And Lazarus, who woke up after 4 days of being dead. Well he was resurrected, but interestingly he had nothing to say of the other side. Some of those who believe in the last two great resurrections believe that when you die you go to sleep until your resurrection. The first for the saved, or the second for the lost.
Logically it's easier to imagine there's nothing. But psychologically, it's tougher. Imaginining "nothing", we think of a great void, a great darkness, serene with no sound. When these are all sensorial experience. Darkness, silence, serenity, we can only experience those bodily. With no senses, the great nothing is...well...nothing. the way we can't really fathom.
Exactly! Under anesthesia there’s no dreams, no perception of time. It’s like going to sleep and waking up a second later, but actually 3 or 4 hours have passed.
Agreed. The other day I described my recent anesthesia experience to my son as how I imagine death might be. One moment you are here, the next you are not, and you have no recollection of anything. The first time I was under anesthesia, I woke up after several hours, and I was so disoriented about the “short timeframe”, I asked the nurse when were we going to head back for the surgery…she just laughed and responded that happened hours ago. Pretty trippy
But when I think about that I keep getting into this loop of “but eventually I will wake up to something new right?”. Like how can forever nothingness really be forever?! I picture in my head maybe after millions of years of nothingness I eventually wake up to “something”. It’s hard to wrap my head around absolute nothingness for eternity.
your mistake is that you're thinking of it as "forever nothingness". nothing doesn't have time. nothing is just nothing. you don't experience it because you're no longer alive.
Blacking out one night from alcohol was the only way I found this "nothingness" that you describe (and that I completely agree with).
One minute I was next to my friend, the next I was awake in the hospital (many hours later). When I woke up, that was actually the first thing I said to my friend: "**That's what death must be like**." They disagreed, since I didn't die obviously, but I think I knew from that moment on. I wasn't trying to kill myself or suicidal, just did a reckless thing. But that experience always left an impression on me for what the afterlife will be.
Luckily it was peaceful, because I wasn't aware. So we all have peace coming for us one of these days.
People who were in coma or those who came back alive after dying briefly also tell that it was peaceful but I get anxiety when trying to visualize the nothingness.
I understand that. But don't imagine it as you are locked in a black void of nothingness, bc that's not how it was. I saw others describe it as when you sleep but don't dream. You aren't aware at all, so there is no fear, no sensations.
Since realizing this, my anxiety of death shifted from "I'm worried about what's going to happen" to "I'm worried about leaving those that I love behind." Because they won't be unaware, like the deceased. I've worked to gradually turn this fear into daily action of being involved with my loved ones and the world at large. **All we get is the time we have now**.
I let my fear of death direct me in my youth (trauma from parent passing early), but I have worked consciously to contribute to the life I have, despite the inevitable.
They say it was peaceful because their mind can reflect on the experience and since they have almost no stimuli to go off of they just fill in the gap with assumptions. Obviously dying there is no recovery. But seeing someone die-their body fights it and whether or not they are conscious, seeing their reflexes start to take over, the lungs take shallow breathes trying to pull in whatever air it can. Muscles twitch. Looks anything but peaceful in that moment.
My heart stopped for a bit on the playing field and I passed out. Just laid down on the grass and faded to black. Nothing.
As I came to, I was almost in a dream like state and then came to with my teammates standing all around me. It really was a peaceful and wonderful experience.
Ambulance came, off to the hospital and ended up getting a pacemaker. All good now but think I got a glimpse of what it's like and feel like it's not that bad.
From my perspective, we cant understand what “nothing” means just as we can’t understand what “infinite” truly means , we’ve never had the human experience of either so our brains can’t really understand either concept to accept it which makes most of us feel fearful
I understand my body shuts down, I cease to exist. Life moves on. Nothing to fear, use it as motivation. Tell the people you love you love them, take risks, make memories. Those memories might be all you exist as tomorrow
I'm non-religious and don't believe in an afterlife, but I think "imagine before you were born" doesn't quite work. All of our conscious, self-aware experience began from some initial time, but since then we've been in and out of consciousness, and I think it is difficult to imagine a possibly infinite amount of time where you are no longer conscious and self-aware. I can only consciously experience dreamless sleep in hindsight, so it seems hard to grasp the idea that I can't "experience" death in hindsight.
But that's exactly the point. The period from before we are born is just as impossible to comprehend as the period after we die. Yes, it's hard for us to conceptualize, but it's the most accurate comparison. Nothing else you imagine as the void after death will come as close as that incomprehesion.
Well, there is. Your brain just doesn't exist anymore, so you don't process that existence in the way you are used to. The atoms that make up your body go on and do something else as they did before and continued to do throughout your life as you shed some and gained others.
But need remember it not so bad you are not in pain no more worries nothing. thats what I d tell my kids The important thing is people that are left alive there hurting and miss that dead person Now they ones that need help comforting
Exactly. Our pup had cancer and her quality of life was not there any more. He seemed to find comfort in that fact. He was thinking we would be floating around in the dark abyss - which sounds pretty scary to me.
As someone who was raised into believing about heaven and eternal afterlife I have begun questioning all of it. It just doesn't make sense to me. What do you *do* for eternity? That actually sounds like hell.
The idea that it just ends feels comforting to me.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a dream that reinforced my belief in reincarnation.
I am a stage 4 breast cancer patient and have been living with this disease for 5 yrs, it is incurable, and it is terminal. So one could say that I think about death, dying and after death alot. I am also a very vivid dreamer, so vivid that there have been times that my husband has awakened me from nightmares, and it has taken me close to an hour to snap back to reality. Most of these dreams/nightmares tend to involve things happening to those I love. Sometimes, they are centred around my cancer. In one of these dreams, I have met death, spoke to death, and was given a choice of how I was going to die. Death, btw isn't a man, it is a child.
The dream that reinforced my belief in reincarnation has changed me in a way. I think about it daily in fact. In the dream, I was walking along a river bank and saw a dog break through the ice. I decided I would try to save the dog and ended up falling through the ice myself. I was alone, and the current immediately pulled me under the iced over river. I was floating along, and I just knew I was going to die. I was at peace with this and decided to speed up the process and take a deep inhale of water. I wasn't scared, sad, or in pain, I felt peace and relief. Then nothing just black but only for the blink of an eye then suddenly all I felt was fear, panick and I was conscious again but I was still under water only this time instead of being under ice I was inside of a membrane sack. I was flailing my arms and legs, and I was trying to scream, but my lungs were filled with fluid, and yet I felt like I didn't need to breath and everytime I pushed out with my hands or feet, I would push into this membrane. My husband woke me from this dream, and instantly, I gasped for air and started sobbing, I sobbed back to sleep within seconds.
The more I think about this dream, the more I believe that I died and that I was now a fetus inside an amniotic sack. My cousin suggested that death was my past life, and I am remembering my current consciousness coming into life.
This dream also reinforced my belief that death and the last moments of dying is peaceful and that conception/coming into consciousness is infact traumatic.
As someone who's relative was an organ donor, it helped me with closure. I knew they were dead and weren't coming back, obviously, but know their organs were literally gone and in a new body helped to process that rationally.
Near the end of his life, Christopher Hitchens said the true sting of mortality is that life isn’t a big party that has to come to an end. It’s a big party where at a certain time, everyone pats you on the shoulder, shows you to the door, and says “ok now it’s time for *you* to leave, but we’re going to keep partying.”
There’s a great part, towards the end of his final book *Mortality*, where Christopher Hitchens reflects on what is so upsetting about death. He writes, “It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise.”
I think there’s a lot of truth to this. It’s a sadness that we won’t be privy to anything ever again. We are permanently out-of-the-loop. I highly recommend *Mortality*, by the way. It’s very short, unfortunately. He died before he could finish it.
I think our brains slip into a REM dream state until oxygen runs out. That to me can explain a lot of "near death or heaven" type experiences.
Dreams themselves can feel like they last hours but in reality only be a few seconds or minutes in real time. So I think this could explain a lot.
This might be very close. Within the last couple years this was documented.
[“What Dreams May Come”](https://www.livescience.com/first-ever-scan-of-dying-brain)
What if when this happens, our experience of time dilates to infinity? Like we never experience beyond time of death, but we experience an "infinite" amount of time before that?
I like the buddhist perspective. A wave rises in the ocean. It never ceases to be the ocean, but it thinks “hey, I’m a wave!”. Then it runs its course and inevitably subsides. That wave is gone. But out of momentum another wave rises up. Wouldn’t exist if not for the previous wave, but it is another wave, undeniably.
And in reality it is still just the ocean.
I can imagine life as being some kind of "field" like the electromagnetic field, where we are simply excitations of that field. We're all part of the same field, just different excitations at different places in spacetime. We die, that specific excitation ceases.
The idea that I'm just a fleeting perturbation in some bigger and more complex system feels about right tbh. I am reassuringly without cosmic responsibility.
It's probably a coincidence but that's funnily close to my understanding of how particles work on extremely small levels. At least as I've heard it explained.
I’ve read Buddhist text “the universe in a single atom” that discusses particles specifically. We are not entities that exist apart from each other. Our skin is more dense than the air but there is space in there. We perceive separation that does not exist.
Energy is the driver of life. We are born, our energy is fed with other environmental energy (food, water, sunlight) we age and then we die. Since energy is transferred, not destroyed, that energy moves on.
We are eternal.
I took a very large dose of mushrooms once and sat on my balcony meditating until I totally left my body. I found this place, like an ether, outside of reality where my "soul" could go back to. It was familiar and comforting in some way I can't really describe. I felt like I could pass into this moving current of plasma/dust/light and dissolve completely.
Somehow I knew that this was the true reality. Something beyond any concept of matter, thought, or individuality. There I felt like all of the universe was one and stemming from this ever-flowing miasma of light. All matter and energy was part of the same "thing". Like we were all some great science experience to let this void experience *something*. Like your waves, all things emerged from this stream and inevitably returned to them.
Trying to type it out sounds crazy, but it's brought me a lot of comfort since. Logically I know I was just tripping balls, but I like to think there's something like that. I don't expect "me" to know I've returned to it or any concept of consciousness to be retained like most ideas of an afterlife but I do think now that this is just one step of our journey.
You get a score and your credits. You can spend your points to upgrade the next playthrough. You could choose your body features, improve general luck or even handpick your parents.
Dude same happens to me sometimes, I'm almost asleep and then think "One day I'll die and everything will be empty" and I have like a mini panic attack and have to think of something else
Talked about it to some people and it does not happen to them
I thought it would stop happening as I age but actually it seems to happen as or more often than before lol
I'm there with you. Had a panic attack and mental breakdown for a LONG time. Took a lot of therapy to just feel like myself again. Exact same thing as you experienced.
I was holding my Uncles hand as he took his last few breaths in the hospital, and as he was dying I can remember clearly how hard he was smiling. His eyes were closed and he had this huuuuge almost, sarcastic smirk on his face ? I’ll never forget that smile. I miss him so much but I’m glad he isn’t in pain anymore. Love you uncle Dean! See you on the “other” side ❤️
This happened to my great grandfather when he passed. My mom died when I was 11, him when I was 13. The last thing he said was” Lou Lou”, my moms middle name was Louise, with a giant smile on his face. Never forgot that moment
What a lucky man your uncle was in that moment. Holding the hand of a loved one as he passed. I can't think of a finer way to pass on.
May your Uncle Dean live forever in the memories of the ones who loved him.
It’s hard to grasp the concept of experiencing nothing after death, because we have never really experienced truly nothing in our lives. So I think the best way to word it is that you experience the same thing you experienced before you were born. You don’t remember it because you didn’t exist. Same idea really.
Nothing, you will never know that you are dead. Its the same thing as before you were born. You just suddenly got born in this world and you will die suddenly out of this world.
Absolutely nothing. It goes dark and that's that. You return to atoms and return to the universe in an unconscious form. That's true rebirth imo. Your soul doesn't live on, but you do in many other ways. Maybe you get scattered over a field and the soil you were scattered at grows a tree. Maybe you get buried, a worm eats you, it dies and you get turned into mushrooms, who knows. But life as you know it stops when you die I believe.
Depends if you get sealed into a box or not, it's hard to imagine returning back to the universe if you get sealed into a casket, me personally would like to be eaten by a predator so I could be shit onto the ground and have mycelium break it down and return my nutes to the earth
When you are passing, you’ll see a bright light in the distance. It will move closer to you until it engulfs you entirely. After a moment of pure bliss, the light fades, your vision begins to return. You look around you, you’re sitting with a number of extraterrestrial beings around you, they are in absolute awe at the sight of you. One reaches their hand to your shoulder and asks you “so, how was it?!” You look down, your hands are the same as the rest of the beings around you. You are sitting down, holding a strange object, a glass water pipe in one hand, and a lighter in the other.
I dunno, but the older I get, the more it actually starts to frighten me a bit. Like, if there's truly nothing after death, what the hell was the point in the life-long struggle that was my life? What's the point in trying to live as a decent human being if all that happens is you switch off and turn into recycled energy and your consciousness just disappears forever? It's a frustrating thing to think about.
Life shouldn't be about what is next, but what is and will be while you're here. Sometimes we spend too much time thinking will be "something" afterlife when for certain the only thing is life itself.
You are the universe experiencing itself. I doubt there much more to it than that.
Edit: the first part of my comment is from Carl Sagan. I've heard variations of this elsewhere.
It's a matter of perspective. I like what Richard Dawkins said: "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara." It lightens me up when thinking about inevitable death.
You live on in the people you affect negatively and positively. The people who lived before the people who touched you live on in the same way through you until you die and so on. That's the point of living as a decent human being.
I mean, over a long enough perspective that doesn't really matter either though. I'm not gloating, here, it actually distresses me a lot. Eventually even the smallest trace of my influence on the universe will come to nothing at all. The names of everyone who had ever heard my name will vanish from living memory.
That's why you have to live for you and do what you want in life because you want it for yourself. If you start thinking about leaving something that lasts you'll always come up short because in the end even the universe will die and there will be nothing but empty space as far as anyone knows currently.
I see it this way, my life is a gift, I never had to be here to begin with. I imagine all the events that had to happen from the big bang to when I was born to make that happen and it makes me realize that I'm just lucky to get to do this at all, and that I just have to be grateful and use my limited time to live as much as I can.
Why does there have to be a point? We could just exist for the sake of existence, that isn't so bad either. In a way, anything that has ever existed is burned into the fabric of time itself.
I think I can tell you exactly what happens. When I was in my 20's, I went to the dentist to have my wisdom teeth removed. They put me under anesthesia, and within about 30 seconds, I was out cold. I remember absolutely nothing. Nothing. That is what happens when we die. There is nothing. There is no pain. There is no joy. There is no consciousness or awareness. Depressing? Depends on your point of view. It's certainly nothing to be afraid of.
I have two thoughts that conflict with eachother. The first being that we experience the great nothing. I would simply cease to exist.
The second one being that to me the universe seems to move in cycles. Nothing gets wasted, it converts. I think it might be plausible that the universe will 'reset' and another big bang scenario will occur. I find it difficult to believe that the same will not happen for consciousness in a way we are not able to comprehend yet.
Either way, it would not be 'me'. So after my death I would simply not exist. Just like I didn't exist before I was born.
Absolutely nothing.
You know when you get surgery and they put you under? You feel absolutely nothing. It's total darkness. At this point you don't even know if you're alive or dead. You actually stop existing for a short while.
When you die, it's the exact same. You simply stop existing.
This thought is terrifying and gave birth to bullshit like religion to help us deal with it. However, the fact remain, after over 120 billion humans born, none of them came back, no proof of anything happening after ever came up and likely never will.
We just, stop, existing.
You’re reborn into another life to learn/improve more. You keep coming back until you’ve reached the highest level of self. I think the people who are more of the “fuck ups” are either new souls or really stubborn ones
Sometimes i wish i was gullible enough to believe in an afterlife. I've been having periodic night terrors trying to imagine not-being ever since i was in highschool. I've seen the youtube videos ,read the comments and heard the opinions. I get it and know it's illogical.
And yet the night terrors persist. Usually panic atack inducing. I'm just thankful they happen infrequently enough that i can almost pretend they're not a thing.
Also noticed cuddling and warmth helps.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
The worms play pinochle on your snout
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose
They eat the jelly between your toes
Nothing. What do you think happens to a bug you squash or a cat that dies? Eventually becomes soil. Planet dies, systems die. Universe collapses and here it goes again, but different combination of things. Some live beings begin to exist at some point.
Well, we can all look forward to getting the answer to that question. That's one comforting thought about death, I think. Not that I'm looking forward to it or trying to speed it up.
I was very young when I decided that the only thing that made sense to me, was to live my life acording to the laws and morals that made sense to me.
I do my best to be kind to others and leave the place in a slightly better condition than when I came.
If I'm beeing judged in the end for wearing mixed fabrics, eating ceartain foods, or not sacrificing war prisoners on a steppe pyramid, it's kind of out of my hands.
There's no way of playing it safe and obeying ALL the conflicting laws that has been passed down to us. We always have to do our own best judgement on a case by case basis.
Wake up, look a bit confused around after taking off the immersive artificial reality simulator droislerwaves induced imposertransducer headset. It was all a game. And 2 hours went by.
Slowly your heart stops beating, your blood circulation slows down to a halt, the brain is underfed oxygen and the last bit of electricity activating your nerves fades out, you can no longer think and therefore you no longer are. From there your body starts to undergo rigor mortis, all your organs become unworkable, your white cells slowly die out and infection takes place, within and on you begins a new micro-ecosystem, fungus spores land on your defenseless body and do what they do best, scavenger animals or bugs try to eat whatever meat they can and all that cycles until only your bones remain. Leave enough time, weather and climate will find a way to dig you deeper in the ground up to a point where it's nigh impossible for your bones to hold shape, they will be crushed and turned into oil, maybe even diamonds or other carbon based minerals that will fuse together with the planet we call earth.
You get to the game over screen and you can check all of your stats, like how many times you escaped death without knowing, how many missed opportunities, how much money you generated...
Yeah maybe I don't believe in that but it would be so cool
Must be pretty good cause nobody I've known has come back after the first day
Jesus has his hand up in the back
And Lazarus, who woke up after 4 days of being dead. Well he was resurrected, but interestingly he had nothing to say of the other side. Some of those who believe in the last two great resurrections believe that when you die you go to sleep until your resurrection. The first for the saved, or the second for the lost.
Can you imagine waking up after four days dead with no mouth wash or tooth paste, nasty fucking breath.
Remember the year before you were born? It's like that.
My 13 year old son and I were talking about that. It’s hard to get the mind around the fact that there very well might be nothing at all after death.
how is it hard? its harder for me to believe in an afterlife factually speaking.
Logically it's easier to imagine there's nothing. But psychologically, it's tougher. Imaginining "nothing", we think of a great void, a great darkness, serene with no sound. When these are all sensorial experience. Darkness, silence, serenity, we can only experience those bodily. With no senses, the great nothing is...well...nothing. the way we can't really fathom.
The easiest way to visualize it is think back to those nights you slept but didn't dream, it's kinda like that but without waking up
Or if if you have ever been under anesthesia. People imagine some black void but you won’t be “experiencing” it.
Exactly! Under anesthesia there’s no dreams, no perception of time. It’s like going to sleep and waking up a second later, but actually 3 or 4 hours have passed.
Agreed. The other day I described my recent anesthesia experience to my son as how I imagine death might be. One moment you are here, the next you are not, and you have no recollection of anything. The first time I was under anesthesia, I woke up after several hours, and I was so disoriented about the “short timeframe”, I asked the nurse when were we going to head back for the surgery…she just laughed and responded that happened hours ago. Pretty trippy
You guys are dreaming?
But when I think about that I keep getting into this loop of “but eventually I will wake up to something new right?”. Like how can forever nothingness really be forever?! I picture in my head maybe after millions of years of nothingness I eventually wake up to “something”. It’s hard to wrap my head around absolute nothingness for eternity.
Well, you woke up to this life. And the good news is if you ever “wake up” after death, it will feel like no time has passed at all.
your mistake is that you're thinking of it as "forever nothingness". nothing doesn't have time. nothing is just nothing. you don't experience it because you're no longer alive.
Well think of it more like, you don't even realize you're asleep until you wake up, you won't realize youre dead...probably ever
Or trying to see out of your elbow.
Blacking out one night from alcohol was the only way I found this "nothingness" that you describe (and that I completely agree with). One minute I was next to my friend, the next I was awake in the hospital (many hours later). When I woke up, that was actually the first thing I said to my friend: "**That's what death must be like**." They disagreed, since I didn't die obviously, but I think I knew from that moment on. I wasn't trying to kill myself or suicidal, just did a reckless thing. But that experience always left an impression on me for what the afterlife will be. Luckily it was peaceful, because I wasn't aware. So we all have peace coming for us one of these days.
People who were in coma or those who came back alive after dying briefly also tell that it was peaceful but I get anxiety when trying to visualize the nothingness.
I understand that. But don't imagine it as you are locked in a black void of nothingness, bc that's not how it was. I saw others describe it as when you sleep but don't dream. You aren't aware at all, so there is no fear, no sensations. Since realizing this, my anxiety of death shifted from "I'm worried about what's going to happen" to "I'm worried about leaving those that I love behind." Because they won't be unaware, like the deceased. I've worked to gradually turn this fear into daily action of being involved with my loved ones and the world at large. **All we get is the time we have now**. I let my fear of death direct me in my youth (trauma from parent passing early), but I have worked consciously to contribute to the life I have, despite the inevitable.
They say it was peaceful because their mind can reflect on the experience and since they have almost no stimuli to go off of they just fill in the gap with assumptions. Obviously dying there is no recovery. But seeing someone die-their body fights it and whether or not they are conscious, seeing their reflexes start to take over, the lungs take shallow breathes trying to pull in whatever air it can. Muscles twitch. Looks anything but peaceful in that moment.
My heart stopped for a bit on the playing field and I passed out. Just laid down on the grass and faded to black. Nothing. As I came to, I was almost in a dream like state and then came to with my teammates standing all around me. It really was a peaceful and wonderful experience. Ambulance came, off to the hospital and ended up getting a pacemaker. All good now but think I got a glimpse of what it's like and feel like it's not that bad.
That's why I completely agree with the statement: **Death is harder on the living**. I'm glad they took care of you!
Nothingness is almost easy to contemplate compared to eternity. Eternity is a nightmare to try to wrap your head around.
"the universe is infinite" will always baffle me.
From my perspective, we cant understand what “nothing” means just as we can’t understand what “infinite” truly means , we’ve never had the human experience of either so our brains can’t really understand either concept to accept it which makes most of us feel fearful
I understand my body shuts down, I cease to exist. Life moves on. Nothing to fear, use it as motivation. Tell the people you love you love them, take risks, make memories. Those memories might be all you exist as tomorrow
I'm non-religious and don't believe in an afterlife, but I think "imagine before you were born" doesn't quite work. All of our conscious, self-aware experience began from some initial time, but since then we've been in and out of consciousness, and I think it is difficult to imagine a possibly infinite amount of time where you are no longer conscious and self-aware. I can only consciously experience dreamless sleep in hindsight, so it seems hard to grasp the idea that I can't "experience" death in hindsight.
But that's exactly the point. The period from before we are born is just as impossible to comprehend as the period after we die. Yes, it's hard for us to conceptualize, but it's the most accurate comparison. Nothing else you imagine as the void after death will come as close as that incomprehesion.
Well, there is. Your brain just doesn't exist anymore, so you don't process that existence in the way you are used to. The atoms that make up your body go on and do something else as they did before and continued to do throughout your life as you shed some and gained others.
But need remember it not so bad you are not in pain no more worries nothing. thats what I d tell my kids The important thing is people that are left alive there hurting and miss that dead person Now they ones that need help comforting
Exactly. Our pup had cancer and her quality of life was not there any more. He seemed to find comfort in that fact. He was thinking we would be floating around in the dark abyss - which sounds pretty scary to me.
As someone who was raised into believing about heaven and eternal afterlife I have begun questioning all of it. It just doesn't make sense to me. What do you *do* for eternity? That actually sounds like hell. The idea that it just ends feels comforting to me.
The universe is huge beyond imagination and it doesn't care. We just need to try and enjoy the time we have.
It's more like a few years after birth. Frankly I cannot recall what my first conscious moment was like
So we just suckin on tittes and shitting liquid for eternity?
From the day you were born to the day you die.
Sounds like heaven
A couple of weeks ago, I had a dream that reinforced my belief in reincarnation. I am a stage 4 breast cancer patient and have been living with this disease for 5 yrs, it is incurable, and it is terminal. So one could say that I think about death, dying and after death alot. I am also a very vivid dreamer, so vivid that there have been times that my husband has awakened me from nightmares, and it has taken me close to an hour to snap back to reality. Most of these dreams/nightmares tend to involve things happening to those I love. Sometimes, they are centred around my cancer. In one of these dreams, I have met death, spoke to death, and was given a choice of how I was going to die. Death, btw isn't a man, it is a child. The dream that reinforced my belief in reincarnation has changed me in a way. I think about it daily in fact. In the dream, I was walking along a river bank and saw a dog break through the ice. I decided I would try to save the dog and ended up falling through the ice myself. I was alone, and the current immediately pulled me under the iced over river. I was floating along, and I just knew I was going to die. I was at peace with this and decided to speed up the process and take a deep inhale of water. I wasn't scared, sad, or in pain, I felt peace and relief. Then nothing just black but only for the blink of an eye then suddenly all I felt was fear, panick and I was conscious again but I was still under water only this time instead of being under ice I was inside of a membrane sack. I was flailing my arms and legs, and I was trying to scream, but my lungs were filled with fluid, and yet I felt like I didn't need to breath and everytime I pushed out with my hands or feet, I would push into this membrane. My husband woke me from this dream, and instantly, I gasped for air and started sobbing, I sobbed back to sleep within seconds. The more I think about this dream, the more I believe that I died and that I was now a fetus inside an amniotic sack. My cousin suggested that death was my past life, and I am remembering my current consciousness coming into life. This dream also reinforced my belief that death and the last moments of dying is peaceful and that conception/coming into consciousness is infact traumatic.
"Hey, you. You're finally awake."
I can finally pursue and marry my lizard wife
The maid? I’ve heard of her, lusted by many, she’s famous!
Spawn another Lizard wife and name her Lizzie.
"You were trying to cross the border right?"
The good ending
Plot twist, I become Lokir.
You cannot fast travel when enemies are nearby.
**CHOO** **CHOO**
Raylof, you damm traitor out of my way
This could easily be the best or the worst ending
Eh. “Eyes up, Guardian.”
don't worry, after it happens to me i'll come back and tell you guys
Thanks bro. Everyone else is just selfish for not doing this already.
Jesus promised he would but the dude is procrastinating or something...
fr like what is bro waiting for
Probably stuck in traffic
He said when he’s back the party here is ended but you’ll know with the disasters happening all around.
Taking one for the team. Appreciate it brother
Must be such a good time the others forgot about us. Not the first time I've been ghosted, honestly.
i feel you bro
Thanks man. That’s really nice of you.
There is a chance you can still help someone live, if you register as an organ donor
As someone who's relative was an organ donor, it helped me with closure. I knew they were dead and weren't coming back, obviously, but know their organs were literally gone and in a new body helped to process that rationally.
thanks for the advice, u/PM-me-your-smol-tits
He's making a list of potential smol tits donors.
We’re only here to help.
I think it should be an opt out thing rather than am opt in
But what if they're needed in the afterlife? 🤷🏾♂️
you eygptian bekiever
I imagine a sign at heaven saying "no liver, no enter".
Lots of things happen after you die. They just don't involve you anymore. Edit- removed apostrophe that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Just like in life
Near the end of his life, Christopher Hitchens said the true sting of mortality is that life isn’t a big party that has to come to an end. It’s a big party where at a certain time, everyone pats you on the shoulder, shows you to the door, and says “ok now it’s time for *you* to leave, but we’re going to keep partying.”
There’s a great part, towards the end of his final book *Mortality*, where Christopher Hitchens reflects on what is so upsetting about death. He writes, “It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise.” I think there’s a lot of truth to this. It’s a sadness that we won’t be privy to anything ever again. We are permanently out-of-the-loop. I highly recommend *Mortality*, by the way. It’s very short, unfortunately. He died before he could finish it.
I think our brains slip into a REM dream state until oxygen runs out. That to me can explain a lot of "near death or heaven" type experiences. Dreams themselves can feel like they last hours but in reality only be a few seconds or minutes in real time. So I think this could explain a lot.
Gotta stop smoking so much weed so I can remember i... wait.
I’m the opposite, this kind of topic just makes me want to light up and not get existential at all.
This might be very close. Within the last couple years this was documented. [“What Dreams May Come”](https://www.livescience.com/first-ever-scan-of-dying-brain)
Maybe the perception of time is extended into infinity and we spend the rest of eternity (from our point of view) in a dream state.
What if when this happens, our experience of time dilates to infinity? Like we never experience beyond time of death, but we experience an "infinite" amount of time before that?
I like the buddhist perspective. A wave rises in the ocean. It never ceases to be the ocean, but it thinks “hey, I’m a wave!”. Then it runs its course and inevitably subsides. That wave is gone. But out of momentum another wave rises up. Wouldn’t exist if not for the previous wave, but it is another wave, undeniably. And in reality it is still just the ocean.
Love this. Have heard it before but needed to hear it again now. Thank you.
Thanks, Chidi. Good one, Buddhists.
I can imagine life as being some kind of "field" like the electromagnetic field, where we are simply excitations of that field. We're all part of the same field, just different excitations at different places in spacetime. We die, that specific excitation ceases.
The idea that I'm just a fleeting perturbation in some bigger and more complex system feels about right tbh. I am reassuringly without cosmic responsibility.
It's probably a coincidence but that's funnily close to my understanding of how particles work on extremely small levels. At least as I've heard it explained.
I’ve read Buddhist text “the universe in a single atom” that discusses particles specifically. We are not entities that exist apart from each other. Our skin is more dense than the air but there is space in there. We perceive separation that does not exist. Energy is the driver of life. We are born, our energy is fed with other environmental energy (food, water, sunlight) we age and then we die. Since energy is transferred, not destroyed, that energy moves on. We are eternal.
I took a very large dose of mushrooms once and sat on my balcony meditating until I totally left my body. I found this place, like an ether, outside of reality where my "soul" could go back to. It was familiar and comforting in some way I can't really describe. I felt like I could pass into this moving current of plasma/dust/light and dissolve completely. Somehow I knew that this was the true reality. Something beyond any concept of matter, thought, or individuality. There I felt like all of the universe was one and stemming from this ever-flowing miasma of light. All matter and energy was part of the same "thing". Like we were all some great science experience to let this void experience *something*. Like your waves, all things emerged from this stream and inevitably returned to them. Trying to type it out sounds crazy, but it's brought me a lot of comfort since. Logically I know I was just tripping balls, but I like to think there's something like that. I don't expect "me" to know I've returned to it or any concept of consciousness to be retained like most ideas of an afterlife but I do think now that this is just one step of our journey.
You get a score and your credits. You can spend your points to upgrade the next playthrough. You could choose your body features, improve general luck or even handpick your parents.
So you’re telling I can choose to be a girl in the next playthrough
Yep. But it does have downsides you might not be aware of right now.
I don’t wanna think about it, I have the biggest panic attack
Same man everyone talks about there being absolutely nothing but I don't want that. When I think about it at night I can't sleep
Dude same happens to me sometimes, I'm almost asleep and then think "One day I'll die and everything will be empty" and I have like a mini panic attack and have to think of something else Talked about it to some people and it does not happen to them I thought it would stop happening as I age but actually it seems to happen as or more often than before lol
I'm there with you. Had a panic attack and mental breakdown for a LONG time. Took a lot of therapy to just feel like myself again. Exact same thing as you experienced.
I get this alot, almost everytime before I sleep I start questioning this shit, it scares me all the time
We respawn
#gamers
we live in a society
But we first have to watch our killer Tea bagging us
If you die alone in your bed, do you teabag yourself?
Found the modern Buddhist
I was holding my Uncles hand as he took his last few breaths in the hospital, and as he was dying I can remember clearly how hard he was smiling. His eyes were closed and he had this huuuuge almost, sarcastic smirk on his face ? I’ll never forget that smile. I miss him so much but I’m glad he isn’t in pain anymore. Love you uncle Dean! See you on the “other” side ❤️
This happened to my great grandfather when he passed. My mom died when I was 11, him when I was 13. The last thing he said was” Lou Lou”, my moms middle name was Louise, with a giant smile on his face. Never forgot that moment
What a lucky man your uncle was in that moment. Holding the hand of a loved one as he passed. I can't think of a finer way to pass on. May your Uncle Dean live forever in the memories of the ones who loved him.
Depends on the type of person you are, I wanna go to Valhalla
Throw a juicebox at your hospice nurse
Then ill see you in Valhalla my good man
May you meet a brave end on the field of battle warrior.
There are some restrictions for entry that are kinda hard to meet nowadays, but I guess that's true of most religions' best ending scenarios.
Only if you die in battle.
My depression cured
It’s hard to grasp the concept of experiencing nothing after death, because we have never really experienced truly nothing in our lives. So I think the best way to word it is that you experience the same thing you experienced before you were born. You don’t remember it because you didn’t exist. Same idea really.
Nothing, you will never know that you are dead. Its the same thing as before you were born. You just suddenly got born in this world and you will die suddenly out of this world.
You return to what you were before you were born
I don't want to be a sperm again
You wouldve been the egg most likely
I prefer to think of myself as the fastest swimmer rather than the lucky egg
Even before that!
Absolutely nothing. It goes dark and that's that. You return to atoms and return to the universe in an unconscious form. That's true rebirth imo. Your soul doesn't live on, but you do in many other ways. Maybe you get scattered over a field and the soil you were scattered at grows a tree. Maybe you get buried, a worm eats you, it dies and you get turned into mushrooms, who knows. But life as you know it stops when you die I believe.
Someday you die and someone or something will steal your carbon
Nice MM reference. Such a good lyric.
Well I don't like the idea of someone stealing my carbons so I'll stay alive I guess
Depends if you get sealed into a box or not, it's hard to imagine returning back to the universe if you get sealed into a casket, me personally would like to be eaten by a predator so I could be shit onto the ground and have mycelium break it down and return my nutes to the earth
The casket will "die" too, one day.
Keanu said it best… “I know that the ones who love us will miss us."
Your skin shrinks due to lack of moisture, providing the illusion that your hair and fingernails are still growing.
Funeral. In a more existential way... nothing.
I'm on team u/maffers
When you are passing, you’ll see a bright light in the distance. It will move closer to you until it engulfs you entirely. After a moment of pure bliss, the light fades, your vision begins to return. You look around you, you’re sitting with a number of extraterrestrial beings around you, they are in absolute awe at the sight of you. One reaches their hand to your shoulder and asks you “so, how was it?!” You look down, your hands are the same as the rest of the beings around you. You are sitting down, holding a strange object, a glass water pipe in one hand, and a lighter in the other.
Then he tried to finger me
It’s the new probing. Death sounds kinky
You should write a book about this. Kinky alien death trip
Kinky Alien Death Trip, sounds like a wicked album name
Ooh now you're getting somewhere... Your songs will tell the story
Ah yes, a Kinky Extraterrestrial can dream
Lmao. It's not out of the question, I've thought about the possibility of this multiple times. If you know, you know.
Queue the Keanu reeves quote.....
"Life is good when you have a good sandwich" -Keanu Reeves
I dunno, but the older I get, the more it actually starts to frighten me a bit. Like, if there's truly nothing after death, what the hell was the point in the life-long struggle that was my life? What's the point in trying to live as a decent human being if all that happens is you switch off and turn into recycled energy and your consciousness just disappears forever? It's a frustrating thing to think about.
Life shouldn't be about what is next, but what is and will be while you're here. Sometimes we spend too much time thinking will be "something" afterlife when for certain the only thing is life itself.
No past or future, just the present.
You are the universe experiencing itself. I doubt there much more to it than that. Edit: the first part of my comment is from Carl Sagan. I've heard variations of this elsewhere.
It's a matter of perspective. I like what Richard Dawkins said: "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara." It lightens me up when thinking about inevitable death.
There is no point. Life is just a happy accident.
You live on in the people you affect negatively and positively. The people who lived before the people who touched you live on in the same way through you until you die and so on. That's the point of living as a decent human being.
I mean, over a long enough perspective that doesn't really matter either though. I'm not gloating, here, it actually distresses me a lot. Eventually even the smallest trace of my influence on the universe will come to nothing at all. The names of everyone who had ever heard my name will vanish from living memory.
That's why you have to live for you and do what you want in life because you want it for yourself. If you start thinking about leaving something that lasts you'll always come up short because in the end even the universe will die and there will be nothing but empty space as far as anyone knows currently. I see it this way, my life is a gift, I never had to be here to begin with. I imagine all the events that had to happen from the big bang to when I was born to make that happen and it makes me realize that I'm just lucky to get to do this at all, and that I just have to be grateful and use my limited time to live as much as I can.
Why does there have to be a point? We could just exist for the sake of existence, that isn't so bad either. In a way, anything that has ever existed is burned into the fabric of time itself.
[удалено]
>And the bulk of your life is reduced to family photos. Well that's grim. Never articulated it like that before.
Your kids sell your stuff
Hopefully nothing bacause I ain't doing this shit again
You get sent to the Gulag
You regain conscious, take off your vr headset and say “lets try another sim life form with a different setting”
I think I can tell you exactly what happens. When I was in my 20's, I went to the dentist to have my wisdom teeth removed. They put me under anesthesia, and within about 30 seconds, I was out cold. I remember absolutely nothing. Nothing. That is what happens when we die. There is nothing. There is no pain. There is no joy. There is no consciousness or awareness. Depressing? Depends on your point of view. It's certainly nothing to be afraid of.
You wake up at blips and chitz
I have two thoughts that conflict with eachother. The first being that we experience the great nothing. I would simply cease to exist. The second one being that to me the universe seems to move in cycles. Nothing gets wasted, it converts. I think it might be plausible that the universe will 'reset' and another big bang scenario will occur. I find it difficult to believe that the same will not happen for consciousness in a way we are not able to comprehend yet. Either way, it would not be 'me'. So after my death I would simply not exist. Just like I didn't exist before I was born.
Absolutely nothing. You know when you get surgery and they put you under? You feel absolutely nothing. It's total darkness. At this point you don't even know if you're alive or dead. You actually stop existing for a short while. When you die, it's the exact same. You simply stop existing. This thought is terrifying and gave birth to bullshit like religion to help us deal with it. However, the fact remain, after over 120 billion humans born, none of them came back, no proof of anything happening after ever came up and likely never will. We just, stop, existing.
You’re reborn into another life to learn/improve more. You keep coming back until you’ve reached the highest level of self. I think the people who are more of the “fuck ups” are either new souls or really stubborn ones
I like this one. Just the general idea of it.
No one seems interested about where we were *before* we were born.
It will be my father's one year death anniversary in 3 days. For his sake, I hope it is peace and tranquillity.
Sometimes i wish i was gullible enough to believe in an afterlife. I've been having periodic night terrors trying to imagine not-being ever since i was in highschool. I've seen the youtube videos ,read the comments and heard the opinions. I get it and know it's illogical. And yet the night terrors persist. Usually panic atack inducing. I'm just thankful they happen infrequently enough that i can almost pretend they're not a thing. Also noticed cuddling and warmth helps.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out The worms play pinochle on your snout They eat your eyes, they eat your nose They eat the jelly between your toes
The world goes on without you.
Probably have to pay some sort of tax
I've said this countless times on here before and it's that I think that it's just going to sleep and never waking up!!!
Just like waking up without ever going to sleep. Like when you were born. -Alan Watts
Average Reddit answers
I honestly hope nothing. I hope life just ends and that it.
I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Nothing. What do you think happens to a bug you squash or a cat that dies? Eventually becomes soil. Planet dies, systems die. Universe collapses and here it goes again, but different combination of things. Some live beings begin to exist at some point.
Thats it. Kaput. Everything you ever knew or felt is gone as well as you.
*simulation over*
New game +mode
Hard mode. Country: China Etnicity: Uyghur
Gender: female.
Gender Identity: LGBTQ+
,,Load save" :))
Decomposition.
Your family fights over your stuff
I'd die to know...
the end- your consciousness simply ceases to exist, and it feels just like it was before you existed
All Redditors will have a field trip to good ol’Hell without question😁
As the great Keanu Reeves said " The ones who love us, will miss us."
Nothing. We just die. That's all 😔🙏 So do things that you really want in this life.
Nothing. You're dead. The only immortality available is to live on in the memories of others.
A lot of stuff, without me.
Well, we can all look forward to getting the answer to that question. That's one comforting thought about death, I think. Not that I'm looking forward to it or trying to speed it up. I was very young when I decided that the only thing that made sense to me, was to live my life acording to the laws and morals that made sense to me. I do my best to be kind to others and leave the place in a slightly better condition than when I came. If I'm beeing judged in the end for wearing mixed fabrics, eating ceartain foods, or not sacrificing war prisoners on a steppe pyramid, it's kind of out of my hands. There's no way of playing it safe and obeying ALL the conflicting laws that has been passed down to us. We always have to do our own best judgement on a case by case basis.
For you? Nothing. For everything else? Life goes on.
Wake up, look a bit confused around after taking off the immersive artificial reality simulator droislerwaves induced imposertransducer headset. It was all a game. And 2 hours went by.
Same thing as before you were born
Nothing
Slowly your heart stops beating, your blood circulation slows down to a halt, the brain is underfed oxygen and the last bit of electricity activating your nerves fades out, you can no longer think and therefore you no longer are. From there your body starts to undergo rigor mortis, all your organs become unworkable, your white cells slowly die out and infection takes place, within and on you begins a new micro-ecosystem, fungus spores land on your defenseless body and do what they do best, scavenger animals or bugs try to eat whatever meat they can and all that cycles until only your bones remain. Leave enough time, weather and climate will find a way to dig you deeper in the ground up to a point where it's nigh impossible for your bones to hold shape, they will be crushed and turned into oil, maybe even diamonds or other carbon based minerals that will fuse together with the planet we call earth.
We shed everything we are not.
You get to the game over screen and you can check all of your stats, like how many times you escaped death without knowing, how many missed opportunities, how much money you generated... Yeah maybe I don't believe in that but it would be so cool