StoneColdTrue wrote on Mar 23rd, 2010 at 9:10pm:Alan McDougall wrote on Mar 23rd, 2010 at 1:15am:Hi Is it really death we fear or is it the complete extinction of life and consciouness that we fear when we finally die?
Blessings and Light+
Alan
That's always a good question. Myself and many of my peers are pretty content with the idea of losing consciousness in death. To just not exist period. That to me is not bad at all as having nothing, no fear, pain, worries, thoughts would be the absolution to peace in my opinion. If you have no consciousness at all, then what is there to fear? I was content with this idea until discovering ghosts and and reaching enlightened epiphanies which more or less just kind of disappointed me until I can be assured fear evaporates in death. Only then would death would be worth something.
Now on the other hand, if it was revealed to the world one day that death was the complete end of consciousness...it's difficult to imagine what that would be like. I see many people losing hope, I see suicide rates increasing, I see depression hitting pretty strong. Now from a natural selection standpoint you could say that all these people affected negatively are the weak and they simply die out, while people content with that idea of death and still willing to live and survive would be the generation to push things forward. Still...I don't see much of an increase in good things.
And that's what really brought some attention to me. IF there was no afterlife. If there was no point to our existence...then why should love even exist? Why should good things exist at all? Because that idea of having no hope or belief that there is something better than this world is an awful realization. And that is almost its own truth to proving a better world does exist. Because without it, this world would know chaos. It would be worse than it already it is. And in truth, looking at how my life is now and how it has turned out...if I remained to have nothing to believe in and I had not found the knowledge I have recently found I would be in a really bad place.
It is indeed scary to conceive consciousness after death. Only because we do not know of the greatness awaiting. All we know is THIS life. So when a person tries to imagine the Afterlife, they imagine consciousness similar to life here. Even if you believe that things are so much better, unless you have experienced for yourself you can't truly comprehend it. I think there's more fear of the unknown as opposed to just death in general.
Also one should consider the bright side of fearing death, which is maybe loving life despite the woes. I've had many misfortunes and I'm not a happy person, but I still have a desire to live. If a spirit came to me now and told me I could enter the better world I would decline. Because there's still a lot I want to do here. So my greatest fear of death would be to die before I was ever able to achieve love and happiness in this life.
Imagine having feared the idea of death all your life and bent your whole existence around the axle of self-loathing, hell, damnation and sin...a life not lived outside the prison of guilt, shame and fear. Then imagine the possibility of the release of death and finding to your amazement that everything that you had feared does not exist and you are in absolute bliss. The extent of your control over the actual outcome of your life is absolutely the same as if you lived that life without fear or concern for what might come.
Interestingly, for this conversation I just had a past life meditation in which I died in a car crash at the age of 17 in 1905. I felt no fear of dying before and had thought I was invincible, so my death was a surprise. I did feel fear for my sister and friends who were hurt in the car I drove and for the fact that I could not help. I soon followed the light and found that I had planned, together with the others, to leave early and it was a choice made in our prelife planning to benefit all involved.
Likewise, in my current life I never had any fear of death, either early or late. As a young fool I was absolutely bullet-proof (read "protected") and was fortunate enough to realize my "luck" was beyond my doing...as a young adult, I was a little circumspect, and got out of the way of stuff that looked bad as it was coming toward me...later on I could feel the bad stuff from far away and just steered clear...in the past decade I seem to pick and choose what I have to deal with...some of it bad, some not so bad, and some downright fantastic...but it is almost a choice at this point. I feel the nudge or the sense of challenge and I pull a situation off the conveyor belt as it passes by and deal with it and its ramifications. All the possibilities are planned and the free will we all have is in choosing what we are going to experience. I simply follow the clues.