Is there anything worse than death?

Not that I have an opinion about such matters.

Have u any evidence as to whether he is right or rong ?

What have those years of study revealed unto u about mysticism ?

Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. It's wonderful.

Pardon my inferior intellect, but what is the relevance of one place (I assume it's a place, a city perhaps?) in Arizona?

Naj, don't know; I've never been there, but I'm told that in the summer it's like the sixth layer of Hell.

Well well well... A nice temperate climate and lots of interesting people to discuss meditation with? I'll try and set up a travel service at once....

sure beats those armageddon-for-the-zillionth-time ear-splitting baaaaaaaa noises, eh?

Is there anything worse than death?

Since no one alive can say with certainty what death results in, the question should be limited to what we all can agree upon: the cessation of interaction with the physical world (save for the process of corruption) by means of the physical body.

With these limits, it fairly easy to make the case that the cessation of interaction with the physical world is preferable to a life long interaction that consists solely of pain. Even this, though, involves a personal preference, but I suspect that those who insist that life, under any circumstances, is preferable to death, have not experienced pain without hope of ending (or have not drunk 15 shots of tequila and then run a quarter mile).

We sometimes hear from well meaning people the consolation that "God doesn't give us burdens we cannot bear," but given the fact of suicide, this cannot be the case. For some people death is preferable to life and if they think it is...than it is.

Depending upon one's spiritual beliefs, death can be far preferable to life if it is the means to "a better life" in some form of paradise. I suspect this is why Christians are so dead set against suicide. If you're going to promise an eternal life of Bliss, you better prohibit the fastest way there or you run the risk of a depleted flock.

Obviously we are all hard-wired to fear and avoid death, but that this hard-wiring is required would seem to tell us something. If death is such a bad thing, shouldn't we be able to intellectually reason our way to this conclusion without the help of evolutionary imperatives?

It is this way because to living things, Life is all there is. Whatever Life is, it has hard wired it's individual members/pawns/subjects to stay alive at virtually all costs while the simple fact of the matter is that none of them can for very long. Eventually Life itself betrays them and takes it's leave no matter what they might do.

It would be easy to make the case that Life is some insane machine of creation that builds death into its creations so it will always remain busy.
We all seem to accept, at a very deep level, that aging, death and corruption are parts of the right way of things, in fact we all have heard on a hundred nature shows that these things are essential to the cycle of Life. Of course they are if Life must operate in cycles, but why must it?

Because, at present, it cannot be sustained indefinitely without death, and Life is very democratic minded - no one gets to opt out of the game.

Imagine the first species of life not aging in the sense we think of, not decaying, not dying. Arguably they could have sustained a near eternal existence because they relied upon photosynthesis and/or chemoautotrophy for sustenance. Of course once the Sun blew itself to atoms or the chemicals of the earth were dispersed into space, the original life forms would, almost assuredly, have perished, but by our reckoning of time this would be pretty near eternal.

Why wasn't this A-OK with Life? It established itself and could have maintained itself for billions of years. Why was evolution required?

Once evolution took hold and organisms grew in complexity, the rays of the Sun and the minerals of the earth could no longer provide the only source of bio-fuel. Before long, Life insisted on organisms that required Life to fuel them ---- thus Death was required.

It could have been Life giving way to an even greater force: Random Chance, but the latter seems less a force than the absence of one.

Given that Life need not have concerned itself with Death for billions of years, why did it chose a path that required Death and in so doing, assure advancement? How was a cycle of Life and Death a better strategy for the continuation of Life than no evolution at all? Why wasn't Life satisfied with an existence as microbes feeding off light and chemicals? Did Life contemplate Existence beyond our Sun's Nova?

By accepting Death, Life accepted, as a partner, Random Choice. If original organisms were essentially immortal, then the random mutations that fuel evolution would have been immaterial.

Ultimately, Randomness may be God himself and so Life had no more of a choice in the matter than the lowest of Life's creatures, but within the confines of human thought, this is difficult to accept. Of course this doesn't mean it is not the case, but since all we have is human thought to examine the universe, we tend to be bound by its restrictions.

If Randomness is indeed the controlling force in the Universe, then it is hard to imagine how there could be the Order we see throughout our perception of this same Universe.

Everything is subject to the scale of Time though and so within the scale of Eternity, it is entirely possible that Randomness could result in Order for some isolated period of time --- notwithstanding the fact that this "period of time" might appear to humans as Eternity.

For all we know, a zillion years from now Existence will revert to Chaos awaiting Order's return in another zillion or so years.

While it is possible for human minds to contemplate Existence perpetuated by Random happenstance, it becomes much more difficult to contemplate the creation of Existence by Randomness.

If in the Beginning there was truly Nothing, then there was also no concept of Randomness. Randomness cannot exist in anything but a binary (ultimately Ordered) universe.

None of this makes any sense at all unless there is a Governing Intelligence. Of course this is the opinion of a cosmically limited human mind, but if I follow my limited ability to know I cannot help but arrive at the steps of God. I could be wrong, but not because of the arguments of those too biased, lazy or scared to follow out the trail.

F'Abuzz, very interesting. But it seems to me that concepts such as chaos, order, randomness, life, death, eternity, infinity/finity, absolulte/relative, Truth/error, Existence, etc. etc. have only a profoundly human significance. They are our necessarily provincial attempts to understand the Grand Scheme of things--also a purely humanly limited notion. When it comes to ultimate concerns I prefer the Ignorance* of the so-called mystical perspective.

* of course there are two types of ignoance: having false answers to false questions, and being free of questions.

Nobody:
U choose to answer in a gut feeling emotional way,
rather than to analyse on a rational basis.
U reject reason, in favor of emotion.

By saying ( as u did ) that u prefer ignorance
and a mystical perspective u show that u prefer to decide what is true
on the basis of INCOMPLETE INFORMATION ( = MYSTERY ).

By this declaration, u exclude yourself from reasoning men.

David

P.S.:
I doubt that there exists such an entity
as a " false question ".

David, I was referring to something more like intuition than to emotion. You are right that I am not a "rationalist", assuming, as they do, that the structure of the Cosmos (or whatever we choose to call the totality of Reality) has a "rational" structure that can be replicated in our heads. That, as I like to say, is little more than the attempt to shrink the Cosmos to the size of our heads.

Intellectually I am probably a pragmatist. I assume that the history of human thought has been a series of notions and models that have eventually proven to be, not wrong, but surpassed in usefulness by other notions and models, which inevitably are surpassed and replaced in an on-going progression of temporarily useful "errors". The goal of all this is prediction and control by means of reasoning and experimentation. At the same time, I enjoy philosophy because of the excitement and "aesthetic" value of its models of reality.

Mysticism, on the other hand, makes no effort to intellectually grasp the totality of Reality as is generally assumed. Instead the mystic comes to see only HIS portion of Reality; it is his symbolically unmediated awareness of that part of the Cosmos that he can see directly and intimately from the inside, because it IS him, his reality (this is classically depicted in the image of the meditating Buddha). This is not "knowledge" in the sense of symbolic formulae, however; it is, instead, ineffable, a form of blissful and liberating ignorance. It is a private rather than public, this form of "enlightenment."

Is there anything worse than death?

Nobody living knows what death is they/we can only speculate.

But if you could talk to 20 people that committed suicide I wonder what they would tell you is worse then death.

My next question would be what is worse then life.

Life unbearable is worse then gambling on death.

This is false.
1000s of people living have known what death is and described it.
www.IANDS.org




People who have committed suicide
have reported hellish conditions.

David, it seems to me that you--and your link--are talking about NEAR death experiences, not death itself. These are not AFTER LIFE experiences, they are LIFE experiences. I do find interesting the report in your link that descriptions of these (life) experiences are uniform cross-culturally, suggesting that their basis is physiological rather than cultural. And if they are physiological that suggests that bodily processes, at least at the level of brain functions, were operating.

I'm afraid I cannot accept a plan of creation that requires sentient beings to strictly abandon their sentience. I can accept a paradox that incorporates in, equal measure, both the self and the all, but I believe it is something of a dodge to insist that enlightenment requires abandonment of the self-awareness that drives us to seek enlightenment.

The moment of enlightenment may very well be the moment that the self is absorbed by the whole, but, if it is, it is a moment achieved, not slipped into. There must be a transition point where the self recognizes the value of surrender.

Y not attend the next convention,
and discuss it with folks who 've gone thru it ?
www.IANDS.org

Because a near death experience is not synonomous with enlightenment.

It may drive one to enlightenment, but it is, in and of itself, nothing more than a physical experience.