And, FWIW, Jesus with an after-death erection was popular enough a motive to officially get banned by the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostentatio_genitalium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_erection#cite_ref-Steinb...
How did this ever pass an ethics commission?
To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.
clinical death = heart stops = reversible, depends on circumstances
brain death = irreversible = perma-dead. no one’s ever come back.
legal death = brain dead (not clinical) or court order (missing for X years/etc)
As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on, a blink for you, you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”. You experienced death for all intents and purposes because I don’t think there’s a cognitive process that allows you to differentiate the stages. Heck, deep sleep might be how death “feels” like.
Do people fear death (excluding suffering) because of the threshold itself or the FOMO? Missing on what would come next?
For sure when clinical death starts (even if later reversed), some processes kick in that never would otherwise activate, totally agree. The commonality of near-death-experience suggests something very basal.
* sorry to make it we're all feel old lol
Why not add this to your will:
1. place my body on a pile of dynamite on an Oregon beach, and blow it up (first issue umbrellas to the funeral party.) Or, failing that...
2. Freeze my body in liquid nitrogen, sharpen my head in a giant pencil-sharpener, then drive me into the ground as a fertilizer-spike.
3. Do #2 above, but throw my sharpened body from a plane flying over farmland. Add fletching to my legs to guarantee pointy-end-downwards.
4. Cast my body in a block of solidified transparent polyester resin, then use it as a large tombstone. People visiting can watch the slow decay, until years later it's a me-shaped bubble. (Leave a little drain-channel to prevent explosion from gas pressure.)
5. Once I saw a button-mushroom entirely take over a live eggplant. Do that to my body, but with psilocybe species. Then dry, grind, and smoke me up.
6. "Resomation," but that's too too conventional.
Ultimately I land on: there's enough 'gotchas' with decomposing human remains where I think a graveyard will do. Though, I wish the casket wasn't necessary.
skeleton powder is more apt. Enough of the euphemism!
Common knowledge in Blighty where the majority of funerals are cremations.
I'm puzzled why you appear to have a problem with this process?
Most town museums of any size will have an Iron Age cremation urn full of burnt bone fragments on display. The ashes weren't exactly ground up back then.
https://learn.folkestonemuseum.co.uk/objects/iron-age-cremat...
When I felt my conscious fading away from a heart attack two years ago, I thought "Ah, I guess I die now. Too bad I can't tell my friend to clear the cache as a last joke."
It confirmed I'm not actually afraid to die, just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future.
So, a heartfelt: Glad you could make it!
If I may ask, were you regretting about the decisions made in past or decisions that you won't see in future and jokes aside, what was the most important thing in that moment, was it about family, (does anything like random-thing-we-worry-about-for-too-long/work/tech/whatever-else even runs through the mind)?
There was also nothing important coming to mind. Family and friends is a small group and I have every bit of confidence they'll do just fine without me. I just hope they'll have a fun party as a final goodbye to me. :-)
Besides, death is the ultimate "What, me worry?" as there is nothing left. Can't even experience the void we enter ( unfortunately because I'd like to experience my brain not thinking about anything at all for once :-p ).
Glad you're still alive. I too find the most melancholy in not knowing - what happens next!
We humans are very likely to be our own worst enemy. I would wish for the world to exist till the 5_billion year date that you mention.
You can! While you’re alive and everything! I’ve had this experience of few times of it being very quiet, and overall my brain is a lot quieter since then (and I see reports from people who’ve gone further/deeper; I get the sense the path is never-ending).
There’s a ton of resources and people out there that basically point to the same thing in different ways. Meditation is one of the ways but it’s not the only one. Some keyword soup if you want to go searching: jhana states, Jhourney, Art of Accomplishment, Joe Hudson, Zen, Buddhism, awakening, Michael Singer, Loch Kelly
There are varying levels of “woo” in this, and if you’re on the woo-averse side, Joe Hudson’s stuff is a good way in.