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”?
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In terms of afterlives I think it’s best to be agnostic. Maybe a will be reincarnated as someone feeling the affects of my karma, maybe not. I don’t think hell exists because that’s kind of evil and arbitrary to lump someone who wasn’t good enough with someone who was the worst person ever. It’s absurd that everyone who hadn’t heard of a religion is damned to eternal suffering.Though, there are some Christian groups that think Jesus abolished hell and now there’s just heaven. It also could be that they are just states of mind, maybe the Buddhist heavenly and hellish realms are also states of mind. However, we can’t know everything, so whether there’s an afterlife, we’re stuck in a Bergsonian loop, or there’s a void, it’s good to do good things and try to affect the world positively. If there is a heaven a dedicated communist is going there.
In terms of afterlife, I would say I’m agnostic. When i say I have appreciation for the Dharmic religions, I don’t mean that I believe in the supernatural aspects of those religions, more that I appreciate the philosophical undertones present within them. Specifically stuff like Indra’s Net, or anything that stresses that “things aren’t really things, but things are the relationships between things”, if that makes sense. Just the stuff that stresses interconnection and nuance, i find that I can really appreciate and see a lot of crossover with systems science and Marxism. Also, Swami Vivekanda has written some very interesting texts on Socialism based on his time in the USSR, which I found pretty interesting.
I do agree religion isn’t the end all, be all, and i generally have disdain for religion, i do find that those philosophies have a lot to be appreciated, especially when compared to the purely black and white thinking of abrahamic religion.
Basically same. I’m reminded of some very good episodes of revleft on how Buddhism and Marxism can complement each other.
Any specific ones i should check out?
From shoeless in South Dakota: ‘shoeless in samsara,’ (talks about death) and ‘death anxiety and overcoming life’s tragedies’ (warning: long and random, you your choice whether to)
From Revolutionary left radio: ‘dialectics & liberation: insights from Buddhism and Marxism,’ ‘zen Buddhism and social transformation,’ ‘Hegelian dialectics: contradiction, Marxism, & the Freudian unconscious,’ the whole ‘dialectics deep dive series’ (long), ‘Karmic law and mutual aid: insights from Buddhism and anarchism’…
Honestly, every time I go through the revleft backlog there are many more I want to listen to, so I suggest you do that if you finish all of these and want more. (Btw I didn’t link anything because there are too many podcast apps and I didn’t want to assume anything).
If that makes you happy, in the theoretical sciences there exist a number of ways to “cheat” death. According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it could be that you live on in parallel universes. According to special relativity, you are always alive in a spherical shell expanding from the point of your death at the speed of light. According to the holographic principle in string theory, your entire life could be contained as a projection on the surface of a black hole. According to general relativity, our spacetime could contain (or be modified to contain) closed timelike curves along which the time coordinate is circular and objects are bound to revisit their past existence at some point.
Of course, just like the search for the holy grail or the philosophers’ stone of the mythological past, these might all turn out either practically infeasible, empirically false, or mathematically contradictory; but it is nice to know - or at least guess with a high probability - that your existence will have left an indelible mark on reality and someone, something in the far future might still find your traces and remember you. In the meantime, perhaps with a bit of black humour considering the topic, I like to close with a quote from Engels’ Anti-Dühring:
Freedom lies not in the dreamt independence from the laws of nature, but in their recognition and in the therein contained opportunity to plan and let them act towards certain purposes.
I mean, obviously I don’t mean to come off as suicidal but death is the absence of pain, suffering, and work, so I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just letting yourself rest without worrying about the stresses of life. Existence kinda sucks, especially if it were to be prolonged beyond finding meaning in existence. The limitations of existence makes it meaningful. I think I would be the most miserable person on the planet if I had to live eternally.
The limitations of existence makes it meaningful
That is a very good take away.
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Indeed I have passed out, many times. It’s always a terrible experience, or, incredibly uncomfortable probably. It feels like I’m losing my mind when I’m passing out to be completely honest. It feels almost psychedelic coming out of unconsciousness for me. Excluding anesthesia, more thinking about passing out while getting blood drawn or from heat or something.
I wish the idea of simply fainting from existence was comforting, but historically that phenomenon has always been uncomfortable as hell for me.
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I have always felt like a highly sensitive person in general. I know there’s a lot of pop-psych stuff around that term, but I’ve really always felt that way. Getting into a verbal altercation with someone, including family has always rattled me inside, makes me feel all fucked up. Same with seeing something highly sad, It’s hard for me not to just be incredibly sad, such as weeping, versus being able to contain it. Same with anger, and so on.
From the Buddhist tradition, I’d say you can use meditation practice to realize for yourself that the notion of a coherent self is an illusion, and you are losing nothing in death. I’d suggest you listen to Revolutionary Left Radio and Shoeless in South Dakota, because Breht has a lot of episodes about Buddhism and stuff. He often tells the story of when his spiritual practice led him to have a crisis where he obsessed about the fact he was going to die, but he eventually realized he was just mourning the human condition.
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A fear of not having the time to learn the innumerable interesting things that there are to learn.
I found that relatable, and I guess I think you can’t regret anything if you don’t exist. I think it’s good to try and learn as much is you can, but what matters is that you try to affect the world in a net positive way. I’m still trapped in the illusion of self, but theoretically with how your consciousness is constantly changing there is no need to regret anything, just be present with experiences as they come, and try to be good, but in the end it won’t matter.
coherent self
Is there such thing as an incoherent self? I feel like everything exists except for me, and that “I” am nothing more than an occasionally interrupted stream of sensory input. Especially since I’ve become terminally online and have barely moved, I even feel disconnected from my body and physical surroundings. So much of “my” time is spent online I feel more like a digital ghost than a living thing.
That’s somewhat it, but that’s also alienation. As the computer is basically an extension of your body, it can be an example of your self not being metaphysically reducible to your human cells.
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.
I’ve got a few disjointed thoughts regarding life/death that may help.
Fearing death is a perfectly natural response to living. We have evolved to fear death. It’s there so we strive to live long enough to breed and raise our young. Humans are enlightened beyond only fulfilling our natural instincts but they still linger and this can’t be helped. It’s in our makeup.
They say life is a way for the universe to experience itself. Since you as a human are just one tiny piece of the whole universe, you’re not expected to experience and learn EVERYTHING… Rather you just learn and experience what comes to you naturally which will add to the universes “knowledge pool”.
All matter in the universe has existed since its beginning and will continue to exist until its end. You and all your loved ones are made of this matter. Even in death, your matter still remains in the universe. So while your consciousness might no longer exist, everything that makes up “you” still does… your matter has just rejoined the universe. Your matter shares this space with the master of everyone who has ever existed or who will ever exist. This means you will never be leaving your loved ones behind for eternity, quite the opposite.
I hope some part of my ramblings soothes you somewhat.
Maybe ‘it’s okay to be afraid’ is the answer. Maybe for me, it is that idea of “clinging” to life, and struggling with that. Maybe it is having this image of myself in my head, that when the time comes, I shouldn’t let the emotions overwhelm me, and I should be able to remain stoic and “exit the world with dignity” or something like that.
I don’t find the concept too scary - I didn’t feel anything before I was, I have no reason to think it’ll be different when I’m not.
I’ve got people I love and things I need to do here, so I’ll try to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
I’ll probably cry and beg to live if it comes violently, but that seems natural.
You’re honestly probably right. Maybe it is having this image of myself in my head, that when the time comes, I shouldn’t let the emotions overwhelm me, and I should be able to remain stoic and “exit the world with dignity” or something like that.
I was going to answer “I try not to think about it”, but then I saw your last line. Now I have to give an actual answer.
I personally think that death is like before one was born, nothingness. I would say that that belief has helped shape my mentality that you should do everything you want to while you still can. There’s nothing afterwards, so gotta hurry up and live while you’re alive.
None of us is going to live forever, we won’t see how things end up, and maybe that’s for the better. I get the fear of missing out on history, that’s something that can’t be remedied. Just try to imagine the future, remain optimistic, do what you want, find a purpose in life, and you will leave this world peacefully.
Agreed. I feel like the second paragraph you had there, is exactly what i was referring to. I feel like I can say that pretty easily, and do feel like I honestly believe it, but when push comes to shove in a moment of emotional intensity regarding death, that whole thing just crumbles before me and is replaced with “but I don’t want to die”. Some sort of “clinging” to life.
I figure I am going to die one day but also I don’t want to die yet so I’m gonna try to not die… I do fear death but that fear is to remind me I’m not ready to die yet. On the other hand I know it will happen eventually so when the time comes and I know there no real chance or reason to fight it anymore then I figure I will let that at fear go. At least that’s what I say now. Not sure how it’ll play out when the time comes.
Maybe for me, it is that idea of “clinging” to life, and struggling with that.
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Agreed. I do think the ideas present within Vedanta and Zen Buddhism (the only two that I’ve studied to any extent) do have some really cool ideas that have a lot of overlap with scientific socialism and Marxism. Specifically stuff like Indra’s Net, or anything that stresses that “things aren’t really things, but things are the relationships between things”, if that makes sense. Just the stuff that stresses interconnection and nuance, i find that I can really appreciate and see a lot of crossover with systems science and Marxism. Also, Swami Vivekanda has written some very interesting texts on Socialism based on his time in the USSR, which I found pretty interesting.
I do agree religion isn’t the end all, be all, and i generally have disdain for religion, i do find that those philosophies have a lot to be appreciated, especially when compared to the purely black and white thinking of abrahamic religion.
