Did you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and think about something that was cold and sweaty? It is that idea — when a man dies, when he faces endless darkness and eternal silence, and when he rises up and down, he floats alone in the void, hundreds of millions of years and hundreds of billions of years, and never ends. I just can't breathe, can i
I have a friend, zhao, who almost went to a psychiatrist the previous year. In his early 40s, he had a great body and one night brushed his cell phone into an article about the hotness of the universe, saying that billions of years later atoms would disappear. He was on the scene, and then for a whole month, every night he was stuck with that idea — the “nothing” after death — more scary than any horror film. His wife said that he had lost a dozen pounds of weight during that time and that he used to sit up and hang around at night. Until one day, his son went to middle school and asked him a word, and he stopped asking him. And the son says, "dad, who's feeling nothing?"
You think about that. Who's feeling nothing? If it's really nothing, then no eyes to see the dark, no ears to hear the silence, no brains to feel alone. Darkness is a feeling, loneliness is an emotion, void is a concept of space — all of which must be experienced by a “person”. But if that “person” no longer exists, who will bear these experiences
To put it bluntly, the “nap after death” that we fear is a trick of our own. Think about it. Who in the world has ever really experienced nothing? No. Never. Of course you can't experience it when you're alive because you're conscious; you can't experience it when you're dead, because you don't have "you." this is the truth, as the man who died more than 2,000 years ago said, “if you die, if you die, if you die, if you live or if you die, if you die, if you live or if you die, if you live or if you die, if you live or if you die, if you live, if you live or if you live, if you live or if you live, if you live or if you live, if you live, if you live, if you live, if you live or if you live, if you live, if you live or if you live, if you live, if you live, there is nothing. Then the philosopher thomas clark stabbed the window paper - he said that the words “black” and “empty” were not even valid because they were human feelings。
Try to remember what happened to the universe in the 13. 8 billion years before you were born. How do you feel during such a long period of time? You don't feel anything. Not because you don't remember, but because there wasn't a "you" to feel. For you, the 13. 8 billion years were not a darkness, not a void, but an absence. It's like a white paper before you paint it. What's on it? Nothing, not even the concept of “no”。
And think about when you sleep every night. What have you been through with those dreamless periods of deep sleep? You can't go through anything. You just closed your eyes, and then opened your eyes, and it was dawn or no light. In the middle of those hours, your subjective perception was reduced to zero. It's not a philosophy. It's a basic knowledge of neuroscience. - a study in nature magazine in 2021 made it clear that consciousness is subjective, that it automatically skips all unconscious states and is anchored only at the moment of perception. In other words, you've been dead a million times in your life. Every sleepless sleep, every whole body anesthesia, every passing out is a pause in consciousness. But were you afraid? You didn't, because those blanks don't exist in your experience。
Now, push this issue to the extreme. Suppose one day your life comes to the end. Heart rate stopped, brain waves zero, doctors declared dead. And? The universe works as usual, the sun rises. Hundreds of millions of years have passed, and the galaxy has crashed into the sensor, new stars have been born, and new life has evolved on a distant planet. A new brain was formed, a new consciousness opened its eyes. From the objective time of the universe, there are billions of years between your death and the birth of this new consciousness. But what about the new consciousness? It doesn't feel anywhere. Just as you can't feel time running out for hours, billions of years of space history, not even a millisecond without observers。
You said it wasn't you. It has no memory of you, no character of you, no life experience of you. You're right. But i want to ask you a question -- what are you? If you lose your memory one day, are you still you? If you were in a car accident, you'd still be you. If future technology uploads all your memories to the clouds and then formats your brain, then the man who wakes up is dead or alive
You'll say he's alive because he's still feeling, still experiencing, still alive. That's right. You were never your memory, your character, your id number. You're just the feeling that's watching everything. This feeling, not to write your name, not to label you, not to recognize your property. It's the same basic thing in the universe -- where there's enough complexity in the nervous system, it's lit up everywhere, just like the light of a light bulb。
This thing, buddhists call it "buddhist", indian philosophy calls it "atman," and neuroscientists call it "aware phenomena." whatever it is, it's the essence: it doesn't go out because a light bulb breaks. The light's broken and the light's on somewhere else. A 2023 awareness study surveyed more than 5,000 people globally and found that more than 60 per cent of them experienced a significant decline in fear of death after experience of near-death. Not because they saw some hell in hell at the door, but because they personally experienced the idea that consciousness could be separated from a specific carrier, just as radio signals would not disappear because a radio was broken。
I'll tell you an interesting ending. Zhao finally got it all figured out, and now he's known as chindago in the neighborhood. One night he couldn't sleep again, not because he was afraid, but because he was hungry. He rises up and cooks a bowl of noodles, and says to his wife, "i understand that i'm afraid of nothing in my life, like a monster that doesn't exist. I looked for it for over 40 years, i looked for every insomnia, and i found it never came. What do you think? "his wife turned a white eye and said, "you've spent more than 40 years and you've learned the idea of a bowl of noodles?" old zhao snorts the noodles and says, "what's wrong with bubble noodles? Spaghetti can eat more than that invisible vanity。
You see, the greatest humor of life is here — we have spent thousands of years writing countless books, scaring countless generations, just to fear something that has never happened and will never happen. What's nothing? Nothing is a conscious mirror, and you put your face up and you see your own fear, not something in it。
So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night with that thought, you ask yourself, "who's watching the dark that scares me?" who's feeling it? The "nap" that scares me. Has it ever existed
If it doesn't exist, what are you afraid of? If it exists, then it is not nothing, and why do you fear it
Tell me, isn't that the reason
