Afraid Of Dying

reply to post by SystemResistor


I doubt its truly like that.

I believe there is an afterlife and if not, I will not ever be there so I couldn't feel bad about it. So for now I am preparing for my own inevitable transition, thinking of places not to go and places I would want to go, thinking about how it would be like to move there, what I would do. Which is nothing grand actually, the thought of just playing (with everything humanity has ever invented) or even studying/learning in heaven for the rest of my existence sounds pretty good.

reply to post by Diluted

Many years ago I was a 16 year old girl on a Christian youth camp in Brisbane.
Rosa, the oldest girl in our hut, was 24, and she was determined to scare the wits out of the rest of us with her descriptions of the huge deadly jellyfish in the ocean there and the slow, agonising death one could expect after being stung.

I braved the water with her the first morning there anyway, but, being a loner, was swimming at the edge of our group. The ocean was beautiful, so I swam out a bit, but soon felt long prickly tendrils enclosing me, enfolding me as though I was in a net. The prickling got worse, and I was burning all over, and every attempt to get this monster off me just left me more tightly wrapped in it's stinging embrace. It was like being caught in a sticky net made of wasps.

As nothing else worked, I figured I'd better get back to shore, because this think had to let go if I got out of the water, so I towed it back to shore and clambered out onto the sand, amidst the screams of the swimmers.

This whole time, despite being a bit of wimp, I was not frightened. When you are in the middle of something drastic, your brain can switch off the fear response, because you are too busy just finding a way to cope with the situation. However Rosa was so terrified from seeing the sea-wasp on me she screamed till she'd nearly drowned herself, and by the time I'd got the sea-wasp off me and was walking up the sand towards the doctor's hut Rosa had life-guards giving her mouth to mouth on the beach.

Even later, when the incompetent doctor and uncaring idiots running the camp had left me alone and untreated, fighting the paralysis and working for hours to push my chest up and down to stop the suffocation, there was still no time to be frightened.


Whatever you are frightened of, rest assured that when it comes to the crunch, it's not anything like your fears. It's much worse to imagine something or see it happen to someone else than to experience it. Besides, death is not the end of your conscious existence; many of us here, including myself, have had experiences which confirm that.


What you should care about is living in such a way that, when you see your life is over, you won't have too many regrets.
Live, love, have fun, do what good you can. There will be a time when this life is but a memory. Make it a good one.

WHEN U THINK ABOUT IT
YESTERDAY TOMORROW AND NOW
ALL THE SAME
DEATH HAS ALREADY HAPPENING
GOD IS ALREADY LAUGHING

reply to post by Diluted

Everything has already died.
This is the other world.
ADI DA

when i think about dying i get a deep anxious feeling in my gut but i also get excited for it. but you have to remember that its your ego freaking out about it, your brain fully understands death but only in the deepest parts and only through deep contemplation (to the point of anxiety/panic attack for me) do we trully except death for what it is. imo most people dont like to think about death, or the universe for that matter, because they live externaly, they distract themselves with what they call "reality", which is society, to the point where they cant do anything by themselves. people need to be more internaly aware of themselves (what is really a good way to do it, is spend a whole day by urself doing nothing (no music, no tv, no ppl)...close ur eyes and just think about urself, ur heart, ur brain, the blood running through ur body, ur nerves, ur deepest fantasys and realise they are all you.)

to me death is not actually dying, the universe never waste anything we all will become recycled (not in a reincarnation way but a cosmic way). are bodies will decay into the earth and then the sun will explode in 5bil years and vaporise the earth into dust and once again the dust will form stars and then planets and then possibly life on those planets and then a new cycle until the universe has had its fill.

there is a larger universal reality in which we are all apart and yet its uncomprehensible

Originally posted by Diluted
Afraid of Dying


I am 26 years old. My name is Jack. Living on a beautiful island in southwest Florida - finally getting my stuff together, here I am - filled with questions. Questions like most of us at ATS have (birds of a feather..)

Yet the one fear that drives me crazy, that lurks inside - is death. Dying. Whom ever made the last prediction post that was great "You're all going to die!" - made me think even more. I frequent imminst.org... (Immortality Institute) -- and basically, well. I'm afraid to die.

The thought scares me. Being a recovering addict - where I literally "Measured My Life in Milligrams" - it's rather odd I'd have no qualms taking a handful of rainbow colored pills and chasing it with malt liquor yet when a topic about a ghost or something on Coast To Coast comes on... I get scared.

Perhaps it is from my father dying at 46, me being 10 - watching the chemo, and death. Perhaps it is being an only child?

I've gone from church.. to church.. I've been baptized. The best concept I have now for this power that is greater than me I learned through a man called Bill W. who helped create the concept of "Create your own concept of God" - Emmit Fox if you will. "God is Good, God is Love, God is understanding.." - and just think those thoughts in times of anger/frustration/anxiety as that is the "Golden Key" (It has been working.)

Just imagine... laying on your death bed, at age 49 from cancer - and knowing your going to die -

What if... it is the end? That your consciousness, your memories, are gone. In a flash. The big sleep, it's as if you never existed and you can't retain your memories. Thoughts like these sometimes paralyze me to the point of... wow. Crying, and that is why... I always ask Why.

Someone best told me "You keep saying "God, show me the way and I'll go!" But God says, "Go, and I'll show you the way."


I've read so much on ATS from going to the bathing pool in the sky, to hellfire and stone if I don't worship A B OR C. I've read of the energy flowing dust to dust ashes to ashes, our energy goes not or thoughts - cryonics - we live in a simulated reality.. etc, etc.


Yet you - have you sat down and contemplated your own mortality?

If so -

How do you not get anxious over the idea of knowing - You're going to die.

I've contemplated my mortality a lot. I'm 33. Maybe it's unhealthy or not normal to do this, but I am not a normal person by any means.

My own thought is a mix of things. The last couple days an intriguing idea crossed my mind. What if we consciously vanish from the universe forever when we die but the memory of us, contrastingly, remains forever? If we're not around to enjoy immortality, but our memory is, does it really matter? I don't think it would. I think that if a memory of us exists forever then that's essentially immortality. Our consciousness may not last, but everything else would. So the bulk of what makes us us would be immortal. Perhaps if there IS an afterlife maybe god or whoever controls the afterlife actually exists far in the future and this future 'god' just observed our memory and 'reawakened' us in a trillion x trillion years? But even if there is no eternal memory of us or a memory of us that's 'reawakened' in an afterlife, at least we share so much in common with one another that so long as 1 person exists it's as though all exist. It's like saying we're all the same, or close.

Another idea is what if time stops when we die? What if there's some overruling power that controls time when we're living. And then when we die this ruler of time dies with it and time stops and we exist in the moments before true death forever and ever. What's the passage of time anyway?

I realize I"m grabbing for straws. It pains me greatly to know that everyone before me is dead. That the people I love will die. That I will die. That all of this will be dead and not remembered. That's just too sad. It might be pathetic, but I dig for answers that're not so bleak. I hope that there's an answer that at least respects our memory and keeps it alive somehow. I've even gone so far as saying to myself that i'd accept hell and heaven if it meant people wouldn't die and be forgotten. I might go to hell, but at least there'd be some permanence in the universe.

I'm sorry but somehow death just being death isn't enough for me. It's too dark and loathsome. If that's true nothing I do in this life can make any difference. Living good can't compensate for it.

And i'm starting to wonder that if time travel exists... that god is a time traveler and the mission? To uncover the past and remember us and give us a home and god does this for all life that has capable consciousness. So god doesn't exist yet. God will exist far far in the future. Either our memory will exist or time travel will or we're all so similar that any single death is meaningless.

So god is kind of like a historian or a researcher or collector or something. God remembers.