, that I shall just rot with no heavenly respite. I refuse to believe in such a depressing thing.

Me, though, I've been concerned about the opposite: eternal punishment.

I don't believe in that, either. the whole purpose of reincarnation is that we learn how to evolve in spirit, in the self-contained classroom called earth, under the burden of these heavy gross physical bodies, which is akin to running a practice race wearing heavy ankle weights, then ditching the weights for the real race.

Like most abject atheists, Asimov was very angry and blamed all the bitterness inside him on Christianity, which in the grand scheme of things, is hardly the villain of the Cosmos, whether you accept or reject it as a personal dogma. To assume that humanity, in some five thousand years of civilization has uncovered all there is to know in or about the entire universe is arrogant and childish in the extreme.

With quantum and string theory, we are only beginning to dip our mental toes in the ocean of potential knowledge and already we're faced with concepts like multiverses and multiple dimensions of spacetime, in which might exist inconceivable and infinite forms of consciousness and biological life. To assume that any or all parts of reality generate spontaneously, or to assume that no creative intelligence could possibly create or invest them, or that the multiverse itself may not be somehow alive and conscious, involved in an eternal act of self-creation and subjective experience is closing oneself off from potential knowledge and experience and that is itself the act of a small mind.

The human mind thrives on symbolism and that's all religion is, the mind generating Jungian archetypes to help itself parse out metaphysical information and make it comprehensible to the mundane. At its best, it invests society with art, culture and societal values, at its worst its perverted to justify conflict and war (not that humans don't find plenty of excuses for war without religion), but human beings will always have a need for it, just as the mind needs to dream each night to maintain its sanity during the day. Just because YOU may not feel the need for it, does not mean that others don't. No matter how much it may annoy you that others have FAITH in what you consider to be childish fairy tales, if those fairy tales give them peace and fulfill them emotionally, what's it to ya?

It just eats atheists alive that some people actually smile as they go about their day and believe that their god has answered some personal prayer, because they're so sure it can't happen, that those contented smiles make them jealous. Jealous that they can't have that kind of peace and tranquility because they're too "intelligent" to accept the "simple-minded" explanation and share their faith. Get over yourself. If you can't, you can't, but stop hating them because they CAN. If their religious faith allows them to enjoy a little happiness in this cruel world, get off your high horse and let it be.

And don't start ranting about how they try to force their beliefs on everyone else, because everything I see being defended under that flag doesn't deserve to be defended and its invariably a special interest insisting on forcing ITS beliefs onto the mainstream and getting angry when they meet resistance. Western Civilization survived just fine for hundreds of years on a Christian-based values system and the forced changes being touted in the name of "tolerance" today are nothing more than an assault on any concept of decency or the value of human life.

Atheists - young atheists in particular - waste a lot of hostile emotion hating Christians for being happy. Why don't you stop obsessing on them and look for something that gives YOU peace. If you spend enough time studying the religions of the world, the thoughts of the great philosophers and the possibilities suggested by the cutting edge of theoretical physics, you probably won't convert to Christianity, but you may have to back up a little and change your classification to "Agnostic."

Because at the end of the day, "I don't know" is the only honest answer.

energy cannot be created or destroyed.




So our consciousness HAS To go somewhere..


I relate it to.. the RAM in your computer...

your computer sends electricity to the ram to hold the info while its on... so you turn it off, where does it go? Turns into heat, maybe light..

your brain signals... electricity. So they will turn to something else too. Maybe back to a form that they were before.


Here's a theory i have:


First off: we have think about. What is life? What MAKES ghosts?

Spirits/energy of deceased people... what about rebirth? Or other related things..... such as "Energy is never lost, only converted"

We relates life to a TV..

Our bodies are TVs.. our Spirits/Energys/Consciousness/etc could be a TV station.. and when we are created in the womb.... A spirit/energy/consciousness/etc thing "TUNES" into that body, and spends the rest of that "TV's existence" in that body... Then perhaps after we die, our consciousness/spirit/energy goes back into the air/another dimension/or whatever... and waits until it's "Tuned into" another body.

That makes a ton more sense to me than "eternal paradise in heaven".. but that's just me xD


Earlier this year, I was extremely upset over 3 of my friends dying in the same week. so i was paranoid about my own death.... and this is one of the things we discussed.

Another Idea I thought about is perhaps the "afterlife" is similar to the Matrix or Total Recall, such as...

our "Spirits" are ourselves.. and our "Bodies" are just experiences/simulations that our "spirits" go though to have fun or whatever.... But the stipulation is, to have the "MOST" fun/experience/etc, we aren't allowed to know/remember anything about the "Spirit world" or whatever...




Thoughts?