This is a topic refered to in Jyana Yoga, the intellectual yoga which has one of the main questions - WHO AM I? WHO or WHAT IS THINKING THIS? etc.
I certainly agree with sven that the self (the conscious "I" that controls and makes constant decisions) ceases to be at death--and this makes it very unhappy. I think aspects of our current civilisation promote and seek to expand the "I" (the selfish ego?), and I don't think this is a healthy road as this "I", of all things, is the one that is doomed to die.
It thinks of itself as a homunculus, but it isn't that, it is a rapidly connecting something something bicyle cycle home home... Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
How can something that has ceased to be, be unhappy? Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
It's PNing of the highest order... You can't be me, I'm taken
Through complexity it comes to see connections in a past-present-future tense system (Fran's left brain model), and so it realises that it will, necessarily cease to exist: die. After death, it won't be there to worry, of course. The dead are calm. Those left behind are the bereaved. But as it lives, this selfish-ego is at times overwhelmed with the idea of not existing anymore at some time in the future. The more society promotes this selfish-ego, the more this unhappiness is spread about.
(Connections here to the potential extinction of humans--the horror!) Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
However, conscious life may actually have no end as we are not there to be aware of the end of awareness in the first place...
Like going to sleep but without the dream--or the waking up? Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
However, conscious life may actually have no end as we are not there to be aware of the end of awareness in the first place... Like going to sleep but without the dream--or the waking up?
Like going to sleep but without the dream--or the waking up?
I don't think consciousness ends at death, but I think "self" consciousness ends at death...
The question then is: what is this consciousness that isn't the self, and who cares about it? Which I would take as a comment by the self about its own extinction. Yet there is a long historical cataloge of humans experiencing states which are, it seems, real but impossible to vocalise in prose.
And From vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that.
