I don’t think that anybody takes drink or drugs hoping for oblivion (users feel free to correct me) - I think they seek altered conscious states. That is, they seek the buzz, and the blackouts are just an unfortunate side effect, like the hangovers are.
Now admittedly, the desired altered state might be ‘feeling no pain’ or ‘forgetting’, but that’s not quite the same as punching out entirely. (For that, they can just go to sleep.)
Lekat, I loved that quote and what you said. I don’t carry the fear of evil I turn it over. I turn over a lot of things that are not in my control. Not all my fears are of Satan/ Evil but he scares me more then death does.
I agree that personal oblivion is not possible. I tried to achieve it with alcohol but it stopped working. I did the inside job and faced everything and it was gone. I feel free today and I make different choices today. It is important be true to yourself.
Death is just the end of this life for my body but not for my soul.
I did. It’s called alcoholism and like drug addiction the person wants to go to the “black peace”. That is just what I called it. An average person does not want anything more then one or two drinks and a buzz. Passing out is not a normal state but I liked it because I forgot myself for a while. Of course when I came to my problems were waiting for me right where they were the day before.
I eventually did the hard work I needed to do all along. Now I am no longer running from anything or need to get drunk.
I think a lot of people that try suicide fail because they are more afraid of death then feeling lousy. Suicide is a permanent solution to a problem that might have been fixable.
There are surely alcoholics and drug addicts that don’t seek oblivion, so let’s not be too broad and careless in slinging the terms around, but beyond that I must concede that a positive example disproves an assumption of nonexistence.
As long as you’re here, though, alleviate my confusion - what’s this “black peace” actually like? Do you actually experience it, or is it an actual oblivion like a dreamless sleep - you close your eyes, then open them and it’s hours later, without you having actually experienced any oblivion at all (since you slept through it). 'Cause if it’s the former it’s not really oblivion, and if it’s the latter why would you bother seeking something you don’t experience?
Every creature ‘fears’ death in the sense that it avoid behaviors that will hasten its demise (physical trauma, lack of nutrition, environmental hazards, etc). Bacteria will avoid behaviors that hasten their own demise. So the emotion of fear of death (which come out of the limbic system in the mammalian brain as far as I know) is just an extension of an urge to avoid death that existed long before emotions like fear existed. Life has been around far longer than emotions have.
However if the debate has turned into why do humans have the neurological capability to reflect and become self aware of their own death, I don’t know. I am not sure where in our evolution we developed that capacity to become aware of our own death. I’m sure others do, but I am unsure.
However if you take ‘death’ to mean any behavior that threatens your survival or the survival of the group you are dependent on, then pretty much most/all our fears are death related. Even things like fear of shame is a fear of death, because shame means you no longer have the protection of the social unit you are dependent on. Social alienation and isolation reduces your chance of survival. So fear of shame is also fear of death. Despondency over not finding a mate means you either will not rear children, or you will have a far harder time doing it than if you had a better mate. Physical pain happens when something threatens the body you depend on for life as well as for working (a broken leg can not only become infected, it can make it much harder to run or hunt). Pretty much all our pain and fear is death related in one way or another.
What you say here is only theory. You can’t prove emotions were developed by evolution over time, nor can anyone know how emotions work. Science doesn’t know how consciousness came about, or where it is located, or what it is, or a good definition of it. Really good, solid research now shows that consciousness continues after the death of the brain and body.
But the worst part is the poor animal that has been brain washed into believing “who knows what” by a bunch of sadistic humans calling themselves scientists. The sadists don’t really know what the ape believes or don’t believe, they have tortured it into mental illness. Then think they have done something grand. Sad, sad, day for humanity. Mentally abusing an animal into mental illness should be a crime. Science has a way of sickening moral people.
I don’t agree. Emotions were developed by evolution over time, and a rich emotional life seems to be limited to mammals due to our limbic system.
As far as not knowing how emotions work, there is a field of neuroscience (affective neuroscience) devoted to the subject. It is a work in progress.
The gorilla had it coming. The scientific website where I found that video said he practiced the sunni version of Islam instead of the one true faith, the shia faith. Because of that I have no sympathy.
“O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.” -Qur’an (9:123)
A work in progress? That really means we don’t know. You have only theories that are untestable, nothing more. And knowing the video wasn’t real doesn’t excuse the cruelty it shows. It’s abhorrent.
Had to get some sleep. My black peace was shutting off the world. I had a horrible schedule and some bad things happened in my life. For whatever reason I chose to ignore the healing process, “Feel, deal and heal” in that order. So I would get home at 7:30 at night after a 12 hour day at a very stressful job with a one hour commute making it a 14 hour day. I literally could not wait to belt back some wine and until I felt the peace and ease a drink can bring. Then it grew out of control to where I could only get some rest after passing out. Black peace was passing out in the clinical sense or shutting off the brain. True sleep is different then drunk sleep where you wake up hung over. I can’t tell you if I experienced it because after a certain amount of alcohol I didn’t remember? I would watch tv and not remember a thing of what I what I watched. I mean I knew I was watching the tv but I wasn’t there. I was in a drunken la la land. It was peaceful though and then everything went black. As I said I didn’t want to pass out I wanted to relax but I overshot the mark because I’m an alcoholic. Alcoholics can’t regulate well and end up drinking too much. Then you become physically dependent and you have to drink to be normal and not in the DT’s. It becomes a vicious cycle and for an alcoholic the day comes when your facing the big dirt nap or dealing with the problems that got the ball roiling. The best example of the black peace phenomenon I have seen is in the movie, “Cider House Rules” when the doctor accidentally dies inhaling ether. Love that movie!
I would have to say giving up my black peace was one of the hardest things I ever did but once I conquered the bottle it became one of the easiest things to avoid. Now cigarettes are another story! They were hard to put down and keep down. But that is not the topic. I have not had a full cup of coffee yet so cut me some slack
I have heard it called the black light also. It is on the cusp of death. On one side is the black peace and the other side is the light. You can meditate to it with a lot of practice. Going there with drugs or alcohol is a toss-up whether you are coming back or not.
Parsing this out for the specific question I asked, it appears you are juggling your terms - these three statements appear to contradict: “Black peace was passing out in the clinical sense or shutting off the brain.”, and “As I said I didn’t want to pass out I wanted to relax but I overshot the mark” and “I would have to say giving up my black peace was one of the hardest things I ever did”
It seems to me that, based on what you’ve written here, what you pursued was the peaceful altered mental state prior to passing out, not oblivion itself. I could of course be wrong though, because my cross-internet mind reading skills have been really dodgy lately.
Do us all a favor and don’t start this.
But if you do decide to drag this out, I’ll fall back on my old standby - alcohol. Percival has helpfully given an example of the fact that when you soak your brain in alcohol, it changes your emotional state. This isn’t a ‘blurred lens’ perception thing - it’s an actual change in mental state, caused by alcohol changing the functional state of the physical brain. Thus it is proved that changing your brain changes you.
Unless your cites are have the same widespread presence and verifiability as the existence and effects of alcohol, don’t bother to present them. They are already trumped by the sauce.
It trumps your claims that a superreality underlies the the dreams that a small percentage of people have mentioned having had around the time of brief cognitive disfunction due to such traumatic events, yeah. Such dreams are considerably less common than traumatic events themselves, as I’m sure even you agree.
Now, if sauce and its effects contradicted the existence of the traumatic events themselves (as you are fallaciously trying to imply to give your position unmerited credence), then that would be an interesting situation, because both things are so omnipresent and so easily verifiable that the fact that they couldn’t both be true would imply that our perception of the world itself was irrovocably broken and unreliable, (Even while we were fully conscious and not undergoing destability of our cognitive processes due to a traumatic incident!) And forget fearing death - living in a world where our own perceptions were constantly unreliable and couldn’t be used to avoid perils around us? Now that would be scary.
Fortunately for all of us this isn’t the case - alcohol and traumatic incidents can coexist in the world without contradiction. In fact, one can easily lead to the other.
Well you see, my site is a repository of a lot of research and articles I did not write. So you can either look at this or not. It was a news story about a skeptic who is now questioning skeptics. You guys are losing the debate.
A news story (and “news” is being extremely generous, as it’s actually a press release from a guy who produces an anti-science, pro-“believer” podcast) about a skeptic who is now questioning skeptics is not “really good, solid research showing that consciousness continues after the death of the brain and body.”
But of course everyone here (including you) already knows that.
You clearly don’t understand what I’ve said about other’s experiences, so you are hardly in a position to speak about whether I’m wrong or not.
But I feel that it is time for me to stop participating in this hijack - we’ve heard your opinion on whether one should fear death, and the instability of the foundation it is based on does not merit further plumbing here.
Interesting article! My Grandmother coded so many times and told me it was so beautiful and to never be afraid of death. She said the hardest part was having to go back down the tunnel into her body. I asked her what it felt like while she was dead and she said it felt like pure love. She said for her it was like the first time they laid her newborn baby on her chest and she got to see him for the first time. That overwhelming feeling of pure love.
She was so unafraid she put in a DMR order and died the next time her heart stopped. I was happy knowing she was going where she wanted to be. I’m sure that they will try and say it’s CO2 or brain death but I think it is the soul leaving the body at death. When I was drowning after I stopped fighting I had the peace come over me. I was laying on the ocean bottom looking up at the light filtering through the water and I started to see my childhood friends and my parents flash before me and then someone pulled me out and I had no pain until then.
