If you are afraid of non-existence, why is this so?

You're a teacher. You HAVE passed on a great deal!

For me it seems we experience it a bit every night when we sleep...not all the time, of course, but in the deepest stages of sleep I pretty much wink out.

As I said earlier, I think anaesthesia is a better likeness. For me there is absolutely no sense of anything until I wake up. No sense even of the usual body clock stuff and all. I feel that anaesthesia is nothing to be scared of (unless they damage my brain but don't kill me) and I feel that that is the closest to a state of non existence we can get.

the world rolled on quite nicely before i existed, i expect it to do the same after i'm gone

i have no fear of non existence, apart from missing new stuff that comes along, but i won't know about it anyway

Logic does not come into it. The "death" of unconsciousness has always ended for that self who fears real death .This "self" is conditioned to "forward plan". The dread comes from from the thought of relinquishing this pre-occupation.

But it came into it for me, so your absolute claim is false. I think logic can come into it for many of us.

I used to experience the dread, and I cannot foretell if it will return if I experience the kind of death when you have forewarning, but I do not experience it right now and I believe this to be due to rational thought about the issue.

Yes, I'd spend more time worrying that my impending extinction is another one of those things that's too good to be true (like the rewards of heaven), rather than fearing it. The indifferent universe lacks intent and any concern about feeling agents of consciousness one way or another. But when interpreted through a pessimist's and cynic's anthropomorphic lens it often seems less a merciful saint bastard that would eventually allow its victims to truly escape than it does a relentlessly sadistic bastard with new surprises behind the empirical and conceptual representations of it.

Sounds like a devil!

Existence is way more frightening that non-existence.

Fear of non-existence is a problem encountered exclusively by those who exist, which makes it a question of fearing existence. It is a condition of our existence that it must end, which is really the whole problem. Not a new idea to this thread, I know.

Well, um, yes.

I could have just said "bm"

Yes, existence is more fearsome, especially the issue of the fate of ego. Let my bore my fellow A2Kers again with the following: Fear of death is fear that the ego-self will (in some paradoxical fashion) "experience" oblivion when it ceases to exist. I've read that zen monks when about to realize the illusory nature of ego sometimes suffer the anguish of one who feels he is about to die. But once he realizes the illusory nature of ego-self s/he suddenly loses all fear of death. In a deep existential sense s/he realizes there's noone to die.
I've said many times in these threads that I have a strong sense that moments after my death I will be just as I was before my birth. No problem. And once one dies there will be no subject of the predicate: "state of oblivion". There isn't even such a subject now, but we feel that there is. The Buddha informed us that this delusion is the central source of existential suffering.
Take it or leave it.

Who said that?!

I have a book by the old roman philosopher Cicero. Tusculanae Disputationes it's called. I had to google the title, as mine is the Norwegian version.

Anyway, in the first of the five parts of it, Cicero gives arguments on why it is illogical to fear death, after one of the people there claims that death is an evil.
Much of his argumentation revolves around the idea that the dead do not know they are dead, and therefore cannot suffer.
I think it's interesting to see how this subject has been debated for thousands of years and still holds some relevance.

Um...probably because we still have death around and all. People tend to think about it a bit.

Yes, but the conclusions today are the same as the conclusions 2000 years ago. Nothing we have discovered with our science or technology has changed that, which is perhaps a kind of reality check.

Well, no.....I'd not have expected it to, really. We can tinker a lot more about the edges of WHEN we die, barring being very poor etc., but I don't think anything is going to change about death, suffering, and the eternal verities.

I DO think our society has managed to remove and deny death to a degree impossible in previous eras.....I wonder if that makes it less or more feared?

I was exposed very early to very significant deaths....to a degree uncommon amongst the well off in current western society. I think it made me initially terrified, because it totally removed the possibility of denial, but I do wonder if it made me deal wit it a little earlier?

I don't know....children without much exposure to death commonly experience terror regarding it.


I'm way off topic....but one thing I notice occurring because of modern medicine and either its PR system, or people's projections onto it, is that people seem to react with what is, to me, surprising degrees of shock and a sense of betrayal to adverse outcomes. I have especially noticed this in obstetrics, where many appear to believe that the perfect, live, healthy baby is their RIGHT. We do have such an outcome in numbers unprecedented in history.....but anyone with good acquaintance with medicine and obstetrics and paediatrics would be far more realistic in their expectations.

Well, I am. As are all the medical folk I know.

I cannot say much about that either.

But I agree with your comment about our society managing to deny death to a greater degree than earlier.
I am reminded of cryonists. These are people who take the eternal life fantasy to a whole new level.
The richest of them have their bodies frozen upon death. The bodies will then be stored until such time that science has found a way to "cure" death, and they will then be revived to live forever.
Those who have less money only have their heads frozen, and will be revived when science has found a way to provide them with new bodies.
Pretty sick if you ask me. Not to mention selfish. But hey, that's the type of people our society is made to produce...

I don't see it differing much from Egyptian practices, just as one example, really.

But I suppose the allegedly post Enlightenment nature of our culture, and the removal of the romantic lens of history, reveals a macabre and pathetic aspect that such practices further from our current reality do not provoke in me.

It feels kind of like a chimera of supposedly less rational reality with the steel and white coats of current science...all bloody and ragged where the sutures are.

Me too. Freaking out about dying at age 70 rather than 80 strikes me as silly---as if I was freaking out about being 5'7" rather than 6'7".

One thing I find interesting is that Buddhism scares its adherents in just the opposite way. It starts by telling you you'll be reborn indefinitely. Then it tells you there's a way out: Be a really good person, and you will eventually earn a state of not-being called Nirvana.

Either way, you gotta be scared of something.

But it might not be the freak/scare factor, Thomas.
It might just be a quite sense of mourning that this life you've been living, been so engaged in, will too soon be over. Too soon. I am enjoying being here.
That's my feeling, anyway.
My feelings about my own importance in the grand scheme of things after my disappearance from this planet is quite a different thing. I will know nothing about it, after all. And it won't much matter, really.
Though I do care about what happens on this planet after my life is over.