The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

what if all this time my existential death anxiety was a god/goddess that embodies that very aspect knocking on my "door" to accept them? (and I've been ignoring it out of fear this entire time?) Is that sort of thing possible?

I remember my anxiety took a turn for the worse a couple months ago when I mentioned to my husband that if there is no way to verify if deities exist or not, whats the point of worrying about them? He agreed, since he's a true neutral agnostic that prefers to leave gods and thoughts of death and existence out of his life. He simply doesn't care one way or another. (this is also where I tried to adopt that same line of thought and stopped my studying and tried not to worry about the divine as he does)

But as soon as I came on here, and started reading about many people's relationships with their gods/goddesses/ideals/metaphors/whatever, I felt instantly better.

(This might be better placed in the philosophical section, but seeing as I'm new I didn't want to attempt to place it in a non-beginner friendly area)

I've been studying various forms of paganism and witchcraft for many years now, going on 7 now, since I first entered college. I've stayed with it for a while, but during college about a year after I started studying, I was lying in bed thinking and the thought occurred to me- What if nothing exists after we die? What if we just "poofed" out of existence?

The thought was very jarring, and I pushed it away quickly. Just coming close the threshold of imagining being nothing sent me on the verge of panic. And ever since then, every couple of months, I'll think about it again.

Problem is, it gets more and more persistent, to the point that now, there's not a night that I don't think about it, and it has gotten to the point that it sent me into a full flown panic attack, which I had never experienced before.

If I stop moving around and being active during the day I'll think about it. It's become very disruptive, and I've considered maybe talking to a therapist about it.

That is until tonight when, slightly frightened that my thoughts started to take that turn yet again, I told myself I'm done looking at scientific articles that do nothing but increase my anxiety and found myself looking around on this forum again. (been lurking for about 6 years now on and off)

What I can do, if it helps with the anxiety, is share the two ways I think about the inevitability of my own nonexistence:

1) [This one is borrowed from Eastern religions.] The "me" I'm so fond of is an illusion to begin with, and a very brief one at that; only the sum total of existence (my own included), the breadth of all the universe, amounts to something real. So when I die, my myopic obsession with "me" gets lifted, and instead my consciousness is replaced by what's been there all along, the interconnected grandeur of Everything.

In short: I'm an integral part of manifest divinity, so when I die, since the universe goes on, "I" go on in a larger sense, in particular in how my life and how I lived added to/shaped the universe around me.

2) I like to think our minds can do all kinds of things. One of them is that time can be very subjective. (Think of how slowly the day can go when you're bored at work.) So perhaps, in the final instant before death, our minds open up our experience of time, so that the eternal afterlife that Christians talk about comes about in our heads, and we can experience whatever we can imagine. (There was a lovely bit about this at the end of the 1999 movie American Beauty, written by Alan Ball.)

Since I can imagine a lot of wild adventures, this doesn't sound so bad. I like to think of this as the gift from the god of time.
 
I don't have much death anxiety, but I'm pretty sure that has less to do with me being all Zen about the two things above, and more with my brain being in fundamental emotional denial about the fact that one day I won't be here.

OK, I just had an epiphany (while washing the dishes, which is when many of my epiphanies happen, oddly enough): I've always considered those two ideas of the moment of death--losing the self to a oneness with the universe, vs. the mind opening up an eternity of imagined time--as either/or, and who really knows.

But what if *both* happen simultaneously?

There's a compelling symmetry for me in that: The totality of everything that is/was/will be pours into an instant, and that same instant expands the wildest dreams of the self to eternity.

What an incomprehensibly beautiful experience that would be!

I think that's a natural reaction; our sense of self is the only thing throughout our lives we can be sure of. (And also, since that drive to preserve the self is a key to survival, I would imagine it's a response that's evolutionarily hardwired into most self-aware species.)

But what if you expand that concept of self? That's what I find intriguing about "oneness with the universe" (it sounds so hokey, but there it is). That the real self isn't just limited me, and when I die, that veil gets lifted and I get to see the big picture. Sort of like our lives are equivalent to going through the world with really narrow blinders on...and then suddenly the blinders get removed, and you can see so much more.

But the things we do in this life still exist, still affect things after we have gone even if there is no afterlife. Who you are now  and what you do now is just as important as what happens after death.

Only a cruel monster would make the universe like that.
It is the most disgusting, horrifying, degrading thing i can think off.

Plus if there is no afterlife faith has no meaning.......
I am not an atheist after all...........:ashamed: