Anxiety

Thought Experiment To Help With The Fear Of Death

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Mortality is a black cloud looming in the distance, something we might not have to face right this moment but will each of us have to face at some point down the line. For many of us this threat, this black cloud, affects not just the future but also keeps us from enjoying the rays of sunshine in the present.

But we already have personal experience with our own deaths, we know what it is to die and have gone through it ourselves in that we have changed many times over our individual timelines. Just think in your own life, for example, about the person you were as a small child, as a teenager, or as a young adult, and how drastically different these people were from each other and from the you of today.

They were once conscious of themselves as you are now, but they are no longer conscious of themselves. For all intents and purposes they are dead, never to think a thought, feel an emotion, or utter a word again. You don’t regret their deaths because your consciousness moved forward on a moment by moment basis so that these changes were smooth, barely noticeable to you. But actually even the person you were yesterday is dead, the person you were when you began reading this article is dead, the person you were just a moment ago is dead.

In this sense you have first-hand knowledge of what it is to be dead since those past incarnations of you are dead. When physical death cuts your consciousness off for the last time there will simply no longer be a consciousness moving through the fabric of time on a moment by moment basis to leave itself behind to die on a moment by moment basis.