I know some of you would rather ignore it than face it.

How many of you have thought about death. I mean more than just "one day I will die". Last night, I did something I hadn't done in a while and that was think about death. I came to the (re)realisation that I will die. More than that, I will die.

I've always believed in a God. But never in an afterlife. Mainly because if we have souls, they are distinct entities from us. We are a product of our minds. In order to survive, we developed an identity. I am me. When my body dies, so will I. There is no place for me to go. That's it. Stop. No dreaming. No breathing. We aren't asleep - being asleep is completely different to being dead.

There was a time before I came into existence. Yet I sometimes don't even believe it happened. There will be a time when I won't exist. Sometimes I question whether this is all just a dream, and I'll wake up. Except I won't.

Everything we do, we do to distract ourselves from the inevitable. Otherwise we would sit around waiting to die. Probably moping. Miserable.

Have you ever thought about death in such terms? What are your opinions? (Do any of you even exist?).

Having been through a period of my life where I was suicidal, I'm pretty comfortable with the notion of ceasing to be.
Whether or not there's anything after this, I couldn't say one way or the other. But what an adventure it might be.

Already posted in the other thread, but essentially, I do that a lot.

depression is a brilliant thing isn't it

I suffer from it a lot, sometimes thinking what is the point in living, sometimes actually wanting to die( and getting rather close to it..)

best thing to do is just to think about other things, love is a good emotion to replace it with, or just live for the moment and don't look back or care what you do
best advice I can give to be fair, otherwise, I don't believe in an afterlife, or anything like that, or religion most of the time. stick to what you like and be happy for as long as you can

I used to freak myself out to the point where I would almost start to panic. Would need a drink to relax. Then that became more than one. So now I just don't drink anymore.

I think in terms of psychological advancement, we still need a crutch and sometimes the thought of an afterlife provides that crutch.

Strangely, I only started really thinking about death when I was at uni and even then it wasn't until halfway through the course.

It's not depression - I'm not low in mood, or have issues with eating/sleep/energy/interest etc.

No, it's rubbish. The only thing going for it is how marvellous life feels when it's gone.
More than that, I'll simply say you're experience of it is very different from mine.

Life is a strange journey; one where you don't want to arrive.

I believe anaesthetic is the identical experience to death. When you're fully unconscious, you don't dream and you have no memories. Some people wake up. Some don't.

I've been under three times in my life, once self-induced and twice in surgery. It was a life changing experience for me. When I came to, I did not believe I was the same person. I still don't. That person died, and I am someone else with most of their memories. After three deaths, I am barely even human.

During my self-induced anaesthesia using a solvent chemically similar to halothane and with the same physiological effects (no longer available in England, but widely available in French supermarkets) I had a seriously bad "death". Some of you may have heard this tale before...

I used to "abuse" solvents regularly because I greatly enjoy the intense tripiness of being on the very edge of conciousness. It's like being totally drunk off your face, but only for a short time and without the hangover. You can control it, going in and out at will. Your hearing goes funny; it echoes. Your vision goes red and then black - but still with the echoey hearing. Time dilates. Your fingers tingle, and motion is like you're under water. It's like being in a video game death sequence.

At this stage, I need to spell out the obvious dangers of such experimentation. A lot of people who do solvents die the very first time they try. For the love of God, don't try sucking on an aerosol because it can freeze your throat and you'll choke to death. No one will be able to save you. Other solvents can cause liver failure, which leads to a slow and painful death involving all your organs dying while you lay there knowing you're done for. Any solvent can cause irreversible brain damage, permanent memory loss, and just in case you didn't get it yet - death.

To the story...

I went too far this once, and I tried to fight the inevitable lapse into unconsciousness. During the roughly 20 seconds I spent leaving the world behind, my hearing and vision went faster than I expected... and then The Devil started taunting me. I was trapped inside a tiny box, all bent up with terrible cramps and I was suffocating. The Devil was laughing at me, saying "You knew you shouldn't have done that. Now look at you!" - and I was there for all eternity. Seriously; it felt like eternity.

For the rest of my life, enclosed spaces will always be hell. Even being a bit "boxed in" because of a chair in the wrong place can trigger these memories for me. I imagine PTSD is worse, but thankfully I never spent a year of my life in 'nam...

I find it very difficult to think about this too, simply because I always come to the same basic theories:

1. There must be some form of existence after death; while I appreciate that being dead is not the same as being asleep, if one has no memory of, say, one's time spent awake during the day, one could effectively lose that day. If no-one else was there to tell you you had been awake but didn't remember it, it might as well not have happened. If you were alone on a desert island you would never know. As far as you are concerned, that is a lost day which never happened. By (admittedly rather shaky) extension, without a further existence beyond life as we know it, nothing my consciousness is recording to my mental record of the events of my life - my life's "log file" if you will - nothing will ever read it.

2. I cannot be sure anything around me is real. I think, therefore I am, but beyond that the past and present, the laws of physics and time could be a Matrix-esque deception and I cannot be sure anyone else posesses consciousness in the same sense that I do. I am therefore left with a new question of why I am bestowed with my "unique" consciousness (or unique as far as I can prove to myself); am I the real life version of The One? Am I destined to do something of cosmic importance? It sounds trite and selfish, I know.

I don't fear death, but I do fear dying. To be more specific, I fear how I die. Something nice like dying in my sleep is fine, but I'd hate to drown or die in some long painful way. But I don't fear what comes afterwards (which I believe to be nothing.)

You will never truly die for as long as you are remembered.

They say drowning is a peaceful way to go. It always reminds me of ... "Not waving, but drowning".

Bull! It's a scarey scarey way to go.

Only to start with. After you breath the first gulp of salty water, the CO2 levels in your blood drop dramatically and you don't feel like you're suffocating.

If you're going to drown, gulp it down. Accept it. There is no pain.

It's interesting you mention anaesthesia, I had a general anaesthetic once and when I woke up, I couldn't help feeling I'd been somewhere, it's one of the few things I cling to when I contemplate nothingness.

When greater minds than yours have said it best...

Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
- Albert Einstein

...It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation."
- Daniel C. Dennett

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
- Mark Twain

I used to think about death a lot as a child and I was terrified of it, I would go sleepless for nights because I could only think of the horror of death, until I was at least 14 the first time I closed my eyes to go to sleep I would see a cemetery which just triggered more thoughts of death.



To me death is scary because what actually happens? How will dying feel and what might you feel afterwards, what happens to everything I have done (little things like arrange my books in a certain way, or whatever), what happens to my loved ones? I think the scariest thing for me is not being remembered, or knowing that one day I won't be remembered.

For a while in my first year of university I contemplated death and didn't find it scary. I contemplated walking in front of cars and trains and wandering off cliffs, my problem is that I'm not a person who likes pain so could never bring myself to do it. Now I'm back to fearing death...