I think since having become divorced from religion (at least with Christianity, I still find Dharmic spirituality interesting, but I still don’t believe in the supernatural), the idea of death has become a bit more difficult for me.
I tell myself that I am okay with dying, since it’s inevitable, and out of my control, but I think deep down, when I really think about the end of my existence, there is some deep terror there, perhaps related to the fear of the unknown. I can think of all kinds of fantastic quotes about death and finding peace with it, but when I think about what it will feel like to die, it instills great terror within me.
It’s not even a fear of the pain or anything. Just a fear of what may or may not be next. I think part of it too is some sort of fear of missing out. A fear of not getting to see the great things that are to come in this world. A fear of not having the time to learn the innumerable interesting things that there are to learn. So much to learn, and so little time. I think it also has to do with the thought of being forever separated from my loved ones. From my partner. From the person who I share my life with and have created my life with. Imagining being separated from her for an eternity, it brings me to tears.
Interestingly, this is a fear I’ve always had, ever since I was a child. I remember being 4 or 5 years old and asking my dad what happens after death, what death feels like, where my friends will go after death, and remember him becoming almost frustrated with my questioning, because these are obviously answers he doesn’t have and are honestly fairly strange thoughts for a child so young to be pondering.
For some reason, death has always been something on my mind since I was a child, and a very emotional thought at that. I think my brief stint of being religious from early childhood into mid-teen years was an emotional ‘band-aid’ of sorts, but since I’ve come to the conclusion that I truly don’t know what death will feel like or what will happen after death, these thoughts have again started racing through my head, giving me moderate emotional discomfort.
Have any of yourselves come to term with death? How have you managed to find peace with it besides “just don’t think about it”?
What is meant by “coherent self”?
You are not the same person from one moment to the next, nor over your lifetime. Your emotions constantly change; your opinions constantly change; you physically constantly change; what does the little baby you once were have in common with you? Genes? You share 99.9% in common with everyone anyway. There’s also a dialectical approach where you say “where does my body end and other things begin?” Even the atoms don’t technically touch each other so, who’s to say that whatever you are sitting on isn’t a part of “you?” Who’s to say the bacteria on/in you is truely a separate entity when they outnumber you ten to one in cells? Who’s to say the plants around you aren’t part of your respiratory system?
This is exactly the kind of mindset I’ve been trying to adopt. Being able to see the deep interconnection in the world and seeing how everything is related in connection and change. Trying to apply it to myself has been difficult. Sometimes it feels like my body/mind fights back against this too, there are times when I’ve felt I’ve made progress on this, but then, somewhere in my brain, for some reason, i feel forced to contemplate specific organs of my body, such as my heart, and how that might feel to go out, and then the anxiety gets going, and then it feels like there’s actually some sharpness in the heart itself, and then I worry about dying and go down that rabbit hole.
How does change in one’s self based on conditions equate to no coherent self? Surely there’s still a continuity.
The most important part of no self is that the ego that talks within your head isn’t actually you, it’s just a process of making sense of things and avoiding being bored. You should check out all the Buddhist stuff from Revleft, but for a quick summary of this topic I’d also suggest this podcast.