I feel like I am getting too talkative. Well, maybe I just need to release what I have stored up in mind. If you don't want to read, please just ignore me.
The questions of "How should one feel about death (of one's own or one's loved ones)?", "Why does one feels that way?", etc. are still left hanging and they are rather hard to answer without being self-righteous. But to answer them we need to discuss suffering, desire, hope and love as well. There is no time and nobody wants to bother to.
@Noqanky:
My point is to explain my view, and when I say I don't understand yours I do it as an indirect question for you to explain it to me so I may understand your perspective better.
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Well, good sir, before I explain anything, first let me thank you for speaking your mind. I didn't know there are people who never felt the fear of death but it seems like you are a honest proof of that and I am glad you shared your experience with us. If you felt insulted by anyone, let me apologize you in their place. (And if your sincerity has made anyone uncomfortable, I'd like to apologize them in your place as well). Please find it in your heart the strength to forgive and the courage to continue to speak your mind like this. As your experiences would benefit my understanding more than you would think.
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Don't you see, sir, humans don't understand each other and this heat and awkward silence (no puns intended) in this thread is just a minor confirmation.
To sympathize with others, we have to associate ourselves with other's pain. Sometimes we don't want to, because doing so takes from us the joy of smiting them, physically or psychologically. Some of us insult others in the Internet for kicks and adrenaline because we don't have to pay the price of two or three teeth, and we justify our action by saying "Someone's feeling get hurt on the Internet? Big deal!" or "You get hurt because of words from the Internet? What a pathetic wimp!". Such activities are not my cup of tea.
And some of us insult others for the crime of insulting others, unaware of our hypocrisy, and go on lecturing people about how to behave on the Internet, to feed our sense of moral superiority and self-righteousness. Such activities are also not my cup of tea.
But you see, how can we understand someone if we don't try to think like them for a moment? We often ask "How could anyone do this?", "Why would you do that?" but we just ask them for the sake of disagreeing and are never interested in the answers, never put in actual attempt to figure out why. We refuse to understand each other. Instead of sympathizing we ridicule and instead of gently explaining ourselves we shout. We shout very loudly and yet we can't hear each other because our hearts are too far away from each other. Is the Internet supposed to bring us closer to each other or just comfirm our distance?
It is not my nature to insult people in the Internet, but I have tried doing that sometimes, because I wanted to understand why some people can enjoy doing it and why some people can be liked for doing it. I didn't really want to be liked for doing so. I just wanted to understand. And I figured people who do so are not just insufferable assholes. The me of 2 years ago would stay away from Mr. Monkey King as far as possible. But I learned how it felt to be angered by the stupidity of people, and learned that I shouldn't feed that anger nor should I suppress it, but I must understand it, understand why I feel angry, and only then will anger cease to exist. Cock, dick, asshole, pussy, and so on, I used to be all of those and I understand what it felt to be all of those.
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It's said a man who doesn't love himself cannot love others. How do we feel compassion? Man is a self-centered creature. When he sees others suffer, he feels painful because it reminds him of himself and makes him imagine what he would feel if the same damage was done to him. If he doesn't feel that that damage would give him pain, then he can't feel sorry for others' suffering. It is a rather negative way of looking at it, so, in a more positive way: honorable is he who makes the suffering of others his suffering and the happiness of others his happiness.
In your case, you said you didn't understand what's scary and horrible about death, so I assume you never felt your own death would be scary or painful, which is why you can't sympathize with the pain and fear of other people about death.
Well, if what you said were true to your experience, then it is not your fault and you were simply trying to understand people. But it is rare nonetheless. Because I assumed the fear of death lied in our instinct, needed for our survival. I assumed everyone was born with it and then either live with it or overcome it. I have heard many people say they don't fear death but most of them were just bragging. When they confronted death in the face they were just as scared as anyone. Sometimes death itself is not scary but the pain preceeding it is, the moment you wait for it is.
Didn't Steve Jobs say: "Death is very likely to be life's best invention."? He had a point.
Well, sir, we can say that man is a selfish animal. He wants to feel loved before he loves. What is more important, to love or to be loved? What does it means to love?
Can a man love without being loved back? Can a man be happy with being unloved by the whole world? I will give my answer later, but in most cases, it is unlikely for a man to be content with such solitude.
Why do we bury dead humans? Why don't we just leave them there to provide foods for birds and wild beasts, and nutrition for the soil, like other animals? It might contradict the natural order of things, but we want to feel that humans are special. We want to feel that our existences somewhat matters, somehow have importance. Death rituals was born from that mindset. Mourning and crying, too, have become some sort of rituals that we often take for granted and some of us have sometimes forgotten what it truly means to mourn.
Sir, you said when you are dead you don't want to see others cry for you because you equated it with depression. It is nice of you to want your loved ones to be always positive, but not everyone sees it that way, sir. Sometime, some of us cry to show others that they have a place in our hearts, that we care about them and appreciate them. And some of us want to know when we die there will be someone being sad for our deaths.
It's cold. You are wearing much clothing and you feel warm. Suddenly you lose some clothing and you feel cold. You will get used to it eventually but your first reaction is to feel colder.
The death of a loved one is also like that. If they have ever occupied much of a place in your heart and sparked warmth in your heart, then their absence will make you feel somewhat lonely and empty, and sad. You would feel there is something mising, as you were attached to them and used to their presences. You were emotionally dependent on them in some way, and with their deaths you lose some pillar to rely on, so for a certain amount of time you lose your balance, and it takes longer for some to regain that balance than others. Some of us want to know that in our lifetime we were reliable and useful in some way, were somewhat cared and loved and thought about, and having some place in someone's heart. 'Before you meet me, you are merry; I am with you, you are merry; I am gone, you are still merry; then how I I know I matter?'. I know it doesn't necessarily work that way but it does for many. Forgive me for repeating such fundamental understanding, but I feel like I can't stress it enough.
Sir, humans are weak and have to rely on each other both emotionally and physically to cope with life, beholden onto each other to make a better place to live, and they can collapse any moment without each other. But there are beauty in that weakness, and it is also our strength.
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Hey Silence, don't die any time soon, for I will be sad if you die.
Hey Chrissie and Monkey King, live a long life, and mama buster call survivor, do survive, because your deaths will be great sorrows to me.
And tigerlilly, stay safe, otherwise there is going to be tear.
You all, stay alive.
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As for my own confession:
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Yesterday was the first day I truly enjoyed a meal. It was a very normal meal, but my experience was new. Before, I only ate to function and keep my fit, and always tried to finish my meals as soon as possible to move on doing something else, something more "significant", and was always thinking about something else while eating, something more "significant". I had superficial experience of the flavor of what I ate, and I could never tell the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi. Then for a moment I realized that I was thinking and comtemplating deeply about life, but I was not truly living my life at all. So I stopped thinking, completely stopped thinking, and ate for the sake of eating. Only then was I living from moment to moment and enjoyed each and every moment, and the flavor was ever renewing because I was not thinking and retaining memory of what I tasted. Everything just felt so right and only then did I truly understand the true meaning of Choiceless Awareness. Then I took a walk, feeling everything around me, getting aware and attentive of everything around me, in the absence of thought. My clothing, my shoes, the wind, the landscape, I felt them all as comfortable, refreshing and ever renewing because I walked with an empty mind. And was truly living in the now.
Thought is time. My thought either lives in the nostalgia/re-examination of the past or the anticipation of/planning for the future, which is nothingness. Any activities of thought has that nature, including imagination. The past is nothingness and only exists in our thought. So is the future. Only the presence is life. When thought ends, time ends. When I ended this psychological time, I then felt infinite, timeless, egoless and fearless. Thinking about the past or the future, doesn't them all feel like a dream? I was awakened. And I learned how to lessen physical pain by stopping identifying myself with the pain, by becoming an observer who is also observed. Only when you empty your mind you can allow "God" ( or "Tao", or "Truth", or "Oneness", or "Brahman", or "The True Self") to operate. No, sir, the "god" I am talking about is not a white-bearded old man riding the cloud. It is "That". The force, the sacredness that inhabits in all things, in every quarks, in each fiber of beings. The energy that moves all things.
Before, drawing (or other artistic activities) and talking to my friend tigerlilly were the only activities that truly made me feel alive. I figured it was because I could forget myself and forget time in those activities, for a moment now and then. And for now, everything I do can make me feel alive. That is zen. Everything I do can be zen.
To truly live is not to be an intellectual but to be a thoughtless idiot, not to think but to feel, not to be logical but to be intuitive. We think too much and feel too little, we make our intuition the servant of our logic, we miss and regret the past and worry about the future, and murder our finest impulses everyday. Is that not what the Dalai Lama meant when he said "he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived." Is that not what Miyazaki meant by saying: "I think that Nausicaa probably thinks that she would like to live at the same happy level as insects and birds, but I'm not sure." Is that not also the birds who flies to fly and takes death when death comes as Krishnamurti mentioned? Perhaps mankind has taken a wrong turn ever since they invented agriculture. No, ever since they figured out how to make fire. We evolved biologically, but have we evolved spiritually? The world has been changed, but has it been 'improved'?
I realized I can live in such solitude without emotionally relying on anyone, and therefore I can love without the need of being loved back, and if I was to die any moment, my life was still completed.
Happiness is not far away. Do not search for it. It is right here. If you want to be happy, you can become happy right now, right this moment, not tomorrow, not ten years later. Now. Do not search for "god". "The kingdom of heaven is within you".
But I don't want to stay in that state for long, because I am too concerned with the sufferings of other. If all I wanted was too be happy, I could have just become a hermit, ended my own suffering and stopped thinking about the suffering of others. The Buddha was awake, but how much could he understand the sleepers? He wanted to wake them up, but could his words truly reach them?
Then I came to understand the greatness of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Instead of being ever-joyous like Henry Miller, Dostoevsky stayed with suffering, with madness, with demonic notions to understand man, and his insight on human nature was unmatched. And Nietzsche could have become an Ubermensch, but he chose to stay a normal human, and his understanding of man was unprecedented. You understand me, sir? All the pettiness, all the decadence, all corrupted desires, nihilistic sadism,… that caused suffering, how can you save man from them without understanding them? Krishnamurti failed because he was on too high a plane and once he reached enlightenment he only understood the sleepers based on his experiences preceding his enlightenment. What he said was the truth, but he didn't really live in accordance with his teaching, because if he abandoned all hope he wouldn't have been teaching at all, like Lao Tzu. Once you become thoroughly enlightened, you save yourself and understand yourself, but cannot profoundly understand others.
Perhaps it was my role to be someone to understand. To embrace in my heart all the gloomiest darkness of humanity, and also it purest goodness.
So, good sirs, I decided that I want to become something between Dostoevsky and Krishnamurti, something between Nietzsche and Walt Whitman, which means I am staying with hope and suffering. I want to be man. Just man.
Does all patient necessarily want to cure their sickness? If a man can get it through the night without Enlightenment would he still want it? A man can live fine without truth, and preaching sometimes just brings about backfire effect. My role is not to preach, but to tell a story.
But it's a story best saved for another time.[/hide]