Welcome to Litsy!

The best way to overcome [the fear of death]—so it seems to me— is to make your interest gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river— small at first, nearly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks ⬇️

Marcus Aurelius was among those who offered another way to come to grips with a prospective of nonbeing: the period after death, he pointed out, is like the period before birth. You didn‘t spend the billions of years before you were born in a state of anxiety and apprehension, because there was no “you” to be aware of anything. Looking back now, it doesn‘t seem frightening that there was once a time when you were not conscious. Why then ⬇️

If death marks a permanent end of your consciousness, then from your point of view when you die, the entire future of the universe (running into tens of billions of years or more) must telescope down not just into a night, as Socrates described, but into a fleeting instant. Even if the universe were to go through other cycles of expansion and contraction, then all of these cycles as far as you are concerned would happen in zero time. What ⬇️