Quote Originally Posted by afghooey
Junkyard:

I still do have some fear of dying, I won't deny that. I think a certain amount of such a feeling is instinctual, if we had no fear of death no one would live long enough to reproduce and we wouldn't be here. But I don't let thoughts of death tear me up like they used to.

I think the thought of nothingness is so deeply disturbing and heavy because we are taught to associate concepts of darkness, emptiness and silence to it. But if we break away from these associations and look at nothingness for what it is, there really isn't anything to fear. 'Nothing' is just a symbol that doesn't point to anything in particular. It's not something that we will ever have to endure.

In the words of Shpongle: Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.

Stoner Shadow Wolf:

I've been thinking more and more along the lines of animism, not perhaps in the traditional sense in which each object has a soul, but in which everything is alive. I remember in highschool biology we were shown a video that illustrated the many facets of life on earth, from single-celled microbes to complete ecosystems and biomes. I remember the narrator stating something along the lines of, "Although science has taught us much about life on earth, we have yet to discover the driving force behind life."

That struck me very deeply and I found myself very perplexed. That is a very big piece of the puzzle of existence that they claimed to be missing. But I think that, again, this is semantical confusion, that we've become tangled in our own symbols. LIFE does not have to be bound by its definition, by any prerequisites such as metabolism and growth. Rather than being some unexplained quirk in an otherwise dead, inanimate universe, I think life IS the driving force behind EVERYTHING. The things that we normally percieve as alive merely react to energy in a more complex way than those things that we consider inanimate, but at its most fundemental levels, everything is the same -- energy reacting to energy, reacting to itself.


science cannot study the mind, the missing link to that which drives all of life.


from the immortal stone to the fleeting midge, all that exists has mind, is life, is aware, has consciousness.