Fear of death.

the thought of an enduring consciousness is terrifying, yet it's hard to wrap my head around (as it were) my consciousness just vanishing

http://www.theonion.com/article/you-still-die-one-day-52183

anesthesia helped me wrap my head around what it would be like to slip into dreamless, awarenessless blackness

Reading the Looming Tower, I was struck by how much of that particular brand of extremist Islam seems to be a system for coping with the fear of death.

I heard or read the horrifying idea somewhere once that maybe the final moment of our life is stretched out into a perceptual eternity.

features in this story, makes it sound like not at all that bad of a thing

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/25/bullet-in-the-brain

whoops, sorry, that's paywalled

read here: http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_27/section_1/artc2A.html

I heard or read the horrifying idea somewhere once that maybe the final moment of our life is stretched out into a perceptual eternity. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Wondering what the source was.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Friday, January 15, 2016 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh man, i came up with ^^this idea independently at a bar last week. iirc it was based on the whole "time slows down during traumatic situations" thing

anyway, maybe read some buddhist stuff on pain and suffering, might assuage the fear somewhat. or maybe you know about that stuff already.

the idea seems sort of similar to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. like you will just lock into these archetypes and get lost in an infinite dream of your own making.

http://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/Wolff,%20Bullet%20in%20the%20Brain.pdf

U didn't exist once, it didn't kill u

A very intense (mostly horrifying, occasionally glorious) mushroom trip in my mid 20s actually really helped me with this. Obviously not recommending that as a medicine, but it's a thing. Notable university nearby has been doing studies administering this to the terminally ill for the past few years.

Because some of the, uh, insights gained during that experience can dissipate and I don't want to make hallucinogens a part of my life, regular meditation and exploration of Buddhist thought (fairly cursory, but enough) have been immensely beneficial.

Realize a lot of the above is a huge turn off to a lot of people, but at the very least I think everyone should look into some form of meditation. Difficult but it pays off. I don't feel qualified to give pointers, but I know there are a few schooled folks here that could help with that.

Other people dying is just about the worst thing imaginable. It might good to brace yourself for it, in some cases, but allowing yourself to be afraid for the death of another involves walking around mourning something that's still alive, and kind of missing the point of life IMO. Talking about your own death, or fearing your own death seems absurd to me. I don't belive that anything that quiet or calm looking should inspire fear. Other emotions perhaps

i'm not sure how i stopped being (for the moment) terrified of death. i can logic through it- we're all going to die, nobody really knows what it's like, worrying about it isn't going to change a thing- but i don't think it's logic that's changed my attitude. we'll see how i feel when i get cancer or have a stroke or something.

Death isn't always quiet or calm (post)

Dying maybe, not always calm or quiet, what you're gonna have to do to get to death

In 'merica, death is *rarely* quiet or calm.

Which is why I'd choose to die elsewhere.

Classic

Unfortunately birth and death are the two things nobody has any choice in (aside from suicide ofc).

now that I have children I am legit terrified of dying

Well if I hadn't been put off before.....

Legit tho my death benefits are p good from work its eased any of the "oh God the bills I'll leave etc" worries and the rest of it doesn't bother me so much.

got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IRbwwbWyDs

I heard or read the horrifying idea somewhere once that maybe the final moment of our life is stretched out into a perceptual eternity. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Wondering what the source was.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Friday, January 15, 2016 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was it my terrifying nightmare?

I spent a year or two constantly afraid of experiencing painful death or injury, traumatic accidents, etc. like hourly painful thoughts. It's not fun. There has to be a way to not be afraid of death, right?

You bastards have really bummed me out now, lol

Like, I've been building a greater understanding and peaceful acceptance of death .. But when I read actual smart posters (i.e. pretty much everyone posting in this revive), it makes me think like I'm fooling myself and that there's no point in changing ones relationship with death.

I don't know, I've pretty long thought of myself as someone at peace with the idea of death, but something shook me recently and I experienced the fear anew.

my heart has stopped before when i was undergoing some heart surgery as a baby, but they got it started back up again, so that is a factor i have to consider, and i think it makes me lenient towards mysticism/reincarnation/post-human consciousness as a possibility. i still have some phantom pain or.... something.... from all of that (i was really sick as a youth) i dunno how to describe it but maybe it has always made me a little uncomfortable in my own body.

hilarious conversation with my mum over Christmas, while out walking. she was asking me how I was etc and I said oh god you know ok, terrified of dying from time to time, especially when I consider dad died at me +12 years and we're v much the same genetically and in patterns of behaviour etc and I said what about you? are you scared of dying? and she sad 'god no, I'm scared of living too long. I don't want to live as long as my mother (93 and still going, though the short-term memory's fucked). I'm just frightened I'm going to outlive my sons.' (she has reason, which I won't go into here, but which doesn't involve me, other than in my fears). Anyway, we agreed to split the difference, which should work out well for both of us.

In fact although I'm periodically paralysed by fear of death, I mean literally paralysed in the form of a panic attack, there are other times that it seems ok, nbd, and it's only really pain that I fear. I try not to think about it.

There were two other things that brought this conversation to mind recently - one was Ernest Shackleton's letter to Winston Churchill, who he was trying to convince to back his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, where he says 'Death is really a very little thing and Knowledge very great' and I thought when I read that that if he had not been a person for whom death was a very little thing, he would not have been able to survive with his team stranded two years in Antarctica or travel 750 miles in a five man boat to get rescue. They returned to a world where death was not at all a very little thing and was in fact in the process of slaughtering an entire generation.

the other was the review by Adam Mars-Jones in the LRB of Grief is a Many Feathered Thing by Max Porter (might be paywalled, sorry), which quote this journal entry by Emerson after the death of his five-year-old son Waldo:

What he looked upon is better; what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday, I woke at three o’clock, and every cock in every barnyard was shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonoured by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove; the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and file he was so eager to use; the microscope, the magnet, the little globe, and every trinket and instrument in the study; the loads of gravel on the meadow, the nests in the hen-house, and many and many a little visit to the dog-house and to the barn. – For everything he had his own name and way of thinking, his own pronunciation and manner. And every word came mended from that tongue …

It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large and generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another … He named the parts of the toy house he was always building by fancy names which had a good sound, as ‘the interspeglium’ and ‘the corigada’, which names, he told Margaret, ‘the children could not understand.’

If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook.

So when I've stopped fearing death out of fear of pain and annihilation, I then go on to fearing it because of the absence of people I love, which isn't intended to be too pompous, but also include getting pissed down the pub with friends, laughing, going to sporting events, holding someone I love very close etc etc.

trying to pretend it doesn't exist doesn't seem to work either.

dude, finish your novel!

i'm not sure that anything really works - there are people who have the terror you're describing and i'm far too familiar with, and people who just don't really have that same fear. or at least i believe them when they tell me that.

so i dunno about you Fizzles, but i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear that (used to) swallow me so fast and whole that i wanted to jump out of bed and run round the house and into the street and keep running until i passed out. the subtle gradations and variations and transferences of the fear have been...interesting...to observe as i've got older i guess.

but short of some magic White Noise pill i don't really know how to make it stop either, and i wonder how much it's messed with my general demeanour over the course of near-40 years

or just maybe: you can take the edge off the fear by letting go of your affection for all of the things that you're afraid death will take from you forever

which largely feels like a bullshit solution tbh

"attachments are bullshit"
- buddha marley

so i dunno about you Fizzles, but i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear

yep this. want to stress I'm not paralysed by fear regularly, just every now and then, and it's more a point of curiosity or interest than anything else. I'm not a particularly morbid person - it's more a larkinesque domestic version of the void that hapoens at night, or something akin to vertigo. but obv not enormously pleasant while it's happening.

"attachments are bullshit"
- buddha marley

― lute bro (brimstead), Sunday, January 31, 2016 3:49 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sometimes I feel like as I age I know less rather than more, but this is one thing I have learned with age is surely not true.

phbbt speak for yourself

amateurist wrote upthread:

so how does consciousness deal with the timelessness of death? does it create an artificial sensation on a sort of "loop," that is experienced as if eternal? does the last moment of experience resonate eternally?

^^this is my biggest fear re: death, i suppose.

i'm not a very ambitious fellow, i don't experience #FOMO. but i'm worried that at some point a switch will flip and i'll be like "OH SHIT WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS AND THIS AND THIS WHILE I WAS YOUNG, I COULD HAVE GONE SO MUCH FURTHER"

man alive's last post has been haunting me, lol.

i suspect timelessness is v different from an infinite loop of some of temporality or another

If our consciousness had the luxury of existing after death, only then would the idea of eternity be frightening to me. Instead I terrify and confuse myself as I attempt to process what it means to not have any layer of thought left to reflect on any version of my existence.

some nights this shit stops me from sleeping. then I just put on another episode of the Simpsons.

seems like a wise enough response, unless fear of death is something of a recurrent problem for you. in which case it wouldn't kill you to sit with it a bit and see what turns up. it's the universe's favorite koan.

It's a good laxative.

Also good perspective for when something non-lethal is befalling you. "Least I'm not fucking dying".

Other than that I'm not a fan.

i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear that (used to) swallow me so fast and whole that i wanted to jump out of bed and run round the house and into the street and keep running until i passed out.

^^^ thanks to NV for writing this, especially the bit about 'moods and moments'. I really only get fear of death when I'm tired and/or stressed out over something that I can't do anything about. All the thousands of ways I can't do what I want - that are nebulous and myriad and impossible to consciously keep track of much less do anything about - get solidified into a fear of death, which is at least something concrete and can be reacted to (even if the reaction is fear).