Death

[Mandalorian54]

I think dying in war deponds on how you die, if you get sniped it's not exactly honerable exept that if you didn't someone else probably would just have been in your place so it kind of is, and dying for your country is honorable. There are more honerable deaths in wars though like sacrificing yourself for your teamates, you know...

 

But I must say I'm a christian so if you die you will go to heven or hell but I don't suspect any of believe in that.

[XERXES]

Originally posted by Mandolorian54

I think dying in war deponds on how you die, if you get sniped it's not exactly honerable exept that if you didn't someone else probably would just have been in your place so it kind of is, and dying for your country is honorable. There are more honerable deaths in wars though like sacrificing yourself for your teamates, you know...

 

But I must say I'm a christian so if you die you will go to heven or hell but I don't suspect any of believe in that.

yea i see where your coming from. But from what ive read, i dont even wana go into war. heh.

[Clem]

dying in war is honourable

 

surviving a war having fought for ur country is more so i feel

[C'jais]

Originally posted by lsd|Wee Bitch

I believe in God so I too will keep you and your family in me prayers. As for death, it's never scared me. What scraes me is becoming a vegetable or a quadrapalegic. I just take everything day by day. If I die today, oh well. If not, that's spiffy too.

 

To comment on what cjais said, if there is no afterlife, we cease to exist after our body dies. We won't feel anything because we are no more, so desires wouldn't exist nor would a taste of nothingness. So there would be no black void no memories, no spirit to survive. Nothing. That's depressing. Isn't it more interesting to at least have a hope of an afterlife? Not saying you don't believe that, but just a thought.

 

Yes Wee B*tch (what kinda name is that anyway? ), it is depressing in a way I agree... but only in the present you are in now.

 

Okay, to take the buddhistic approach, you could say that your happiness, your entire love of life, depends solely on having your constant desires fulfilled. When those desires aren't fulfilled we become unhappy - isn't that sorta depressing too?

 

What you "desire" is to have an afterlife, but what I desire is to turn to nothing, to extinquish those desires and escape meaning, anger and... suffering....

 

Aight, this is getting to Yodastic and Buddhistic for me to take, and I apologize if I've offended any buddhists in here with that jibberish I just wrote...

 

I've had a bad day, that's all....

[obi]

Originally posted by -[MotU]-Lyger|=-

ya kno i F-in hate this day(9/11) sooooo f-cking stupid. i kno I am not going to die, because of some stupid date. + its pontless to worry about death, cause thats all you think about and you dont think about your actual life. real stupid to be worrying about death if you ask me, live in the moment, not the past or the future.

 

wow, someone ate a bowl of Jackass for breakfast.........

 

 

Hey leXX, sorry to hear about your grand-pappy.

 

Here's my take on death:

 

Death is not 'the end,' but rather, 'a new beginning.'

 

I think when your body "dies," your spirit moves onto whatever God has in store for you.

 

Good luck on this issue, leXX.

 

[Camus]

Thight might lighten your mood...

 

 

"Jeffrey: When I die, I want to go like my Grandfather did, Peacefully in his sleep. Not yelling and screaming like all the passengers in his car."

[Jaster_Mareel]

Even if you don't believe in God there's still some pretty comforting things in the Bible. You may wan't to read it if you have one. Death is usualy when people turn to God but some times it's when people turn away if you know what I mean.

 

Ooops I accidently logged in as the wrong person oh well.

[C'jais]

I feel like sh*t for saying this but...

 

My grandfather passed away 4 years ago....

 

ANd I didn't feel anything at all... I only cried in church because everyone else was doing it - very emotional scene.

 

I think it was because I never got to know him very well - I think I'm gonna cry like a little baby when my dog dies some day...

 

My two cousins who also were at the church didn't cry either - I guess it must be a Danish thing

[whitedragon]

i am reminded of a quote from stephen kings desperation "yes God i very crule because he lets us live"

[Agen]

But if he didn't then there would be nothing better than anything else or desires which are fulfilled or anything at all. Just a point.

[rfa_vasquez]

if i go i want it to be without me suffering.like i dont wanna be shot and then take all the pain then go

[Absurd]

About 10 years ago my 'best friend' killed himself.

 

That's when I stopped taking death and friendships so seriously.

[Agen]

The moody-man's story unveils now eh?

[whitedragon]

Originally posted by Absurd

About 10 years ago my 'best friend' killed himself.

 

That's when I stopped taking death and friendships so seriously.

im sorry to hear that

[gorganfloss]

Originally posted by Absurd

About 10 years ago my 'best friend' killed himself.

 

That's when I stopped taking death and friendships so seriously.

Whoa...

 

 

 

 

Well I kinda want to die (not now) so I can see what happens afterwards, if you get to float around as an apparition and all that suff.

[Tyrion]

Sorry to hear about your grandparents,were you close to them Lexx?

 

Anyhoo..I've decided not to think about death much. If you do,you lead a unhappy life and thus everythin becomes depressing... but I do wonder.

 

Like I killed a bee today in PE,we were improving our locking skills(I.E. making sure we all knew how to unlock locks) and a bee came towards me. I tried to hit it once with a lock,to protect myself. So I got it,but it didnt die.I hit it again,and it still didnt die.The 2 of my friends watched it,both wanting em to kill it. I saw the bee grasping painfully for life,then my friend squashed it one last time. I felt pretty awful...

 

But death is kinda wierd. If we have souls,we know we go somewhere. Maybe to heaven,maybe to another dimension,heck maybe just feel "conscience" in the universe...But we could be just lots of brain cells,just fooling ourselves into thinking we are alive when we really not,so we never die...but we never lived...

 

 

When you cant go to any of your friends how during summer,and the swamp is quiet,you get quite philoshophical...

[whitedragon]

Originally posted by gorganfloss

Whoa...

 

 

 

 

Well I kinda want to die (not now) so I can see what happens afterwards, if you get to float around as an apparition and all that suff.

well not exactly

[gorganfloss]

When I get philosophical, people I know on other chat-room thingys say Im "deep".

[Absurd]

Originally posted by gorganfloss

Well I kinda want to die (not now) so I can see what happens afterwards, if you get to float around as an apparition and all that suff.

 

You might find this entertaining - saw this on another forum:

 

"Viola! Instant God Experience!

 

Dr. Michael Persinger, working at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has pioneered a method for inducing the religious, spiritual experience of the shaman. Without drugs, herbs, hypnosis or invasive surgery, he can quite literally flip a switch and induce the experience of "god."

Using an ordinary striped yellow motorcycle helmet purchased at a sporting goods store, which he has modified with electromagnetic coils, he can place the helmet on your head, connect the wires to a device he has constructed that generates the proper signals, and when the magnetic fields produced by the coils penetrate the skull and into the temporal lobes of the brain, the result is the stimulation of those lobes and a religious experience results.

 

In common with the Hindu view that a confrontation with God is a confrontation with the self, the nine-hundred plus people who have undertaken the experience produced by Dr. Persinger's helmet have had some very profound experiences. Four out of five say that they've had experiences so profound they would be life-changing had they not understood the mechanistic underpinnings of what they had experienced.

 

How does Dr. Persinger's helmet work? It works by inducing very small electrical signals with tiny magnetically induced mechanical vibrations in the brain cells of the temporal lobes and other selected areas of the brain, located in the skull just above and forward of the ears. These lobes are the portions of the brain that produce the "Forty Hertz Component" of the brainwaves detected in electroencephalograms. These mysterious "forty hertz components" are present whenever you are awake or when you are in REM sleep. They are absent during deep, dreamless sleep. What the "forty hertz component" does is not well understood, but we know that it is always present during the experience of "self." We cannot have a "me" experience without the forty hertz component being present.

 

What this means is that the forty hertz component is essential to our experience of self. We cannot experience our sense of individuality without it. It stands to reason, then, that if the forty hertz component could somehow be suppressed, the sense of individuality would be suppressed with it, and indeed, this is what Dr. Persinger's helmet does. It turns off the forty hertz component and with it the sense of individuality which your brain uses to define "self" as opposed to "rest of the world."

 

When the brain is deprived of the self stimulation and sensory input that is required for it to define itself as being distinct from the rest of the world, the brain 'defaults' to a sense of infinity. The sense of self expands to fill whatever the brain can sense, and what it senses is the world, so the experience of the self simply expands to fill the perception of the world itself. One experiences becoming "one with the universe."

 

But What About the God Experience?

 

There are two temporal lobes in the brain, one on each side. The one on the left, in most people, is the dominant one, responsible for language, which becomes dominant when we first learn language as children. The one on the right, non-dominant, contributes to the sense of self with constant communication with its opposite colleague. But being on the far side of the brain, sometimes the communications get out of whack, often as a result of stress or disease, and the forty hertz component falls out of sync. When this happens, the result is that the normally silent right-hand sense of self becomes experienced as a separate presence by the left-hand sense of self.

This is the experience of the God presence. There is an overwhelming sense of presence, an inescapable feeling that someone is there. But when the forty hertz component is deeply attenuated or entirely absent from, say, the left side, and there's no "self" experience occurring, the feeling of unity with infinity is occuring with a sense of an overwhelming presence resulting from the continued operation of the right hand side, there is no way to describe it other than feeling that one has experienced the "infinite presence." Hence the God experience.

 

All of this has been verified not only experimentally with Dr. Persinger's helmet, but by use of high-tech brain scanning machines similar to the CAT and MRI scanners that many of us have experienced.

 

And The Sense of Timelessness and Spacelessness in Prayer and Meditation?

 

Many deeply experienced meditators feel, when deep in meditation, an experience of transcendance of the here and now. They feel a sense of being outside of time and space. How is this experience produced?

 

Two researchers, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, have taken a particular interest in these experiences. Through the use of a brain-scanning technique called SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography), they have determined how these experiences arise. The researchers have produced images of the brains of Tibetan Buddhists who undergo deep, profound meditative experiences as the result of years of practice. They have done the same with a Catholic Franciscan nun, who, after 45 minutes of deep prayer, had her brain scanned to determine what centers were active and what centers were not.

 

The results show that in both cases, the pre-frontal cortex, which controls attention, is highly stimulated. This is not surprising - meditation requires a great deal of concentration. The subjects are clearly deeply attentive to their task. But the superior parietal lobe, the center that processes information about space, time and the orientation of the body in space, is suppressed, and is almost totally quiet. The result is that any sense of time, space or being in the world is suppressed along with the activity in the superior parietal lobe. And not feeling "in the world" leads to an "other-worldly" experience. So it is not surprising that those who have this experience describe it as being in the "spiritual realm." Persinger has been able to reproduce this by electrically supressing activity in the superior parietal lobe using his helmet - and when he performs this experiment on Tibetan monks and the Franciscan nun, they all report that the experience is identical to what they experience in their own meditative practice.

 

What About The Near-Death Experience?

 

The near-death experience that is described by many patients who have been revived from life-threatening events contain elements of all of these and a few more.

We have seen how the presence of the "god" feeling arises from the result of the shutting down of communications between the temporal lobes. And we have seen how the sense of timelessness and infinite space arise through the supression of activity in the superior parietal lobe. But what about the vision of the tunnel with the light at the end? And the sense of rising out of the body?

 

The sense of orientation is lost when the superior parietal lobe shuts down. The 'self' no longer feels anchored to the body, because the sense of self being in the body is lost, and one often seems to be rising to 'heaven.' We now know that the vision of the tunnel is produced by the visual cortex being disconnected from sensory input, and beginning to shut down. Same with the light at the end of the tunnel, which is an artifact of the brain's visual cortex 'looking' for sensory input it cannot 'see.' The visions of a beautiful summer garden or lovely mountain landscapes are the result of the memory centers acting on the centers of the brain that organize visual input into things we recognize, which is operating in the near-total absense of sensory input. All of these brain activities together produce the familiar being of light at the end of a tunnel, and the entrance into the beautiful summer garden.

 

These experiences have a deep, even profound feeling of reality to them. This is simply because the centers of the brain that are producing the experience are cut completely off from sensory that would dilute the 'realness' of the experience - those centers that analyse experience for us in real time and allow us to evaluate it for its correspondence to reality - in other words, the centers of the brain that enable us to discern the difference between dreaming and wakefulness, real versus imagined. Hence, the subjects who report these experiences describe them as being so real they were not at all like a dream. Indeed, they weren't - they were dreams undiluted from sensory reality checks and the evaluation of sensory data for its validity.

 

But What About "Brain-Dead" Patients And Their Near-death Experiences?

 

What is now understood is that these phenomena can occur with very minute amounts of electrical activity in the brain. Most of the brain can be shut down and these phenomena are still possible - with electrical activity so small it is not possible to measure it through external devices. Remember, our brains don't come with "diagnostic ports" like a modern automobile's engine computer - what we measure with our electroencephalograms is the "leakage." It's like trying to discern what's happening inside a computer by listening to the static it creates in a radio sitting next to it. A lot can be happening without making enough noise to hear it on the "radio."

 

What Does All This Mean?

 

It is clear that the meaning of the understanding of these phenomena are easily explained in detail through well-understood neurological processes in the brain. What are widely regarded as evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm can easily be explained by the material, the mundane. So in the light of that reality, what does the religionist have to say?

Those who have communicated their interpretations to me say that they remain unconvinced that this means any new. I disagree. For most who write to me regarding my essays about the reality of a metaphysical universe, I have but one thing to say: your most powerful, persuasive evidence, namely your own powerful, personal experience, can now be easily and rationally explained, in all its features. No metaphysical explanation is necessary. Because no metaphysical explanation is required to explain your experience, your "evidence" is no longer evidence of anything metaphysical.

 

So now, religionist, how do you prove your case?"

 

http://www.bidstrup.com/mystic.htm

[gorganfloss]

Originally posted by whitedragon

well not exactly

 

Hmph...

 

 

 

[whitedragon]

wow thats deep

[gorganfloss]

Originally posted by Absurd

 

You might find this entertaining - saw this on another forum:

 

"Viola! Instant God Experience!

 

Dr. Michael Persinger, working at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has pioneered a method for inducing the religious, spiritual experience of the shaman. Without drugs, herbs, hypnosis or invasive surgery, he can quite literally flip a switch and induce the experience of "god."

Using an ordinary striped yellow motorcycle helmet purchased at a sporting goods store, which he has modified with electromagnetic coils, he can place the helmet on your head, connect the wires to a device he has constructed that generates the proper signals, and when the magnetic fields produced by the coils penetrate the skull and into the temporal lobes of the brain, the result is the stimulation of those lobes and a religious experience results.

 

In common with the Hindu view that a confrontation with God is a confrontation with the self, the nine-hundred plus people who have undertaken the experience produced by Dr. Persinger's helmet have had some very profound experiences. Four out of five say that they've had experiences so profound they would be life-changing had they not understood the mechanistic underpinnings of what they had experienced.

 

How does Dr. Persinger's helmet work? It works by inducing very small electrical signals with tiny magnetically induced mechanical vibrations in the brain cells of the temporal lobes and other selected areas of the brain, located in the skull just above and forward of the ears. These lobes are the portions of the brain that produce the "Forty Hertz Component" of the brainwaves detected in electroencephalograms. These mysterious "forty hertz components" are present whenever you are awake or when you are in REM sleep. They are absent during deep, dreamless sleep. What the "forty hertz component" does is not well understood, but we know that it is always present during the experience of "self." We cannot have a "me" experience without the forty hertz component being present.

 

What this means is that the forty hertz component is essential to our experience of self. We cannot experience our sense of individuality without it. It stands to reason, then, that if the forty hertz component could somehow be suppressed, the sense of individuality would be suppressed with it, and indeed, this is what Dr. Persinger's helmet does. It turns off the forty hertz component and with it the sense of individuality which your brain uses to define "self" as opposed to "rest of the world."

 

When the brain is deprived of the self stimulation and sensory input that is required for it to define itself as being distinct from the rest of the world, the brain 'defaults' to a sense of infinity. The sense of self expands to fill whatever the brain can sense, and what it senses is the world, so the experience of the self simply expands to fill the perception of the world itself. One experiences becoming "one with the universe."

 

But What About the God Experience?

 

There are two temporal lobes in the brain, one on each side. The one on the left, in most people, is the dominant one, responsible for language, which becomes dominant when we first learn language as children. The one on the right, non-dominant, contributes to the sense of self with constant communication with its opposite colleague. But being on the far side of the brain, sometimes the communications get out of whack, often as a result of stress or disease, and the forty hertz component falls out of sync. When this happens, the result is that the normally silent right-hand sense of self becomes experienced as a separate presence by the left-hand sense of self.

This is the experience of the God presence. There is an overwhelming sense of presence, an inescapable feeling that someone is there. But when the forty hertz component is deeply attenuated or entirely absent from, say, the left side, and there's no "self" experience occurring, the feeling of unity with infinity is occuring with a sense of an overwhelming presence resulting from the continued operation of the right hand side, there is no way to describe it other than feeling that one has experienced the "infinite presence." Hence the God experience.

 

All of this has been verified not only experimentally with Dr. Persinger's helmet, but by use of high-tech brain scanning machines similar to the CAT and MRI scanners that many of us have experienced.

 

And The Sense of Timelessness and Spacelessness in Prayer and Meditation?

 

Many deeply experienced meditators feel, when deep in meditation, an experience of transcendance of the here and now. They feel a sense of being outside of time and space. How is this experience produced?

 

Two researchers, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, have taken a particular interest in these experiences. Through the use of a brain-scanning technique called SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography), they have determined how these experiences arise. The researchers have produced images of the brains of Tibetan Buddhists who undergo deep, profound meditative experiences as the result of years of practice. They have done the same with a Catholic Franciscan nun, who, after 45 minutes of deep prayer, had her brain scanned to determine what centers were active and what centers were not.

 

The results show that in both cases, the pre-frontal cortex, which controls attention, is highly stimulated. This is not surprising - meditation requires a great deal of concentration. The subjects are clearly deeply attentive to their task. But the superior parietal lobe, the center that processes information about space, time and the orientation of the body in space, is suppressed, and is almost totally quiet. The result is that any sense of time, space or being in the world is suppressed along with the activity in the superior parietal lobe. And not feeling "in the world" leads to an "other-worldly" experience. So it is not surprising that those who have this experience describe it as being in the "spiritual realm." Persinger has been able to reproduce this by electrically supressing activity in the superior parietal lobe using his helmet - and when he performs this experiment on Tibetan monks and the Franciscan nun, they all report that the experience is identical to what they experience in their own meditative practice.

 

What About The Near-Death Experience?

 

The near-death experience that is described by many patients who have been revived from life-threatening events contain elements of all of these and a few more.

We have seen how the presence of the "god" feeling arises from the result of the shutting down of communications between the temporal lobes. And we have seen how the sense of timelessness and infinite space arise through the supression of activity in the superior parietal lobe. But what about the vision of the tunnel with the light at the end? And the sense of rising out of the body?

 

The sense of orientation is lost when the superior parietal lobe shuts down. The 'self' no longer feels anchored to the body, because the sense of self being in the body is lost, and one often seems to be rising to 'heaven.' We now know that the vision of the tunnel is produced by the visual cortex being disconnected from sensory input, and beginning to shut down. Same with the light at the end of the tunnel, which is an artifact of the brain's visual cortex 'looking' for sensory input it cannot 'see.' The visions of a beautiful summer garden or lovely mountain landscapes are the result of the memory centers acting on the centers of the brain that organize visual input into things we recognize, which is operating in the near-total absense of sensory input. All of these brain activities together produce the familiar being of light at the end of a tunnel, and the entrance into the beautiful summer garden.

 

These experiences have a deep, even profound feeling of reality to them. This is simply because the centers of the brain that are producing the experience are cut completely off from sensory that would dilute the 'realness' of the experience - those centers that analyse experience for us in real time and allow us to evaluate it for its correspondence to reality - in other words, the centers of the brain that enable us to discern the difference between dreaming and wakefulness, real versus imagined. Hence, the subjects who report these experiences describe them as being so real they were not at all like a dream. Indeed, they weren't - they were dreams undiluted from sensory reality checks and the evaluation of sensory data for its validity.

 

But What About "Brain-Dead" Patients And Their Near-death Experiences?

 

What is now understood is that these phenomena can occur with very minute amounts of electrical activity in the brain. Most of the brain can be shut down and these phenomena are still possible - with electrical activity so small it is not possible to measure it through external devices. Remember, our brains don't come with "diagnostic ports" like a modern automobile's engine computer - what we measure with our electroencephalograms is the "leakage." It's like trying to discern what's happening inside a computer by listening to the static it creates in a radio sitting next to it. A lot can be happening without making enough noise to hear it on the "radio."

 

What Does All This Mean?

 

It is clear that the meaning of the understanding of these phenomena are easily explained in detail through well-understood neurological processes in the brain. What are widely regarded as evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm can easily be explained by the material, the mundane. So in the light of that reality, what does the religionist have to say?

Those who have communicated their interpretations to me say that they remain unconvinced that this means any new. I disagree. For most who write to me regarding my essays about the reality of a metaphysical universe, I have but one thing to say: your most powerful, persuasive evidence, namely your own powerful, personal experience, can now be easily and rationally explained, in all its features. No metaphysical explanation is necessary. Because no metaphysical explanation is required to explain your experience, your "evidence" is no longer evidence of anything metaphysical.

 

So now, religionist, how do you prove your case?"

 

http://www.bidstrup.com/mystic.htm

 

Okee-Dokey then...

 

[Chastan]

yeah, leXX, strangely my (former) roommate's grandpa died on this date one year ago, that's what he thinks about when he thinks of "9/11". I hope you are feeling well, if not, be sure to ask someone for a hug, that's what i like to do when feeling down

[whitedragon]

Originally posted by Chastan

yeah, leXX, strangely my (former) roommate's grandpa died on this date one year ago, that's what he thinks about when he thinks of "9/11". I hope you are feeling well, if not, be sure to ask someone for a hug, that's what i like to do when feeling down

oh really i usually ask for a bottol of scotch. just kidding

[Jah Warrior]

Death is a weird subject to me, I think I am in a state of denial that I will ever die which is foolish, I just dont really want to think about it in truth, I'm more concerned with making the present time more bareable, However I have no dependents (unless you include my bumbaclart brother or little man my hamster).

 

If I had to go, I would either want to be struck by lightning, God I love lightning!!! or failing that I will be happy to die with a spliff in my hand and being pleasantly stoned at that time.

 

Going to hell or heaven does not really concern me, I am far more inclined to take the buddhists point of view on this matter. (dont tell my mother she is a sunday school teacher LOL).