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Comment by pasiaj | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience that I might be able to explain logically.

I was thinking about death, the exact moment of death, and thought about the last sensation felt by a dying person.

I had a thought that the last affect you experience subjectively never goes away. That if you feel horrible at the moment of your death, subjectively that feeling never goes away.

That idea and feeling shook me and made me think of heaven and hell being abstractions of the last subjective affect that you are ”stuck” with.

I understand that this is nonsense, but it ties well together with abstract consepts about soul and afterlife and logic in a way that allowed my mind to create a model it, and feel all the horrible outcomes of that model.

The model felt plausible enough to trigger strong emotion.

It did not trigger anything long lasting - just a momentary feeling of terror.

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I had a similar feeling of terror as a kid, thinking about death and eternity one night in bed and suddenly experiencing terror. The best way I could describe it was this vast eternal concept of nothingness forever that scared me with the immensity of infinity. In a way I’m kinda grateful for that experience now as it’s led me down a path of learning about meditation and eventually a lot of the things described in this thread.

Here’s something you might like to ponder as an alternative perspective (though I can imagine there’s fear of going back there).

What would be the implication if the passage of time is only an illusion created by memory? What if every moment in our lives is experienced simultaneously, but it only appears to move forwards because we experience each of those moments individually - each containing some memory of moments before. After all it’s not possible to experience any other moment than this one, right now, so we don’t have any subjective evidence that we (as awareness) even experience anything other than a single moment.

In other words, even if awareness persists outside death, when memory dies with the brain how can there be any perception of time - what would it even be that experiences eternity?

So some of that was definitely going through my head during the meditation. I kept thinking about someone I know who committed suicide and how desperate their last moments must have felt and coupled with the idea that they might live those moments over and over over-amplified everything.

It also made me wonder whether or not there are any efforts to create messages that could potentially persist an event like the universe contracting into another tight ball of energy followed by another big bang. The whole idea being that we could pass messages to future iterations of existence in the hopes that the world wouldn't play itself out exactly as it did before. That's some scifi stuff right there :)

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