As I said in the other thread, I think psychedelics are a useful way to confront this existential terror, personally at least. Terence McKenna talked about this a lot through the lens of psychedelic experiences. Here are a few relevant quotes that might be useful to you.
"Here’s a hard psychedelic truth actually if you want to boil it down to the bottom line. This is the one thing I’ve learned, maybe, from psychedelics which is - and this is the message of the Time Wave and this is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it, Panta Rei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is."
"Well what I’ve learned from life, vegetables, travels and books can be summed up in two Greek words. It’s the central message of the philosopher Heraclites. He was always my favorite philosopher but whenever I would read about him, he was called the crying philosopher. I had to live to be 44 years old to understand the poignancy of Heraclites’ message. He said in a nutshell, Panta rhei. All flows. Nothing lasts. Nothing is permanent. This is the hardest message life has to teach because what is says is: your joy is transient, your anguish is transient, your fortune, your home, your dream, your moments of great ecstasy, your moments of great insight and your moments of great empowerment. Everything is flowing through your hands at the moment that you are aware of it."
"The one thing that seems secure is a truth that is hard to hear in the context of a dominator culture with an obsession with the material world. And that truth is that nothing lasts. nothing lasts.
You know, your enemies will fade. Your friends will fade. Your fortune, your poverty, your disappointments, your dreams - everything is in the process of changing into something else. So, your agony is about to be assuaged. On the other hand, your happiness is about to be destroyed."
"But I think it’s not simply taking psychedelics but it’s also to decondition oneself to the notion of ego and all the concepts which constellate around that, such as place, property, ownership, and stability. You see, the idea that we have inherited from Western religion and science is the idea that things should be stable. This is a very male dominant notion, the wish for stability, eternity, when in fact the message life hands you over and over again is “nothing lasts”. nothing lasts. Not what you love, not what you hate, not your enemies, your friends, not even your dear, dear self. nothing lasts. And the ego goes mad in the presence of that truth; it, it, it can’t swallow it. And so we have anxiety of death, need to dominate people, need to possess property, terror of illness, resentment of fate, because we are not in the flow."
What helped me is the realization that your death already happened, it's just somewhere else. It's kind of some hippie bullshit but your mortality, fate, and probably how you're going to die (unless you decide to go off the rails to spite fate or something idk) are all set in stone, and there's nothing you can do about it because whatever machination that determines these things has already determined them.
The part about your life and method of death being set in stone might be hippie bullshit, but I think that frame of mind is valid and useful for accepting mortality. Your death has already happened, it's just happened in the future. Your life is a book and you can fill its pages, but the binding is finite.
your life is a book
if this is the case, who is to say you cant pick up a new book when you finish the current one?
maybe we are all just cosmic :LIB:raries, filling up the shelves of our being.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will.
moodtelling myself that I've already been non-existent before I was born, and it's just going to be that again, sort of helps. sort of
It's kind of freeing for me tbh. Like I do get sad but at the same time feels like a rest. A beautiful poster gave me a guide to psychadelics I'll look for it in a bit and link later.
One thing I've tried was meditation and you do get like a thing. Hard to describe but after meditating for a while I kind of forgot who I was and then eventually forgot I was. It's been a few times I done this and it was hard to maintain but very interesting. Just don't go into it thinking you'll get it on the first try.
I hope this helps and if not know you aren't alone. Take care of yourself comrade. Edit the beautiful poster was all of us this whole time. Also https://hexbear.net/post/56083/comment/545754 Don't wanna mess up their name.
Need sleep kept reading this as a pint. Everyone here is a beautiful poster.
Except for peeps who down vote me.You know what them to because as wrong as I can be at times no one's ever insulted me personally here.
I cope by reminding myself that I’m gonna die whether or not I spend time and energy worrying about it. It took time for this thought to really sink in but these days it calms me. Like, I can let it eat me alive or not, and that’s the choice I do have, the thing I can control. The dying part is out of my hands, but I can still choose where to put my energy and I’m choosing not to put it into the black maw of the abyss.
I used to be extremely anxious about death. by meditating on this I can usually make peace with it. Psychedelics are not for me (sadly) so in case you’re in the same boat I figured I’d share.
Yeah psychedelics fixed this for me. I used to have panic attacks about my own mortality and I'm good with it now. I think I had acceptance after the first couple times I did them but definitely after I unintentionally ego death'd last time. Try growing some shrooms, it's a fun pandemic project.
Can't belieeeeeeeeve
How strange it is to be anything at aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall
For me: if you spend your life well with big highs and lows created from hard work, risk taking, genuine relationships, good food, hard laughs, and maybe some drugs+alcohol, then the end of your days will be like being at a party when your social battery runs out and even being around your friends is a little much. The reaper will come in through the front door like your ride home and you'll feel a relief, you can finally go home and rest.
But also, even if you got some bad news today you wouldn't reaaaaaally have to cope because you could keep your nose down in your phone looking at twitter, PPV MMA fights, Twitch streams, etc. that keep your mind from ever having to come to grips with what's happening. Imagine in 40+ years when you'll have VR with haptic feedback and untold wonders of technology. You would entirely forget that you're using escapism to sidestep critical, sacred emotions and conversations.
I don’t know. I find the thought of death very comforting. I’ve heard it’s usually a peaceful process once your body gives in, but I’m partially suicidal, so that probably doesn’t help, lol.
I just condense that feeling down to a few moments of panic a week when I'm reminded, until I can calm myself down by remembering what agency I do have
No one lives forever, but the effects of our actions can: I say just try to learn and grow as much as you can to help and support others so that they can learn and grow, and maybe that ripple of good will spread out and amplify and join together with countless other ripples to become a great wave.
Everything is made from the conditions that created it, 1917 happened because of earlier failed revolution, which itself was set into motion by a historical wave that began as mere disparate ripples going back decades before it
