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What is it like to die?
What is it like to die? - going to an eternal sleep or spending a temporarily dreamless night?
"Now, if the death is only a dreamless sleep, it must be a marvellous gain. I suppose that if anyone were told to pick out a night on which he slept so soundly as not even to dream, and then to compare with all the other nights and days of his life, and then were told to say, after due consideration, how many better and happier days ad nights than this he had spent in the course of his life - well, I think that ... (anyone) would find these days and nights easy to counts in comparison with the rest. But death is like this, the, I call it gain, because the whole of time, if you look at it in this way, can be regarded as no more than one single night." - Plato, The last day of Socrates.
This remind me Hamlet's monologue
"..................................To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause..."
being alive means not having first hand experience with death and its process.
but makes us to think if the world ended now would we be happy how you lived our life, would we done justice or would we just let it pass us by.
and finally would we be ready to face the death.
Steve Jobs said: "death is the only destination we all share"
share your ideas (before you die) :-) Thank you
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Mitch SMith 50+
In my experience (3 near death events) it goes something like this:
Violent near-death in car accident:
Firstly a highly sharpenned clarity of senses.
Secondly, Accepting the likelyhood of death
Thirdly, regret for those who will mourn.
Fear becomes irellevant, afterlife becomes laughable.
Undergoing general anaesthetic with chance of not ever coming out:
Acceptance, regret for mourners, fade to white.
Heart Fribulation (resulting in brain hypoxea).
Momentary fear,regret for mourners, acceptance, fade to black.
That is my personal experience.
I have a friend who nearly died from a lacerated jugular (car accident) who reported out-of-body watching the paramedics fishing round in his neck to find the blood vessal.
So I assume these OOB things are more common with exsanguination.
elizabeth muncey 10+
Mitch SMith 50+
I think it's generally understood that anaesthetics induce neural noise. The noise threshold overpowers normal neural signals and simply drowns consciousness out.
The affect this has on synaptic structures is not known as far as i have heard. However, I would say that some synaptic disruption takes place. If a person is his/her conectome, you are not the same person when you wake up. However, it is likely that inherent network stabilisation dynamics will re-build something close to the original.
elizabeth muncey 10+
Mitch SMith 50+
That's truly fascinating.
Loose association is something that my wife and I call "planets".
I can invoke the state consciously, my wife was precipitated into it as part of BPD - meds give her the capacity to take conscious control of it.
Loose association has the remarkable property of wild creativity and the skill that DeBono calls "latteral thinking".
In network terms, these associations are supressed by the "field of attention", but there is a qualification of "context". Context is a nested "framing" dynamic whereby the exit point of a network signal is dictated by the entry point. These entry/exit maps can have very deep nesting with each frame being constant and retaining the hierarchy of priority. The context hierarchy further supresses any exit point that does not conform to the framing hierarchy.
If the framing hierarchy gets disrupted, you will have loose association.
For instance, the symbol "tank" may have entry and exit point framed by "container" as in "water tank" but it also has a military frame. Loose association might see a military tank filled with water or a rainwater tank shooting projectiles.
There is one very important role for loose association - it tends to follow the strongest association chain - that devoid of context heirarchies, can map an underlying reality that is not percieved in practical perception - at the very least as a subjective reality, but at the most - inspiration.
Do you keep journals?
elizabeth muncey 10+
elizabeth muncey 10+
Mitch SMith 50+
Australia has plenty of felidae now - they are eating the native wildlife at an alarming rate.
The marsupial population had cat-like animals, but they are all extinct or nearing extinction.
Wife uses quetapine. However, we have discovered that it is only the start - the key is regular sleep. Qietapine helps with that. Need absolute regular dose time - thou shalt always take the dose at 7:30pm - inscribed in obsidian. Then commandment #2 is thou shalt not get disturbed during sleep, and #3 is - thou shalt not be awakened by the expectations of self or others - sleep until finished, not a second before. Then - there is about one hour spent waking-up, do not expect to do anything for 1 hour after waking, take it easy, do no work - don't let others over-ride this, they haven't a clue.
This reduces the productive day to about 8 hours, but what the hell, it's just how it is, and a human needs only 4 hours effort per day to survive.
If you need to get something done, start with a piece of paper - write down what the task is - in big letters, then each subtask in smaller letters - the big letters keep your framing. To keep "on-track" read the words from bottom to top and back down again. This wil train-in nested framing.
Do a lot of writing and read it back to yourself.
Do regular breathing in meditation. Listen to silence - it's not empty.
Count to 10 with eyes closed while imagining a pen writing the number on a paper.
Get foot massage.
Make friends with your physical heart (it has a little brain and will appreciate the attention).
btw - many animals do talk. If you take the time to learn their language.
I have a tribe of currawongs nearby who I am feeding to get their company - they recently tried to teach me their language - I got a few words so far, mostly to do with placation, Even though they want me to, I don't want to do their territorial call - it might get interpreted as another tribe - I cant sing as well as they can.
elizabeth muncey 10+
Mitch SMith 50+
The goal is "the window of clarity". Getting that window open gives us a chance to widen it.
If meds do the trick, then that's what is required.
But once you are in that window, you are presented with the task of widenning the window in such a way that meds will become less essential to get teh damn thing open.
So the most effective use of the lucid window is to work on techniques of lucidity.
Do you follow?
But you have to get that window before anything can happen.
Here it is from another angle:
The Buddha can sit anywhere, it is necessary for us to walk.
To be without walking is to be the Buddha.
We become the Buddha through walking.
I am merely asking you to become the Buddha.
This is the challenge of all living things.
Or:
Take tiger mountain - by storm or strategy.
elizabeth muncey 10+
Mitch SMith 50+
Ther have been many Buddhas. They are simply those enlightenned ones who choose to teach - we hear about those ones, we do not hear about the many Buddhas who choose not to teach. In the tradition, they are all the same. In reality, we are all the Buddha - but only in flashes.
I know very well about mysogeny. But the aberance of others defines only our self-story.
You must remember that the self-story is only a tool, it is the tool we take up to carve the rock of society. Mostly, we forget to put it down.
My father would say:"Argue for your limitations .. and .. sure enough - they are yours."
I have made some suggestions. If you choose to argue about how you cannot do these things . I wonder about how much you need them .. perhaps you don't. If they are not neccessary or important, then something else must be more necessary and important. Is it important for you to be in perpetual low-energy and helplesness? There may be some wisdom in that, I have found it does not work for me. I say to myself:"I will be good to myself first - then I will be strong for those I love. If I am low, all i have to give is low - let's see how strong I can be!". So I ask myself: "What is this thing that I should be low for?" ANd teh silence answers me "nothing".
elizabeth muncey 10+
Edwin Nazarian 10+
Sorry to hear that you had such an experience, but I believe after that you look at life with completely different eyes and now you are making the most of it.
Well, I haven't had such an experience, my experience was being unconscious for like a night or day In Military Hospital about 14 years ago, there I had no idea where I was and what I was dong there. years passed after that until I learned how to use my conscious and unconscious mind to memorise and remember certain events. Then I was sure that our unconscious mind knows and remembers everything, this took me a while, but I got myself into deep hypnotic trance to find out what had exactly happened that night in Military Hospital. Well, now I know that I was there, but I wasn't really there, it was only my body laying there.
was this a near death experience I am still not convinced.
have I experienced it again? NO...
thanks
Mitch SMith 50+
Yes, trauma changes one's outlook.
The car crash gave me some PTSD for a while - and would get anxiety in cars for foar a while / hyper vigilance never truly subsided.
But cumulatively, these events have helped me become intollerant of afterlife fanatics and demonstrated the fallacies of heaven/hell and most notions of "god" - because at the point of death, none of these things matter.
Sounds like you had some injury to brain stem .. maybe the left pre-frontal cortex?
Things in the subcosnscous are not without structure. There are core-self functions that don't require a lot of memory. they are not particularly conscious unless we focus on them - feelings/emotions which arise from body-state. And they monitor things that we have little awareness of. The hippocampus(major memory function) seems to be involved in a couple of functions - it looks like a left/right division with the right doing holistic recording, the left being more serial memory attached to awareness - recording causalities. The other main component seems to be the arrangement of behavioural "macros" (skills/habbits) which are probably associated with the cerebellum.
i must mention that the memory is not totally stable - it gets subjected to update with fresh associations replacing synaptic atrophy.
Edwin Nazarian 10+
I haven't had any injury to my brain. all I had was a certain virus (which later on was common in the area) and this made me to drink a lot of water, my stomach was filled with water which doesn't allow me to eat anything as there was not enough space for "extra"food. I walked about three months like a pregnant woman and yet being on duty of Flag Of Honour - (means standing straight and motionless during 2 hours) and this was over three months every God's day and night. - (there was three of us so we each had this 2 hours.)
One morning I didn't feel well, I was sent to see a Doctor from there directly I was hospitalised for very long time, about 8 or 9 months.
the moment I told you was during the first week when my conditions weren't getting any better but worse and not a doctor could know what was going on. Because they could see nothing but water in my stomach...
I couldn't believe that I wasn't allowed to drink water or eat anything watery.
Glad it is gone and over... since then, health comes first for me!
I started to believe that MIND - BODY is a system,
our physical conditions affect our mental condition and vice versa.