Thread: I just can't get my head around nonexistence after death

Originally Posted by Taosaur

The idea of nonexistence after death is founded upon the superstition that we exist in the first place. To dispel anxiety about nonexistence, one must first come to grips with the tenuous, conditional, and largely illusory nature of what we are here and now. Identifying with the running commentary between your ears is a choice, and neither an adaptive nor a realistic one.

So then you've chosen to ignore the running commentary between your ears (aka, thought)? Wow. It's amazing you've learned to read and write, much less managed to post on a website, where just being here is an admission that you are not ignoring that commentary; especially because "here" in this case is a dreaming website, where identifying with that running commentary could be seen as the core to successful LD'ing. This ignoring of thought doesn't seem like something that can be compartmentalized, either; it is all or nothing, right? Particularly when you deem existence a superstition, right?

Identifying with that commentary between our ears, I think, is what makes us human, whether or not we choose to live in the here & now (where paying attention to that commentary is also required, BTW). Identity (meaning recognition of that commentary), in the end, is all we have. I think that to choose to ignore it leaves pretty much nothing, making for an empty and probably very boring subsistence-level life (being that anything beyond subsistence, like posting on websites or postulating on existence -- much less considering it at all, would be a choice that is apparently neither adaptive nor realistic). I for one will take the illusion, since it is much more interesting.

Or did I totally misunderstand you?

Originally Posted by Sageous

Or did I totally misunderstand you?

Insofar as you assumed "ignore" must be the only possible alternative to "identify with," yes, you misunderstood me. The only way to cease identifying with the so-called "stream of consciousness" and replace it with a stream of mindfulness is to pay close and genuine attention attention to it.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Identifying with that commentary between our ears, I think, is what makes us human, whether or not we choose to live in the here & now (where paying attention to that commentary is also required, BTW). Identity (meaning recognition of that commentary), in the end, is all we have.

Isn't the whole topic of this thread that any identity based on thoughts is the one thing we most definitely do not have "in the end," though? The thing to understand and accept is that we don't have it here and now, either. Our identities dissolve and re-emerge on an ongoing basis every moment of every day, and what emerges each time is a fiction. It's an improvisation with the materials at hand, and can differ considerably from one moment to another. What remains present throughout is the ground of being, the fundamental causal substrate of our thoughts, awareness, form and identity. In the origin of our thoughts and the causes of our existence, we find ourselves linked to continuities long preceding our birth and sure to survive our death. We find ourselves linked to the entirety of existence, which on the one hand does not depend upon our incarnation (our being between a given birth and a given death), yet does depend upon every individual who ever existed for existence to present itself in the form we know.

Do you choose to be the froth on a wave, thrust up and scattered again and again, or do you choose to be the ocean?