Mortality is a state of being where you are subject to an inevitable death.
This is the one single certainty that any human being knows of from a very early age, the fact that at some point
in the future you will cease to exist regardless of how you live your life.
Many people turn to faith to answer what they believe is death, be it in the form of Jesus Christ dying for humanities sins, the belief that we are
all a seperate part of a whole supreme being, the belief that we are part of a continuous reincarnation cycle and so on.
This thread is about the realisation of what death actually is, what it is not and it is an attempt through discussion, to get to the core of the lack
of answers for what happens after life.
If I were to ask you, if you were to forget who you are tomorrow and had absolutely no recollection of who you were, yet you are still alive
biologically, does this mean that who you are is actually a different person and in essence who you are right now would be dead?
Keep this question in mind as you read over the rest of this thread.
In so many belief systems there is the promise of eternal life, yet many of them tell you that you will be free from sin in this next life, therefore
you cannot possibly be the same person because a part of you has been removed.
In other belief systems there is the promise of reincarnation, where you are reborn as a new person, animal or something else, this too is pretty self
explanatory in that you as an individual will be a different person.
There is also another belief that we are part of a whole, a supreme being that is fragmented into our individual experiences, upon death you will
re-connect to this supreme being. This still indicates that who you are individually will cease to exist.
With this in mind, back to the original question of memory loss even, I do not think that it is death that causes fear.
I believe that it is the loss of identity, memories, individual characteristics and essentially the loss of self that causes the fear upon realisation
of ones own mortality.
Here is another thing to think about, if I told you something right now in this very statement here that was so profound it changed your life, does
this make you a different person from what you were before I told you?
It appears that death itself might simply be a change in who you are as opposed to an end, quite literally a life changing moment when it comes to who
we are.
So many people do not actually feel what mortality is, we spend so much time running from it, as a society we are taught to hate aging, look young
etc. It is not a very well discussed topic as it does bring fear with it but at some point in life, everyone will get a sense of the gravity of that
moment that will come at a point in your own individual life.
I am interested to see what the response to this will be if any, I am simply trying to put into words a realisation I have had about an important part
of life that is repeatedly dodged, which is death.
edit on 17-6-2011 by XXXN3O because: (no reason given)