Question For Atheists

My experience of a world with humans tells me I am not unique, and thus although my sense of self seems to condensate in a personal subjective experience, I cannot deny without going into severe scepticism or solipsism that any human has a similar sense of self. Going further, this experience of a world populated with life comes to me by recognizing the "inertia" of life therein, of that which seems to will and to know even though, however deep we physically look, the causal chain is never perceptibly broken. In a way, both phenomenology and the phenomenology of abstraction upon empirical phenomenology can mesh arbitrarily well, maybe asymptotically well, with the thing in itself. Hence, again, I cannot deny that not only is there many senses of self across humanity, but most probably across all myriad forms of life, although both way they seem inaccessible to me.

Accordingly, there is nothing to close such a sense of self from below at birth, nor from above at death. Both are open boundaries at best; it is not an on/off switch. It is in some sense to say that life is topological first, for, in addition, there is no clear boundary to claim the world as purely within or purely without, only the world is that which is close, that which expresses closeness in opposition to isolation. On the other hand, it is rather these many senses of self which, as appreciably undeniable as they are, are topologically far, disconnected from my neighbourhood, inaccessible to me. In its bare state, a life never experiences another life's sense of self, although it can come as close as it wants to phenomena arising from another life experiencing the world. I may measure neural correlate, or bodily functions, or neurotransmitter concentrations, in real time if necessary, yet that doesn't bring me closer to someone else's experience of self. In other words, my "fingers" may reach as deep as they can throughout the phenomenological world and thereby reveal phenomena as rich as necessary to account for the Other's sense of self, lest the causal chain be broken, but nothing seems to lay above senses of compassion, sympathy, hatred or the popular experience of "oneness", that would indicate a common neighbourhood directly connecting selves.

In that sense, life in birth is that which brings you as far as possible from others, and life through death, marked by a complete dissolution of the sense of self, brings you as close as ever to every other selves. Life is what occurs when you pump inertia into a topologically isolating substrate; the world isolates itself in its parts as a relatively faithful representation, or memory, of closeness relations therein.

I "am" not but everything apart, and will become once it's over. I may bring myself consciously or unconsciously to anxiety, or I may be brought to it by worldly factors, but such anxiety, apart from biology, from the sheer bodily pain and panic it might stir in me, isn't any different from the anxiety of thirst, hunger or voiding. Anxiety roots in the very inertia of life, it forms a direct expression of the will to live at the scale of human experiences, yet I need not, it seems, invariably act on it, the same way I need not immediately fetch myself a glass of water the moment thirst comes around. Life has inertia, and so although it shapes my motivations, mood and actions, death anxiety, or any anxiety, always compete or cooperate with everything else that goes on in life. Hence it only becomes necessary to act on it by various coping mechanism once you've stopped long enough to steer most of the inertia towards the experience of anxiety itself. Meditations upon death could thus be compared to a gravity assist; come to it with enough inertia and you'll leave with more; come with too few and you'll crash on death, forcing you to act by coping with it, whence, in particular, neurosis, phobia, some cases or religiosity, &c.

In the end, we must not fear anxiety lest we fear fear itself, hence the false premise in your question that there is something necessary to be done, that there is a necessary stance to take. My advice; live with it forever, and live with the fact that you have to live with it forever. Follow the warrior's path and accept that religions, neurosis and intentional coping are but irrelevant losing battles, little battles within battles within battles which in the end only served to waste your time before crashing irreverently right before your eyes.

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