I hope for death, but I fear eternity

[Inliytened1]

Damn.  That would be punishing.  But no one has the power to override God in the end.

[Leo Gura]

@Display_Name My only advice to you is to this:

Become very serious about what kind of thoughts you allow your mind to entertain. Take responsibility over your own mind. Do not focus on things that disempower you. If you notice a certain line of thought is consistently disempowering for you, make a commitment to stop allowing that line of thinking into your mind ever again. Just drop it. Let it go. Practice letting go. Watch my video: The Power Of Letting Go.

You are under no obligation to entertain every negative, depressing, disempowering, ugly thought that enters your mind.

Focus your mind on how you can best honor the miracle that is your current life. And stop thinking about bullshit.

Reality is your dream. So if you dream of horror and torture and shit, that's what your reality will slowly become. Until eventually you reach Hell. That's all Hell is.

Edited June 17, 2023 by Leo Gura

[StarStruck]

Your mind is a garden and you are a gardener. If you plant disempowering plants that is what you will get. A very sad garden. 
The thing with the awe inspiring garden is that you need to take your time and create and maintain the right eco system through right habits. 
It all happens in the now. Unless you are old you have all potentiality in the quantum field to choose from. 

Edited June 17, 2023 by StarStruck

[Yimpa]

13 minutes ago, StarStruck said:

It all happens in the now. Unless you are old you have all potentiality in the quantum field to choose from. 

Even getting old gets old.

But it is possible to telepathically communicate with your older self and download some of its wisdom into your present experience. 

Everything gets recontexualized and your sense of self expands.

[davecraw]

Let's go to the core. Essentially this is about being at the mercy of something more powerful than you.

Imagine such an entity exists and it wants to put you in hell forever. You can't overcome that. In such a case you are doomed.

Now what to do?

Well does it exist?

For what it's worth I tried hard to prove such a entity can't/doesn't exist. I failed. As far as I know no one has proved the impossibility of such an entity. Perhaps we just aren't intelligent enough yet to do it. 

I don't think it's worth it to try to disprove its existence especially considering the rate at which AI is progressing. We might soon have an AI that can analyze these situations far better than any human.

Thus, I offer a practical solution. One that can be implemented. Determine what you want and work to create just that. Don't waste your life imagining hellish things. 

If the entity exists you're damned. If you waste your life fearing it you're damned regardless of whether it exists or not.

The only way to not be damned is to create something wonderful for yourself. Do that and nothing else. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 17, 2023 by davecraw

[Display_Name]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@Display_Name My only advice to you is to this:

Become very serious about what kind of thoughts you allow your mind to entertain. Take responsibility over your own mind. Do not focus on things that disempower you. If you notice a certain line of thought is consistently disempowering for you, make a commitment to stop allowing that line of thinking into your mind ever again. Just drop it. Let it go. Practice letting go. Watch my video: The Power Of Letting Go.

You are under no obligation to entertain every negative, depressing, disempowering, ugly thought that enters your mind.

Focus your mind on how you can best honor the miracle that is your current life. And stop thinking about bullshit.

Reality is your dream. So if you dream of horror and torture and shit, that's what your reality will slowly become. Until eventually you reach Hell. That's all Hell is.

I tried committing, I tried counteracting, but the thought patterns always come back, again and again. 

What happens after death?

[ItsNick]

This video might be helpful

[Yimpa]

5 hours ago, Display_Name said:

I tried committing, I tried counteracting, but the thought patterns always come back, again and again. 

As long as you are thoroughly convinced that you can solve this problem from within the cycle that’s keeping you trapped to begin with, you will forever remain stuck.

You are not aware of this cycle right now. The good news is that it’s possible to become aware of it, but you have to be willing to face your fears gradually. 

I recommend reading about ERP therapy (exposure response prevention therapy). You may find it useful.

[Leo Gura]

18 hours ago, Display_Name said:

I tried committing, I tried counteracting, but the thought patterns always come back, again and again. 

What happens after death?

Switch your attention on something new, something productive. If you just sit around all day with no purpose, you will have a lot of bad thoughts brew inside you.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Osaid]

On 15/06/2023 at 11:19 AM, Display_Name said:

a part of my mind has become irrationality obsessed with the idea

Yes, you have become obsessed with ideas.

You don't fear death or eternity or any of these things. This is a misdiagnosis. None of these are in your experience. You can't fear something that isn't there. You are fearing ideas. It's just that a lot of value is being placed on your imagination and ideas about reality, even more so than reality itself. You have unknowingly created this type of value system within yourself.

If I were to wipe your memory right now, you would be at complete peace. I'm sure you have small moments in your day where you are at peace, and then you start thinking about these things, and then you start fearing again. It is very important that you notice when this happens next time to get a good grasp of what I am saying. One moment you will be focused on something else and you won't remember this topic, then once you start remembering this topic, you will immediately become stressed and panicked. Nothing in your experience has changed, yet the imagination creates such a substantial difference in your emotions. When you notice this, it starts to seem like your life would be much better if you could do away with the burden of your imagination. 

So, your ability to remember and imagine things is working against you now, because you have started to fear the things that you imagine. Imagination can be very vast. It has infinite variety. So, it becomes a big problem when you put so much importance on something like imagination. 

If you sit in a room with another person, you will be the only one fearing these things. The other person will just be at peace. They wont perceive any of it. So, this fear is ultimately just you fearing your own personal psychology, that's all. It has no existence otherwise. Existentially, things are at peace, or else the person in the room with you would also be panicking with you.

On 15/06/2023 at 11:19 AM, Display_Name said:

Knowing what I apparantly know from both spirituality, and rational thinking, it all makes little sense. Seems absurd even. But the “what if..” of ultimate hell remains.

You are fearing something you don't know. It's just a "what if." Here's another "what if" for you: What if it never happens? All that stress and suffering for just something you imagined. Wouldn't that be tragic? What if this? What if that? This is just mental drama which you are emotionally reacting to, nothing else. If you don't know, then all you are doing is imagining colorful mental scenarios which have no reality.

If you really become conscious that you don't know anything, and that you are just imagining things that you don't know, you will be at peace, because this will immediately remove your psychological drama. The psychological drama runs because there is a misplaced sense of importance. You think there is actually something to get emotional about? No, it's just a thought. It will vanish just like that if you decide to stop it. If you really realize it is something you are just making up, your motivation to continue creating it will immediately collapse. You should understand the absurdity of fearing hypotheticals which do not exist. 

When you fear ideas, it is because you have separated yourself from your current experience. You are not experiencing your current experience, you have removed that privilege from yourself. Your current experience has nothing to panic you. For someone like you, you cannot even drink a glass of water without simultaneously fearing some idea of death or hell or eternity, so the experience of drinking water is never actually experienced, it has become tainted with some imaginary non-existent experience. These thoughts are like a wall which block you from making contact with your present experience. You don't want to unimagine this wall, even though you could, because it feels like something that you should continue imagining since it is very important to you. So, you compulsively focus on it, and it causes you fear and anxiety. Again, there is a misplaced sense of importance.

If you aren't currently experiencing it, it's at best a lie or fabrication or imitation. So, if you actually ever connect to the present moment, if you actually decide to experience what you are experiencing right now, you could only be at peace.

At a certain point, you started missing the point of life. The point is not to be analyzing the future at the sacrifice of your well-being. The point is to experience what is happening RIGHT NOW. If you don't do that, you will be unable to experience life, you will only be able to experience your ideas of life. Over time, you've "logicked" yourself into thinking that thoughts and ideas about reality are better and more important than reality itself, even at the cost of your own sanity. Thoughts are SECONDARY, not PRIMARY. Experience is primary, always.

I am not saying not to imagine. You can have ideas if you want. It's a powerful tool. But, right now, you're like a chef that's holding their knife from the wrong side and cutting themselves everytime they use it. Having a sharp intellect is good, but if you don't know how to use it properly, it will cut you as you use it. This self-harm is completely unnecessary. It is possible to use the knife without cutting yourself. You can use your intelligence and ideas and imagination to plan ahead, but there is no moment where something substantial enough to fear manifests itself. It's just a thought, after all. If you take the time to really realize this, your experience will be permanently recontextualized in a very powerful way.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Osaid

[Display_Name]

@Osaid I am deeply grateful for your compassion and time writing that. You are right, the thought has inundated my very day to day experience, it's coalesced and molded into my very personhood, when I look up from anything that was just distracting me into regular experience, it's there.

1. I will continue to recognize the imaginary, truthless, tiring and unproductive nature of the thought, feeding it less and less.

2. I will find new things to work on and occupy myself with as Leo said

 

[Display_Name]

14 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Switch your attention on something new, something productive. If you just sit around all day with no purpose, you will have a lot of bad thoughts brew inside you.

Do you think the scenario as described in roko's basilisk is possible? (resurrecting & uploading our mind after death)

[Leo Gura]

DEATH IS IMAGINARY. There is no such thing.

[Javfly33]

On 17/6/2023 at 9:17 AM, Leo Gura said:

@Display_Name . If you notice a certain line of thought is consistently disempowering for you, make a commitment to stop allowing that line of thinking into your mind ever again. Just drop it. Let it go. Practice letting go. Watch my video: The Power Of Letting Go.

You are under no obligation to entertain every negative, depressing, disempowering, ugly thought that enters your mind.

Focus your mind on how you can best honor the miracle that is your current life. 

@Display_Name  Good shit!! ???

Edited June 18, 2023 by Javfly33

[Paulus Amadeus]

@Display_Name

A couple years ago I had similar fears about AI. I was worried that some super AI would take over and somehow manage to keep me alive forever. It would torture me to death and then revive my body until eternity. Nowadays (even though AI is way more powerful then back then) that fear is completely absent in me.  

Looking back, I can see that there was a massive amount of unprocessed fear in my system. I believe that at least some of this fear came from my family lineage. In my dads side of the family there have been many generations of people who seriously believed in hell. I was raised as an atheist, but I think this fear of hell somehow got programmed into me. So when I heard Sam Harris talking about AI taking over, my fear of hell buttons got pushed hardcore. At the darkest moments I considered wearing a suicide pill on a necklace, so that if I read somewhere that AI had gotten super powerful I could quickly kill myself before the AI could get its tentacles on me.

 

I think the way out of these nightmarish thoughts is doing serious deep healing work. Feeling your feelings, working through your traumas. I don't think 'not allowing negative thoughts' is going to cut it. I was never able to banish negative thoughts from my head. The only thing that worked was working through my shit. And this was more on the level of the body and emotions, then on the level of mind(although working on beliefs can be powerful as well). The fear of AI/hell can also greatly be reduced by deeply realising that there is nothing wrong with you, and that you are and have always been 100% been worthy of love. The universe will not torture you because you are bad. You are not bad, and the universe loves you unconditionally. 

On a different note. Everything is happening within consciousness, so it's impossible to upload your consciousness into a simulation. If in your dream you dreamt that there is some super AI, then no matter how smart this AI is, it could never put your dream into itself. It is in the dream, not the other way around Uploading consciousness into the computer is complete nonsense. It's like a if a television screen was worried that the villain in the movie was going to lock it up in a basement and torture it forever. 

I really hope this helps. Having these fears was the darkest time of my life. You can work through this and then the world will look very different again. 

[Princess Arabia]

13 hours ago, Osaid said:

Yes, you have become obsessed with ideas.

You don't fear death or eternity or any of these things. This is a misdiagnosis. None of these are in your experience. You can't fear something that isn't there. You are fearing ideas. It's just that a lot of value is being placed on your imagination and ideas about reality, even more so than reality itself. You have unknowingly created this type of value system within yourself.

If I were to wipe your memory right now, you would be at complete peace. I'm sure you have small moments in your day where you are at peace, and then you start thinking about these things, and then you start fearing again. It is very important that you notice when this happens next time to get a good grasp of what I am saying. One moment you will be focused on something else and you won't remember this topic, then once you start remembering this topic, you will immediately become stressed and panicked. Nothing in your experience has changed, yet the imagination creates such a substantial difference in your emotions. When you notice this, it starts to seem like your life would be much better if you could do away with the burden of your imagination. 

So, your ability to remember and imagine things is working against you now, because you have started to fear the things that you imagine. Imagination can be very vast. It has infinite variety. So, it becomes a big problem when you put so much importance on something like imagination. 

If you sit in a room with another person, you will be the only one fearing these things. The other person will just be at peace. They wont perceive any of it. So, this fear is ultimately just you fearing your own personal psychology, that's all. It has no existence otherwise. Existentially, things are at peace, or else the person in the room with you would also be panicking with you.

You are fearing something you don't know. It's just a "what if." Here's another "what if" for you: What if it never happens? All that stress and suffering for just something you imagined. Wouldn't that be tragic? What if this? What if that? This is just mental drama which you are emotionally reacting to, nothing else. If you don't know, then all you are doing is imagining colorful mental scenarios which have no reality.

If you really become conscious that you don't know anything, and that you are just imagining things that you don't know, you will be at peace, because this will immediately remove your psychological drama. The psychological drama runs because there is a misplaced sense of importance. You think there is actually something to get emotional about? No, it's just a thought. It will vanish just like that if you decide to stop it. If you really realize it is something you are just making up, your motivation to continue creating it will immediately collapse. You should understand the absurdity of fearing hypotheticals which do not exist. 

When you fear ideas, it is because you have separated yourself from your current experience. You are not experiencing your current experience, you have removed that privilege from yourself. Your current experience has nothing to panic you. For someone like you, you cannot even drink a glass of water without simultaneously fearing some idea of death or hell or eternity, so the experience of drinking water is never actually experienced, it has become tainted with some imaginary non-existent experience. These thoughts are like a wall which block you from making contact with your present experience. You don't want to unimagine this wall, even though you could, because it feels like something that you should continue imagining since it is very important to you. So, you compulsively focus on it, and it causes you fear and anxiety. Again, there is a misplaced sense of importance.

If you aren't currently experiencing it, it's at best a lie or fabrication or imitation. So, if you actually ever connect to the present moment, if you actually decide to experience what you are experiencing right now, you could only be at peace.

At a certain point, you started missing the point of life. The point is not to be analyzing the future at the sacrifice of your well-being. The point is to experience what is happening RIGHT NOW. If you don't do that, you will be unable to experience life, you will only be able to experience your ideas of life. Over time, you've "logicked" yourself into thinking that thoughts and ideas about reality are better and more important than reality itself, even at the cost of your own sanity. Thoughts are SECONDARY, not PRIMARY. Experience is primary, always.

I am not saying not to imagine. You can have ideas if you want. It's a powerful tool. But, right now, you're like a chef that's holding their knife from the wrong side and cutting themselves everytime they use it. Having a sharp intellect is good, but if you don't know how to use it properly, it will cut you as you use it. This self-harm is completely unnecessary. It is possible to use the knife without cutting yourself. You can use your intelligence and ideas and imagination to plan ahead, but there is no moment where something substantial enough to fear manifests itself. It's just a thought, after all. If you take the time to really realize this, your experience will be permanently recontextualized in a very powerful way.

This was outstandingly written. I know the message is more important; but, grammatically, it was superb. Did you use some kind of machine to write this. I mean, a comment this long with no grammatical errors and so well punctuated - even when to insert the paragraphs. Be honest, did you use some type of AI or something of the sort to write this. I'm not referring to the message itself but the format. 

Thank you for this reminder. It was well received and hopefully others can see how understanding this message can tremendously reduce anxiety and mental suffering that people go through on a daily basis.

[Osaid]

1 hour ago, Princess Arabia said:

This was outstandingly written. I know the message is more important; but, grammatically, it was superb. Did you use some kind of machine to write this. I mean, a comment this long with no grammatical errors and so well punctuated - even when to insert the paragraphs. Be honest, did you use some type of AI or something of the sort to write this. I'm not referring to the message itself but the format. 

Thank you! I appreciate that.

No AI, just my brain. I'm glad I'm a good competitor though.

1 hour ago, Princess Arabia said:

Thank you for this reminder. It was well received and hopefully others can see how understanding this message can tremendously reduce anxiety and mental suffering that people go through on a daily basis.

My pleasure, I hope so too. This type of stuff is very hard to communicate. 

[Osaid]

14 hours ago, Display_Name said:

1. I will continue to recognize the imaginary, truthless, tiring and unproductive nature of the thought, feeding it less and less.

That's great. If you just start keeping tabs on it, slowly you will start to see it's nature.

It's not about stopping the thoughts. It's just about recognizing what it actually is. When you see what it actually is, the gravity of it will fall away, and then so will the compulsion. When you see it as it is, then you can consciously engage with it without harming yourself. 

If you imagine a snake, and you know it is imaginary, the way you handle that imagination will be very different to someone who imagines a snake but cannot see that it is imaginary. This is the difference between consciously engaging and unconsciously engaging.

When you give it so much importance, you won't be able to stop harming yourself, because that sense of importance creates a compulsiveness that constantly pulls you to it. Now you're stuck, constantly delaying the peace which is inherent to the present moment, because you have some business to deal with inside of your head, but the catch-22 is that the business in your head is infinite and neverending, so you're stuck there until you become conscious of what you are doing.

14 hours ago, Display_Name said:

I am deeply grateful for your compassion and time writing that.

My pleasure. 

[Godhead]

[mmKay]

@Godhead did you just make this meme? It's too accurate and encapsules the core issue perfectly ?