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capliberty
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Re: Don't Fear Death [Re: Lion]
#6502321 - 01/27/07 01:45 PM (17 years, 2 months ago) |
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My apprehensions are more geared towards ruff experiences than they are to death.
Death is a release. The reason people fear death, is that they still are clinging to this world. They have REASONS to live. Usually those reasons consist of wanting to live your life for something in the future or the continued experience. Your fear of death was also the apprehension of losing what you have. Once you have exhausted those reasons and you've had your fill of life, death will be an inviting finality. At least from where I'm looking at it.
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MarkostheGnostic
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If people were truly convinced that death was mere unconsciousness like dreamless sleep, there would be nothing to fear. Adults haven't been afraid of going to sleep since they were very little, if at all. I don't mean afraid of a dark room, a closet, etc., I mean afraid of going to sleep.
My contention is that we have a fear of death because we don't know what the experience might bring. We have an unconscious, unarticulted but very real intuition that death may bring a condition that is very unpleasant. I'm not talking about mythic Christian Hell either although there are plenty of people who have consciously rejected the notion but unconsciously their early childhood programming still haunts them.
I'll offer by way of personal experience a parallel to what I'm saying. When I was a little boy and I vomited, I became terrified by the strong contractions of my diaphram, by the hot organic liquid that was filling my esophagus, by uncontrollable spasms. It was bad enough that I was vomiting (my mother forcing my neck down so I wouldn't puke on her clean floor didn't help either), but terror accompanied this experience. Why? Because those things that I mentioned brought my four year old mind back to the birth canal where something similar but more complete was going on. I'm a Grofian in many regards. When I relived my birth experience at the age of 19 years, 360 days, I experienced mortal terror and ecstatic polymorphous sexuality at the same time - Thanatos and Eros in a death-life struggle. The pleasure offsetting the crushing suffocation and terror. Fixation in this stage of the struggle is behind sado-masochism, bondage, the way people choose to suicide and many other dynamics.
Anyway, in the way that vomiting threw my mind back to the birth trauma, I came away from my Big Trip fearing death AS the birth trauma. I came to realize that my psychotic experience and loss of personal identity in the revivfication of the birth trauma was what metempsychosis was - transmigration, reincarnation, call it what you like. Death led to another birth experience, which was hellish enough. That belief fueled some serious spiritual and moral rebirth for years to come.
I'm no longer convinced that rebirth is what my death will bring. I have petty concerns about what to do with my earthly belongings if my Lady predeceases me, and some concern about what is to be done with my body. I don't have a burial plot, I have childish trepidations about being burned in a crematoria (I've had a tour of the device), I'm not certain that I still want to go to medical school - as a cadavre, or give up usable parts and be incinerated. I can't have a sky burial since I'm not a Native American, and I can't be hacked up and thrown to vultures like they did in Tibet. I am working towards Realization of a mystical sense of who and what I am. I am also acquainting myself with the stages of dissolution as described by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I am comforted by Knowing what is going on during intense times (like having cataract surgery and having first 'happened' to have seen it done on PBS, so I knew when they were cutting my eyeball, macerating the lens, vacuuming it out, etc., and I witnessed with 'Knowing,' lending calmness to the process).
Longevity is a blessing in this because only a small percentage of octagenarians (80+) fear death. Fear and sexual desire - my companions in the birth canal, with sexual sensations urging my entirely genitalized baby-body onward to the light. With death, if one is advanced in age enough, the fear factor seems to diminish somewhat proportionately to the sex factor. One should have spent sufficient time in one's life making the shift, the born-again leap to another Center of identity besides the embodied ego (which perishes). One needs to watch one's whole death drama with calm Compassion, with curiosity - despite any pain because a big part of pain is attendant anxiety, and with calm Compassion supplanting fear, pain should become less and less disturbing. Let us see if all this striving towards the light has its metaphysical correlate to our physical birth. Finally, death in nothing more than an expiration that is not followed by an inspiration.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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MrBuzin
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I fear life more then death.
I think we fear death because it's an instinct. I really do believe we are just animals in this oddball reality afterall
But who am i to say anything
Edited by Syk0s3s (01/27/07 05:50 PM)
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fireworks_god
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Quote:
MarkostheGnostic said: My contention is that we have a fear of death because we don't know what the experience might bring.
I think we fear death because we are attached to our identity and our life situation.
-------------------- If I should die this very moment I wouldn't fear For I've never known completeness Like being here Wrapped in the warmth of you Loving every breath of you
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daytripper23
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Thats interesting you mention the fear of vomiting, although i dont really understand what you said. On one crazy confusing trip, i tied the idea of vomiting up my morning glory seeds with death, for some reason. I dont know exactly what made this assosiation, but to me they became one in the same. I remember when i puked i was submitting to death, but after I got it out of me there was no realization for some reason. I was in basically the same delusional state as i was before i puked, except less nausaus. Usually seeing one of your delusions triggers something.....
-------------------- Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!
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Lion
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Quote:
MarkostheGnostic said: My contention is that we have a fear of death because we don't know what the experience might bring.
-------------------- “Strengthened by contemplation and study, I will not fear my passions like a coward. My body I will give to pleasures, to diversions that I’ve dreamed of, to the most daring erotic desires, to the lustful impulses of my blood, without any fear at all, for whenever I will— and I will have the will, strengthened as I’ll be with contemplation and study— at the crucial moments I’ll recover my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
Edited by Lion (09/23/11 04:18 PM)
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eonbluenebula
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Quote:
daytripper23 said: Thats interesting you mention the fear of vomiting, although i dont really understand what you said. On one crazy confusing trip, i tied the idea of vomiting up my morning glory seeds with death, for some reason. I dont know exactly what made this assosiation, but to me they became one in the same. I remember when i puked i was submitting to death, but after I got it out of me there was no realization for some reason. I was in basically the same delusional state as i was before i puked, except less nausaus. Usually seeing one of your delusions triggers something.....
Death, in so many ways, could be allegorized into cleansing and purging process, much as vomiting. Though so many people percieve death as the opposite of clean -- of unsanitary decay -- all death is, really, is life making way for change and renewal.
I think death generally deserves a lot more appreciation than it recieves. People think of it as a 'catch' to life, a sacrifice that we must make for our time here. As part of a seamless duality, though, I think that death should be loved and respected just as life is. Without it, none of us would even be given the opportunity to experience and appreciate life, and so I consider it to be just as much of a miracle.
-------------------- "There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love." ~Alan Watts
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SoY
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Quote:
fireworks_god said: I think we fear death because we are attached to our identity and our life situation.
-------------------- "The choiceless truth of who you are is revealed to be permanently here permeating everything. Not a thing and not separate from anything."--Gaganji "Yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream." "My karma ran over my dogma!"
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