#263 The Paradox of Death

We have the famous quotation from Epicurus as we encounter him in Lucretius' poem, 'On the Nature of Things': 'Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not. And when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death, and therefore, in death, there is neither pleasure nor pain.'

Do that most important thing, now. Express your love, now. Relinquish those hang-ups, now. Bury the hatchet, now. Recognize the nature of mind, now. Live fully, now. For one day, you will die.

You can summon Carl Sagan or Marlon Brando from beyond the grave and fully recognized that they were once as alive as you are now. And we know the precise day that they died, and we also know that the world went on without them.

What we think about death, in particular about what happens to each of us after our bodies die, depends on what we believe about two fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind: the nature of consciousness and the nature of identity.

I probably think about death more in the average day than most people think about it in many months or even a year.