Processing our mortality

[bennyboy]

I think somehow you are lagging about 1 post behind the new ones I keep pumping out. Apologies, but there's one just before this one that I'd hoping for your valuable comments on, too.

As for Camus-- that's one of those epic stories that tends to memorialize a figure for a long time. Brilliant.

[Mister Agenda]

Contemplating death is psychologically healthy. The people of Bhutan have a common practice of thinking about death five times a day, and they are considered one of the countries where the people are happiest. Even their children are not sheltered from death.

There's some evidence that we have a sort of 'psychological immune system' that prompts us to be more likely to think of something happy after we've been contemplating death.

Thanks for the happy thoughts, Lady!

[Foxaèr]

Contemplating death is psychologically healthy. The people of Bhutan have a common practice of thinking about death five times a day, and they are considered one of the countries where the people are happiest. Even their children are not sheltered from death.

There's some evidence that we have a sort of 'psychological immune system' that prompts us to be more likely to think of something happy after we've been contemplating death.

Thanks for the happy thoughts, Lady!

Still, there's something else psychological to be stated for happiness deriving from thoughts of death.

[LadyForCamus]

I think somehow you are lagging about 1 post behind the new ones I keep pumping out.  Apologies, but there's one just before this one that I'd hoping for your valuable comments on, too.

As for Camus-- that's one of those epic stories that tends to memorialize a figure for a long time.  Brilliant.

LOL, sorry!  Chalk it up to "baby brain", and 6 months of sleep deprivation.  Let me scroll back through.  I don't want to miss any of YOUR valuable thoughts.

[emjay]

I wonder sometimes if any religious folk out there harbor a secret fear of their promised-land.  Trying to imagine what the experience of being with god is like must be as futile an exercise as trying to imagine non-existence.  They, themselves, often purport that god's greatness is too powerful for our mere mortal brains to comprehend, so I have to think there must be at least some degree of anxiety attached to the notion that when you die, you're leaving what you know, and are familiar with, and crossing into the unknowable.  

If there's something "out there," and it involves immortality, it's unlikely to involve our status in the well-meaning struggle of hairless monkeys.  I cant imagine how sex would be reconciled-- you gonna show up in heaven and have Gramps at 20 years old, packing wood in his 1940's vogue golf pants?  Is Tomb Raider-era Angelina Jolie going to be okay with me trying to rub baby oil on her 24/7?

Nah, you have to be 100% right on this.  Whatever might be there, it's not what's here, and whoever that dude is, if it's human, it's not me.  Soul or no soul, experience or no experience, bennyboy has to metamorphose into something radically different at best, or just disappear.

I think that sums up the problem with heaven all round for me; to the extent that its perfection is based on individual human wants, especially where those wants may be interpersonal, it's impossible to please everybody one hundred percent of the time. So heaven as a place... a perfect environment to live in... does not make sense to me as even a logically coherent concept, let alone a possibility.

Add to that the fact that most, if not all, human wants/needs come from a negative opposite state... the enjoyment of sleep is relative to tiredness, the enjoyment of food is relative to hunger etc... ie the pleasure of relief/satisfaction of a need is directly tied to, and cannot exist without, that unpleasant need in the first place, where in life the two are constantly alternating.

So to me, the most heaven could be, if it existed, was a pretty cool place most of the time, not a perfect place all of the time... basically earth with benefits... or some sort of happy but unchanging meditative state for eternity.

[LadyForCamus]

I wonder sometimes if any religious folk out there harbor a secret fear of their promised-land.  Trying to imagine what the experience of being with god is like must be as futile an exercise as trying to imagine non-existence.  They, themselves, often purport that god's greatness is too powerful for our mere mortal brains to comprehend, so I have to think there must be at least some degree of anxiety attached to the notion that when you die, you're leaving what you know, and are familiar with, and crossing into the unknowable.  

If there's something "out there," and it involves immortality, it's unlikely to involve our status in the well-meaning struggle of hairless monkeys. I cant imagine how sex would be reconciled-- you gonna show up in heaven and have Gramps at 20 years old, packing wood in his 1940's vogue golf pants? Is Tomb Raider-era Angelina Jolie going to be okay with me trying to rub baby oil on her 24/7?

Nah, you have to be 100% right on this. Whatever might be there, it's not what's here, and whoever that dude is, if it's human, it's not me. Soul or no soul, experience or no experience, bennyboy has to metamorphose into something radically different at best, or just disappear.

I think it's reasonably fair to assume that even if suicide wasn't a sin, most theists wouldn't be leaping off bridges left and right in their unbridled anticipation of heaven.  Evolution via natural selection has grounded us all firmly here, philosophical positions notwithstanding.  

My view of the idea of sins is that they are the animal instincts gone too far for well-being-- gluttony, sex obsession, etc. They represent a loss of control of consciousness over the unconscious impulses. Suicide, unless it's done in a chemically-imbalanced depressive state, can't be that-- it is an overcoming of animal fear on a philosophical or social basis.

I wonder, is there such a thing as suicide not driven by a chemically imbalanced depressive state? Factors such as drug abuse and prolonged physical suffering can bring about the same storm of chemical imbalances seen in clinical depression.

I'm thinking of the recent "right to die" story about the 27 year old girl who had terminal brain cancer, and was granted the legal right to end her own life at a time of her choosing when the physical and emotional anguish became unbearable. Is there a line to be drawn here? She must have certainly fit the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression, but do we consider her choice a rational and philosophical one, compared to...say...Robin a Williams', who was suffering from Lewy Body dementia?

Life and death, like almost anything else, look very different the more you zoom in or out on them, and even some of those moral issues with family and so on really look more and more like emotional reactions on the chimp-brain level than ration arguments for struggling on.

I think there is a moral case to be made for the cessation of suffering, but I'm not sure it's ever truly rational, given the state of mind a person must be in, in order to come to that decision. Maybe the distinction to be made is not in whether the reasons for suicide are rational, but whether the source of that individual's depression is modifiable. If that makes any sense? lol.

[Angrboda]

I wonder, is there such a thing as suicide not driven by a chemically imbalanced depressive state?  Factors such as drug abuse and prolonged physical suffering can bring about the same storm of chemical imbalances seen in clinical depression.

This may not be particularly relevant, but I attempted suicide several times while under the delusion that I needed to end this life in order to journey back to an alternate universe that I originally came from. My suicides were typically attributed to depression, but that wasn't the driving force behind them. I suppose if somebody has the right set of beliefs, regardless of depressive state, they may be capable of suicide. Think of the Heaven's Gate cult deaths.

[bennyboy]

I wonder, is there such a thing as suicide not driven by a chemically imbalanced depressive state?  Factors such as drug abuse and prolonged physical suffering can bring about the same storm of chemical imbalances seen in clinical depression.

I'm thinking of the recent "right to die" story about the 27 year old girl who had terminal brain cancer, and was granted the legal right to end her own life at a time of her choosing when the physical and emotional anguish became unbearable.  Is there a line to be drawn here?  She must have certainly fit the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression, but do we consider her choice a rational and philosophical one, compared to...say...Robin a Williams', who was suffering from Lewy Body dementia?  

I can think of very many cases where suicide would be a rational decision, maybe even a noble one. A soldier behind enemy lines might commit suicide to avoid being interrogated and causing great harm to his fellow soldiers. One might commit suicide to make a strong point, as Tibetan monks do when they burn themselves to death in front of the Chinese legislature. One might see suicide as the greater good-- for example, a very strong environmentalist might decide that humanity is a cancer to the world, and decide no longer to participate in our rape of the Earth. An old person might decide that instead of costing his family hundreds of thousands in health care costs for terminal cancer, he'd rather sit on the beach with a bottle of sleeping pills and watch the sun come up one last time.

As for the right to die-- it clearly CAN be rational, but with a caveat: we've all had times in life where we were so sick that if there were an "end it now" button next to our beds, we might have pressed it just to end the pain-- even though a few days and a couple bottles of orange juice would have been enough to get through it.

[LadyForCamus]

I wonder, is there such a thing as suicide not driven by a chemically imbalanced depressive state?  Factors such as drug abuse and prolonged physical suffering can bring about the same storm of chemical imbalances seen in clinical depression.

This may not be particularly relevant, but I attempted suicide several times while under the delusion that I needed to end this life in order to journey back to an alternate universe that I originally came from. My suicides were typically attributed to depression, but that wasn't the driving force behind them. I suppose if somebody has the right set of beliefs, regardless of depressive state, they may be capable of suicide. Think of the Heaven's Gate cult deaths.

Wow, Jor! So sorry to hear what you've been through. I think I speak for everyone here when I say that planet earth is fortunate you were unsuccessful. I think you're right that
such a thing is completely possible. When I was young, maybe 10 or so, I would lay awake in bed some nights and try to imagine what heaven was like. All I had in my mind was everything Father and my parents had said over and over about how amazing it's going to be. My father is an avid gun collector, and I recall several occasions where I was extremely tempted to grab a pistol from the bedroom and shoot my self; not because I was sad, but because I was really, really excited to know what heaven was like. As a kid, it felt like waiting endlessly for Christmas morning. Oh, the fucked up things adults teach their children...