Someone here

@howisitsoactivehere what makes you think you have no free will ?

The next time you’re talking to yourself, in your mind, ask yourself this question: Who or what is talking to who? Are there two different people in your head, one that is talking and one that is listening? If not, then it’s kind of weird that you would need to have a conversation with just yourself in your head. After all, it’s you who’s doing the talking, and you’d think that you would already know what you were going to say to yourself. So what’s up with that? This self-talk is such a normal, everyday occurrence, and yet it points to something very deep about you as a person: the self is not an entity. It is not a little person or some kind of essence within you. Instead, the ego, or sense of self, is a construction. It is made of pieces. Experiencing this aspect of the ego directly, for yourself, is probably one of the more profound experiences a human being is capable of. It is, in fact, the essence of awakening, or at least the beginning of it.

What kind of routine? I feel like it's not worth it because of health consequences yet despite that I keep smoking ? Any insight as to why I do this ?

I just can't put the damn cigarettes down .even tho it's ruining my health .i need help. This is an absolute necessity. I cannot continue like this. im raping my health. Yet all this doesn't seem to make me stop. I have other reasons that I believe are making it difficult for me but I won't get into them here to not make this too abstract. it's affecting my physical.. Mental.. And psychological health to a very disturbing degree. It's not possible to live a healthy life without putting it down. If I don't quit.. It will catch up with me more and more and eventually I will end up having lungs cancer or whatever. I'm a heavy smoker. 4 packs a week or something is too much. And I'm already starting to feel the negative consequences. I can't run without feeling like losing my breath completely. My energy is getting lower. My appetite is decreased. And a lot more. Time to take this shit seriously and stop.

@Indisguise what a coincidence 😂

It is hard to accept that a loving God would destroy your entire life and leave you paralyzed from head to toe. He did good actually coping with his situation, many people would ended thier lives or become depressed and unfunctional if this happened to them. It is a tragedy but it seems God loves tragedies too. We all pay the price of existence, some of us pay it more than others. The price is suffering. Yet despite his suffering he was one of the greatest scientists to ever exist. Mad respect to him . Yes we can see the body obviously. With the mind it gets a little bit tricky .because what is the mind ? Its not like there is an entity into itself called "the mind ". Its just a bundle of thoughts. But when I say the mind I mean consciousness or spirit .or whatever you wanna call it .basically our true Nature. Which is divine nature .that's what separate us from animals. If we are talking about that then no we cannot see it because it is the seer itself .the eye can't see itself. The knife can't cut itself. The tongue can't taste itself etc .

Nice perspective and a new way of looking at it .I hadn't thought about it like this before. Thanks friend 🙏

@Mandy thanks. For not much other than I like Stephen hawking

@Mandy Help me out because I’m not an expert in the field, but it seems to me that we only have empirical evidence of the differentiation of the mind and the body recently through so-called near-death experiences. Right now we have the ability to raise people who have been clinically dead and they talk about their minds separating from their body. So, I think this is empirical evidence that the mind and the body are not the same or that there’s part of the mind which is not part of the body. Do you think this near-death experience is compelling evidence for the difference between the mind and the body?

If something is physical, if it’s a body, it’s extended in space, it’s located in space, it’s publicly observable, it’s quantifiable and measurable. But if we think of the mind as a thing, going back to the former idea of the soul, then the soul does not seem to take up space, or at least not in the same way. It doesn’t exclude other physical objects from space. It has no definite location in space, and it’s not the sort of thing that can be publicly observed as we expect in science, where we’re acquainted with our mind or our soul most directly through introspection. So I'm not aware of any identity other than the physical body .I mean what else could I be? Isn't that aligned with direct experience?

@Mandy do you have evidence that consciousness survives physical death ? are near death experiences a decent evidence that consciousness survives physical death ? And why does all people who experienced an NDE report the same thing ? The long tunnel with the bright white light at the end , and seeing their body from above as if they astral projected ?

@Phil I'm not sure what to do with your posts .they are kinda ambiguous and hard for me to understand you correctly. So I will just go on my own here and describe what I'm experiencing as of late... To answer your opening question: no I'm not doing the panic attacks. They happen to me. A big component of them is that they happen unexpectedly and completely out of the blue .and they actually make you feel you've lost control over yourself and reality (your surroundings) permanently and you are not getting it back. Of course that comes just with the fear and its not true. After about half an hour you calm down and you re-gain your control over reality . It’s actually completely understandable to have anxiety around death, even though it is inevitable. But I notice my fear of death increases whenever I experience a panic attack. What im trying to do to not let death anxiety hinder my day to day life. For some of us, contemplating death can cause intense anxiety and fear. It’s why death anxiety is a recognized mental health disorder with its own name: Thanatophobia. It’s considered a phobia if the fear arises virtually every time you think about death or the death of a loved one.if the fear persists for more than six months..or if the fear prevents you from functioning in everyday life or relationships. If this describes your anxiety, then you've got a huge problem. It becomes difficult to function In everyday life. The lesson im trying to learn is that there is a danger of missing out on so much if we don’t appreciate even the most ordinary of days. we do not notice each passing moment, perhaps take others for granted and we do not appreciate the value of this precious human life. But if we live with our mortality as a daily experience, then we will live a happier and healthier life. So that might be a benefit of remembering death. In gaining a better appreciation of all the cruel twists and unknowns, i become more skilled at the art of living .making the most of what i have, making each moment count. In facing death, in accepting that it comes to us all one day, we not only have the opportunity to shift our perspective but to also expand our awareness around life itself. I'm trying to see the bright side of the situation. And the benefits of my panic attacks and death anxiety.

I'm still not sure how by visiting a cemetery it will help me overcome fear of death . I actually visited a cemetery before at the death of one of my dad's friends and i was crippling in fear and I experienced intense panic attack. This fear reaction can become so severe that people experience a panic attack. A panic attack is an abrupt fear with symptoms such as a pounding heartbeat, shortness of breath, shaking, feelings of unreality or detachment,and a fear of losing control or dying. Panic attacks are often extremely unpleasant, so people may begin to avoid any situation where they might encounter the fear source that triggers an attack. For example, a person with necrophobia might avoid taking a certain route so that they do not have to pass by a cemetery or funeral home. That's what I would do.

How do you know? Did you die before and came back to life to tell us that ?

How? All that's there is decaying Corpses and decayed bodies hat turned into ashes and dirt and rot in the soil. If I visit a cemetery it will actually increase my fear of death .sorry about being upfront about it .

Its not your choice. You will inevitably be anxious about death at some point In your life .especially as you get older and closer and closer to your death .the last two decades of your life will be bombarded by death anxiety .that's just how it is .its not like you can escape death by avoiding thinking about it .

Sure .I will check it out .thanks

Yes .what's the significance of that in relation to my question?

No one .

Well there is no reason per se to think of one of those things and not the other .but since you are going to die someday in the future..and that is inevitable..you know that this end is coming..sooner or later you have to say goodbye to your whole existence..doesn't that at the very least create a little bit of anxiety inside of you ? Knowing that in a matter of 10,20,30,40,50,60 years maximum, you will be fucking dead?

Im familiar with spirituality and nondual teachings and I know that the sense of individuality or separation is false or illusory. That there isn't an actual separate self inside the organism. Who you think you are is not who you actually are. Who you think are - the ego is literally just a thought. An arising sensation that says "im me here inside this body ". When this thought disappear.. What is left is pure awareness of various perceptions and sensations without any personal relationship to them. Without "my perception and my sensation" identification. You can grasp in direct experience that "you" is false identification with thought.. It is not real. Yet it is the most real thing for you. After all what is more real and important to you in your life then yourself? Right? So what exactly is grounding this sense of self? Why does the "I" thought keep arising throughout your whole life even after seeing through the misidentification? And what is the personality ? What makes this body-mind here to have a different personality than that body-mind over there even tho there is no "person" to begin with? What role do memories play in grounding your sense of self? What is the difference between a memory and a thought? Now a whole pack of questions can open up about memory .is the past even real ? No matter where you look you can't find anything but the present and How can we trust our memory if any at all? Etc but I will just stop here. For example your entire life story and who you think you are and how you view yourself and your life is just a thought story.. Mostly memories... But those thoughts are not occurring 24/7.. So once they stop occurring even for a second you are left not knowing who you are and how you got there (interesting huh?). And so what prevents you from losing yourself and going Insane is these stories and memories keep arising to ground your sense of self and reality. Not sure how to connect all that with death. If we aren't the separate self ..then who dies?and who was born ? Could it be that the false illusory self Dies and the real Self continue to eternity? But the question still remains in what form does it exist ? Because you can trick yourself that complete absence of experience forever is still an experience of some kind.

@Phil dude..death is not a belief .who are we kidding? What happens if you jump off a cliff or shoot yourself in the head? Can you answer this question for me? The scientific approach to death is that when you die, the machinery that generates those memories of who you were, those ideas of who you might be, and your awareness of those thoughts and of the world currently around you now and how you feel about it, that machinery stops working. So those thoughts cease to be. Sadly, then, I fear that when you die, that is a permanent end to present awareness. Is it true that after you die.. It will be just like before you were born? Completely lights out? Or am I going to pop up out of nowhere again mysteriously just like my previous birth? And why do I find myself anxious about both possibilities? I hope that you can provide a sufficient answer to this without dismissing all that as thought activity or whatever.

Ok fine. Its an emotion. Aren't emotions 'things '? Plus ..I want practical solutions to this fear ..First of all let me ask you what's your definition of death ? Do you believe like Leo gura and @Indisguise that "death is imaginary" or that its just a thought in the present moment ..or do you consider it as an inevitable part of life ? Even if you have never had an experience that brought you close to death, simply witnessing someone else die (or come close) can have similar effects. When we lose someone..especially someone we were close to.we very understandably end up reflecting on them, their life, and of course, the fact that they are now gone. Naturally, then, this could lead to contemplating our own possible death Also as I mentioned to you before in the actualized forum..I struggle with extreme panic attacks .., a panic attack is an extreme event that makes you think you are either going to die or go crazy and lose touch with reality (which in some ways is very similar to death). So, even though panic attacks themselves aren’t actually a threat to your life, because they feel like it in the moment, they can be a trigger or cause for longerterm fear of death.

These are two separate issues. You can live an amazing kick ass life and still fear death. Because how you live your life has nothing to do with the fact that you gonna die someday and it will definitely be a nasty experience. Let alone the crippling fear of the unknown beyond death . At some point or other, all of us will be faced with fears about death. After all, what happens when the light’s go out remains one of life’s biggest mysteries. Not only is it normal to fear the unknown but in these current uncertain times, we’re probably going to find our thoughts turning to our own mortality even more. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, contemplating death can spur us on to make important changes in our lives. It can make us question whether we’re living a life that’s based on our values the things that are important to us. But it can also play the opposite role and make us anxious all the time .expecting our death to be near .

🤔