Didn’t science come about with our desire to know? So wasn’t it a natural jump to want to know what the hell we were doing here among all these creepy crawly things? Us, the self proclaimed ‘crown of creation’? And where we go after our little stint here? The ‘why’ question spilled over into the psyche and unlike what we discovered about the things in our environment , when we tried to discover the ‘who am l’ , ‘why am I here’, ‘where am I going’? etc, we couldn’t come up with a concrete factual answer, only speculations and fantasies. And the question arose in some: “why are we making such a mess here while we ‘seem’ to be so smart”? “What’s wrong?”
Sorry for replying so late.
Perhaps “envisage” is not the right word here, but when I used it I could not find a better one.
Of course one can envisage one’s own death but it’s all at an intellectual level and so it has no real impact on oneself. It’s like envisaging your house being on fire tomorrow, it’s something we know it may happen but it doesn’t prompt us to do some action.
First of all, let us be clear: I don’t want and there is no need to demonstrate anything. We are not in an academic debate. To me the structure of the self “requires perpetual continuity” to use your words. I’m saying this because I feel it in myself, i. e. I want to continue, I feel there are so many activities I still want to do, experiences I want to live and I can’t see an end to it. “I am eternal” is the sensation I have, It may be and probably is a deceptive feeling, but here it is and I cannot help but detecting it.
If you find it’s not so, then you should explain to me why. But I’m not interested in theoretical reasonings which do not have a a kind of “resonance” with my feelings. I think we all should be more simple in dealing with human problems. Rationality can be an obstacle in exploring these kind of things. K.'s statements look apparently rational but actually they are not and they leave a trace in our hearts.
Why do you object my use of “sofware”? Do you think that is not the case? Our brain functions partially like a computer, but if you don’t like the word software we can use “conditioning” or patterns. Our nervous system works according to patterns, some of which are inherited and some learnt and recorded in infancy. One of the strongest patterns or instincts - as they were called in the past, is the instinct of survival all organisms have. We are programmed to survive not to die. That is the sense of my previous statement.
Again I detect here a too rational approach. It may be logically true but it could not coincide with our own attitudes, feelings or whatever. One can say that those attitudes or feelings are deceiving, but it would be an erroneous approach for me to ignore them. Actually I was reflecting a lot about death during the last few months, both for the coronavirus and because my time in this earth is coming to an end. After so much pondering and delving into myself that was the clear response I got: I could not “envisage” my own end.
Dear Voyager (incidentally, it seems to me ridiculous to invent such a name for oneself),
In all your comments you counterpose ‘feelings’ to what you have termed, intellectual, academic, theoretical, rational and logical. Personally, I do not do that. Both feeling and intellect are tools, or rather they are modes in which the mind operates. The mind operates at its best when using the whole set of tools, feelings as well as intellect. So, to start with, I reject that opposition.
Okay. It seems you want the mind to do something here which will have an ‘impact’ on it. What sort of impact are you suggesting? Here we have a clue:
The metaphor almost speaks for itself but needs to be clarified. The metaphor of the house on fire comes from K I think. It refers to the urgency of the need to undergo a radical transformation. And the question arises, if one could ‘envisage’ one’s own death, would this lead to a ‘mutation of the brain cells?’
There is a danger here, a danger in how we pose the question and what the mind is up to in posing the question. In this case the danger is teleology. Let me suggest something. A man arrives at the notion that if he could envisage his own death then it would transform him. He has been searching for the key to this transformation for many years and not found it. But this notion is something he may work with, and he does. He is so sure that if he could envisage his death it would transform him that when he undergoes no transformation he becomes convinced that the block is his inability to do the said thing, envisage his own death. He then has to explain his experience of trying to envisage his own death to himself. Finally he comes to the conclusion that his envisioning was ‘merely intellectual.’
In the case above, the assumptions he started with led directly to the conclusion he came to. It was bound to happen, the answer was already there at the start. That is what teleology is.
What was the man trying to do in ‘envisioning’ his own death. He talks of feelings and stresses their primacy over reasoning. The reasoning must conform to, or resonate with, the feelings. Therefore the feelings, which come first, are the past and the reasoning must resonate with the past for it to be seen as valid.
It is a false path. You cannot experience your own death for two very simple reasons, because when one is dead there is no experiencer and therefore nothing to experience. That is all. There is no magic here. To understand it does not transform you. It does not stop the house from burning (if indeed it is). The lack of a transformation does not constitute a failure and does not warrant a criticism of the intellect and its supposed shortcomings. The intellect has merely done its job in informing you that you cannot experience death. It should also be telling you that the very effort to envisage your own ending is based on an odd idea that there would be a you to perceive it, feel it, experience it and so on. There is an obvious contradiction in that experience implies continuation. You cannot have both ending and continuation.
Yes, the ego wishes to continue but that is a reflection of the will to survive which is the essence of life. No organism wants to die. But the ego is not an organism, it is a reflection. It reflects. Were there no ego we would still strive to maintain life. You have stated that the ego “requires” to survive. I do not see any requirement. It is a drive. In order to fulfill that drive, certain requirements come into play, food, water, air, clothing, warmth etc.
Paul, thanks a lot for the kind compliment. You sure have a wonderful talent for creating the right atmosphere conducive to a friendly dialogue! 
It seems you lack the necessary immagination to understand my nick, never mind. It’s only a stupid nick and it was not meant to show anything.
I won’t reply to the rest of your post now. I need time to do it. But I don’t know whether I’ll do it anyhow.
When I joined this forum and had a first glance at the discussions I decided to try a simply and direct approach at the discussions, even at the risk of appearing naive. And I mentioned this choice of mine in my previous post. Your approach is something so different from mine that I fear I will not be able to cope with it.
However, I want to try to answer briefly and simply, changing the plane of the discussion.
Do you think that religion is a rational affair?
I don’t understand the question. I could answer ‘no,’ but what would you get from that?
My question is strictly connected with your previous reply to my post. You are a very rational and logic fellow, and at a first glance your arguments are exquisitely logic and rational. You can use well your brain.
But K.'s teaching and a topic like that of death are not rational. Religion is not rational, and reason can never grasp it.
Yes certainly not a “path”. But a ‘realization’? Not intellectual. K described the ‘transformation’ possibility, as i heard it, in not imagining one’s own end but in the face of the loss of a loved one. The realization that that person was ‘gone’ and not moving from that, not “allowing” thought or feeling to enter… That that is transformative through the ‘insight’ that there is no ending, there is no death… as he put it, that “life has no beginning and no end”.
Well probably one is looking forward to the event. Look at the effect of the idea on oneself. That is the beginning of trouble.
No not “looking forward” at all. I think that he was describing the loss of his brother.
He writes of that, here and there, and there are commentaries about it from Lutyens and others. My point is the effect on us (you, me, oneself) when we read it and then we desire it. Hundreds of millions, billions, of people face grief from loss and many have come at it the way K describes, understanding and letting go. But how many have been miraculously healed (made whole) by it? But when it is about K, the idea has a lure. Do we fall for that?
Hello Paul,
Looking into this statement, the first thing that comes to the mind is the tagline ‘the ego is first and foremost body-ego: S Freud’, so when we say we strive to maintain life past the no-ego, we are meaning that it has elements well beyond it’s identification with body and it’s reflections, and it’s those deeper aspects we are pointing to as dying. As I see, ego is a given so long as there is this triad of observer-observation-observed, the ego as a drive, is a will, with it’s tie-up with the physical, but at a deeper level it’s the drive towards making every perception determinate. Therefore no-ego, if we carefully consider it as an event, has a correspondence to the fact that body is still, senses are acute and yet the perception is indeterminate. In other words, no ego is first and foremost a state of meditation or attention as K puts it. But then, there is this apparent transformation of that state towards inattention, the intervention of specific memories and therefore back to perception with a potential (not requiring any additional effort) to slide back to attention.
Very few unfortunately. But I wouldn’t call it an “idea” but insight into the reality thought has enclosed us in: the view that life and death are opposites. For example, we look at our own body as it ages and when thought, to whatever degree, has a resistance to what is seen, this ‘aging process’ , it is not questioned how bizarre a reaction it is. The aging is nature, natural…that thought has so divorced itself from ‘what is’ that it has a negative judgement about this ongoing natural process… as if “it shouldn’t be”. That the ‘death’ of the loved one “should not be”. I don’t know if I’m getting this across. K described it “life has no beginning and no end”.
I was referring to the proposal that an event or experience may lead to a radical transformation. If it has not happened to you then for you it is only an idea. I have never been to Australia but I accept Australia to be a fact (at least, the existence of the land mass). I cannot say the same about deliverance.
With regard ageing, that is a very interesting discussion. I have written a book, an adventure novel, around the question after seeing an interview with the gerontologist, Aubrey de Bray, whose life work proceeds from the notion that ageing should be seen the same as any other natural process that takes our life, as a disease. And if it is a disease, he proposes we should seek the cure, as we do for any other illness. He states that the cure will be found within this century. One will gain maturity, say aged 25, and then simply stop at the peak. Twenty-five forever.
What do you think about that? 
By the way, there is a jellyfish which gets to a certain age and then rejuvenates, goes back to jellyfish childhood and starts all over again. It is called Turritopsis dohrnii, the eternal jellyfish
Just what a future world needs , a 25 yr. old eternal Donald Trump 
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Yes, Freud never used the word ‘ego.’ He used the German for ‘I.’ He wrote of ‘the I’ and ‘the it,’ (being the ego and the id). He did not wish to use Greek words but rather to keep things simple. He more or less saw the ego as a control centre. The idea is that in order to operate in the social world you need to have an image of yourself in relation to the environment in which you interact. His notion of mental illness was that the sufferer had failed to create a suitable ego. Something had interfered with the process. He did not see the ego as a problem in itself, if it was healthy.
So he did not see the ego either as a drive (as you may suggest) or as ‘will.’
But he said the ego was a body ego for reason that it was an offshoot of the id (the it). The id is the centre of the drives and therefore of will. The ego is the factor that takes these drives and negotiates them with the world. The ego is the interface. It is an interesting notion.
And there is another interesting element to it. Due to the ego being something that has to be constructed, there is a long interim period where the ego is not able to operate solely on its own judgements. It is not yet mature enough and so it relies on the judgements of others. To do so it creates another sub-centre, the ‘super-ego,’ a sort of inner voice modeled on some authority figure, such as a parent. So, the ego is a control center, a negotiator between the drives and their realisation and also a subject to the internalised authority of society. To the extent that it matures successfully, the ego becomes independent of the super-ego and the super-ego dissolves. This is somewhat like what Jung called individuation or, at a stretch, what K called integrity.
What is the title of your book Paul. Is it in publication?
Thanks for asking. It is called The Lazarus Seed and as yet I don’t have a literary agent for it (still trying). It is ‘upmarket speculative fiction,’ which doesn’t seem to be a popular genre at present. A lot of the action takes place in Brazil and the US. My protagonist is a Swedish professor of evolutionary biology. This is the pitch I am using to describe the novel:
What price immortality? Shy Swedish academic Nils Holmgren discovers a 16th century chart revealing the existence of an immortal Amazonian Fish God. But he has a rival, US billionaire Hydel Isk. Abandoning his staid university life, Nils travels to Brazil accompanied by Guillaume , a young French Guyanese adventurer who knows more than he lets on.
Contaminated by mutant DNA, Nils is left for dead by Isk, who steals it as a cure for ageing. The NSA sideline Isk to create a breed of super-soldiers. The DNA has viral qualities, causing a pandemic and global chaos as its victims yearn for human blood. Undergoing their own transformations, Nils and Isk resolve past differences and fight to stop the pandemic from destroying humanity.
Resonating contemporary concerns about global pandemics, scientific hubris and authoritarian governance, this upmarket thriller journeys from staid Sweden to quixotic La Mancha, the mysterious Tepui mountains of Brazil, the jungles of Suriname, the storm drains of Las Vegas, the wastes of Alaska, the sinking Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana and on to its climactic finale in the Florida Everglades.
It’s a great title. Good luck getting it published.
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I’m beginning to be concerned about this gentleman’s carbon footprint!
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Haha . . . but I’m sure it is less that Krishnamurti’s. Plus, it is only virtual. In fact, due to his mutation he turns into half-fish and can swim oceans.