how do you know if your dead?

[Dreamwalker.]

ok so I have had a really strange night...........a touch of insanity ............

.......I have just lived through a night mare............................I thought I had died.....

everything was black................even the stars were dim...............I could not turn my light on...flick flick nothing.......sure sign your dead right?....................only an everlasting darkness.......and morning never comes...............and no bloody street lights................no moon...........just dim stars and darkness..arhhhhhhhhhhh!...............this is a first.......scary......got some torches ...they worked........thats a good sign I thought................... ..............death is weird...............sun never rises....always an endless darkness.....avoid dying if you can ....not recommended............................................it seemed like hours in darkness..............I thought of all the shit lying around................my family...a feeling of release...........no more worries about various issues................weird imagining your family finding your remains................oh well I thought.....I'm dead ...nothing I can do about it now...............so my death was an endless dark sky..& very cold..incredibly boring.....and no lights...........just waiting for nothing........life in the ghost realm......What do you think death is like?

Edited February 24, 2015 by Dreamwalker.

[quarterflesh]

Il have what he's having.

[Yeti101]

I might worry about the process of dying, but I don't think I would worry about being dead. I have dreamt about being dead, nothing bad at all. Dreams of dying can be unsettling. I remember one where the emotional feeling was ......maternal (?), like going home. My post dream speculation is that we associate death with the way we feel about our mothers when we are very very young. This is because our younger selves still have some recollection of or connection to our pre-alive state and we instinctively know that we are returning to this state. This is odd, because how could we remember not existing? It is, at this point, a mystery.

There are things that I would like to be true, but that does not constitute a good reason for believing them. I guess I'll find out eventually. Overall I'd rather work on my life than worry about the metaphysics of what's going to happen once it's over.

[gtarman]

IMO if you're dead, you probably won't be able to ask yourself that question

And if you are dead and can still ask yourself that question, then it turns out there's an afterlife after all. Win/win really

[woodwoman]

I wanted to know what it was like to be dead, and got a good view that evening in a deep meditation.The darkness was all pervading, no solids existed including my body, there was a release from all the attachments of life and a certain level of peace came over me. Then I realized I was alone and lost in the darkness, I felt unsafe and suddenly there were monsters and demons coming at me, piercing my nervous system in their relentless attacks. I thought if I just close my eyes I will not be so frightened, then I thought I want to go home and repeated this desire to myself until I was conscious back in my bed.

I was all of 12 when this happened and there were no drugs involved. This experience has taught me a lot of things, mostly "watch what you think!"

I could have created a paradise in my afterlife instead I created Hell "Whatever you believe is what is".

What do you believe will be your fate? Heavenly Bliss or a fear filled hell? Can we determine our post life fate by our thoughts and actions today?

One other night I wanted to go to heaven and found myself on a cloud like plane with a bunch of men all dressed in white robes, interesting thing was the main guy was black skinned with white, long, curly hair and beard (I was adopted and at this point in my life I had never even met a black person and christianity was all white.). They taught me a bunch of stuff which I can not remember and showed me all around.

I decided I wanted to go home but they were not sure I had made the right decision and showed me the tricky path home. The path was a slippery slide and a large man stood at the bottom of the slide with a big machette, chopping down on the slide at regular intervals. The gods told me I must make it down the slide 3 times to gain passage home. Guess I really wanted to go home! I made it past the machette twice but on the third time my leg was chopped off at the thigh. I woke up immediately, screaming with the excruciating pain of my leg being removed. My leg was really still there but the intense pain lasted over a week.

Lesson: It is easy to get to heaven but it is really hard to get back.

I have also died in my dreams but I am still alive or maybe I am just the living dead .

[-RC-]

Scary, but then you become one with the universal stream of consciousness, so your ego, and individuality is absent. Maybe...

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

My question is how long do you have to realise when your dead, that your dead, before your once more alive?

[etherealdrifter]

yeah man. totally.it's prolly more fun to contemplate"How long have i been dead here? than contemplate what is dead.what is dead anyway? we die all the time as true psychonauts.(weel alot of people od their own consciousness but the important matter is how long have we died befor becoming aware of the death in the first place.

 

turn the lights down and immerse yourself into the bath of unknown

now put on the music and dance like a tree

[bogfrog]

What do you think death is like?

i dont know, but what you described reminded me alot of an experience i had after i nearly poisoned myself.. i came to an awareness of myself as a conciousness who had been idle, thoughtless, but aware, drifting in a deep, dark, limitless void of black nothingness for an eternity. it may have been a few minutes, a few hours, but for all i could determine, it felt like i had been there for eternity and when i die, it is to this formless emptiness that i (which is also formless emptiness) will return.

i think knowing you are dead is harder than determining that you are not dead. reality checks. testing the limits of concieveable actions...can you push a spoon through your hand? can you see through walls? can you project your conciousness into the endless expanse of space and dive into a black hole, find out whats on the other side? i think writing on the corroboree is an unlikely thing for a dead person to be able to do...but then again, how would i know, i might be dead right now, surrounded by these dead-eyed uni students in a computer lab...i just hope my death isnt like this..

good question. hope you're feeling ok bud.

Edited April 29, 2014 by Ceres

[Nailthesnail]

Regarding the question "What do you think death is like?"

I have a semi close friend that I get along with quite well and have quite deep converstations with, We were talking about the posibilitly of psychedelics taking us too other dimensions which I do not doubt. But it somehow became a talk about what happens after.

Now he used to be quite a heavy legal smoker but has since then quit which is awesome, But as we were sitting there on his porch he told me he bought some marijuana and that he smoked it in his pipe which is fine, But he said there must have been legal high resin on his pipe still because he told me he went into a seizure like state and was brought through many dimensions and he felt as if if he was to die this would be what would happen. I can not remember the full conversation but he told it like I was there aswell it was that detailed. He said it was one of the scariest things that has ever happened too him.

I really wish he had a sab account I'd love you guys to hear it too.

@Ceres we could be dead, We literally can't rule out anything on this we might just not be "dead" in this reality. I don't know what beliefs we all hold close but I am not keen on the past life belief as I do not know how living on this planet for eternity could be even the slightest bit appealling. But what if when we are reincarnated we are in a different solar system?

@ DreamWalker regarding your experience I hope you are okay, These sorts of nightmare things are pretty traumatic. I sometimes wake up with a delerium type feeling about the dreams I had the night before too the point where I sort of believe that this has happened.
Once again I feel like this won't make sense when I post. Very interesting post indeed

[mimzy]

Interesting question! I've never had an experience with which I've though yep this is it, I'm in the process of dying. I have had a few experiences mountaineering when I thought I would probably die. I will share a few. The first one involved a rock climb that I rather naively attempted. Half way up, all of my protective gear wiggled its way out of the rock and left me soling a 30m climb with some tough sections ahead. I though that was going to be the story of me. The only emotion I experienced was terror. The second experience was climbing a mountain in Nepal. I was sleeping at camp 2.7 when a massive avalanche came down and washed most of camp 3 off the mountain. I remember waking up to a cracking sound, knowing exactly what is was, and waited for it to hit. Again the only emotion was terror, with massive spike of adrenaline. These experiences have led me to believe that at the moment of death I will probably again feel a sense of terror at the prospect of joining the void. I have lost a few friends to climbing, IMO death is never the romantic voyage we like to envisage it as, it comes suddenly and leaves anti-climatically.

[ayjay101]

woodwoman - I have had a similar experience to you! Mine too was also without drugs, in the middle of a night's sleep:

For me, it began with events in the physical world accelerating and accelerating, to the point that everything was a tracer on the event that just preceded it, until soon everything could not be separated from anything else, until all things seemed to be occurring at once. This continued until all light, colours, objects and events blurred and brightened as they accelerated and melded, eventually arriving at the omega point - a bright white neon void - a process similar to completely blissing out - resulting in a scene similar to the Matrix scene where Morpheous starts to train Neo in the white void, about the true nature of reality.

In that place, I existed just as pure consciousness without any physical form. I remember looking down and feeling like I was falling, but then instantly realising that I was in fact in constant free-fall inside a bright white void. Physical objects and physical reality did not exist there.

I quickly realised that I was there entirely alone - and since this was a void, there was no orientation in time or space - no reference point to past, present or future and nowhere to be with no reference point to realise whether I was going anywhere.

I immediately panicked and felt incredible loneliness. Even more worrying was that it was impossible to determine how long I was there, since time could not exist without some kind of reference point, from one moment to the next.

I immediately started to think of things to prevent this feeling, first my family - and they were instantly manifest - completely as I know them in waking state - autonomous external entities, with their own thoughts,emotions and feelings. I physically re-created them with my thought. I then did the same for friends, for physical objects, sensations etc, and very quickly re-manifest the universe I inhabit now.

It was an utterly profound experience for me, and it was wonderful to have had this experience without even trying. I've since been told this is a 'peak experience' by someone in the know.. lucky me

I'm grateful mine was bright, as opposed to your darker visions. I suspect this may be one perspective of a death experience.

[Dreamwalker.]

Some really interesting responses ...........................having played it over in my head now a few times..........................I probably first woke around midnight..................incredibly cold...........very weak..............like you'd stayed in the cold ocean water just a little too long.....time to come in............but your core temp is down and your body isn't very responsive...............I think I was drifting................between thinking and dreaming ........aware I was looking out onto the dim lit garden..................took me hours of drifting before I realised the door was open...........and I need to close it.................but too weak..................it was 3c outside....................a swift of light frost..............normally my room would be around 18c.......it was like I was outside with just a few light blankets...........................possibly on the threshold of hypothermia............. what was a nightmare............was probably more primordial survival instinct..............

I can understand why some of the American cultures were so fixated on the need ritualise ...the fear the sun would never rise........

gtarman...........I don't know..........its not an after life I would chose ......hopefully woodwoman is correct and it its is about right thought......................I tend to be more of deva in spirit................I'd be quite happy not to be in a hurry returning to earth................and spend 1000 years or so in a heavenly realm.........who needs enlightenment any way?.......................there is a reason heaven is hard to leave.......bliss bliss..............not arhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!.... ....................the story goes death comes as a real shock after a 1000 years

Yeti's going home...........totally!............heaven feels like home....................and death or grim is a maternal women.............................I painted a picture of her once....................a boy looking down on her .........................the women of the canal.....................Ceres you get a good view from the bridge

If death wasn't a wall? wasn't black and white..............on or off?

I believe we move through realms all the time.............call them emotional or sensation states............we are all dying...........and we have seen others die...................but both philosophies/religions and science say that reality is an illusion.....................perhaps some of us are more dead than others?

It took me years of insight med to go to that place WW,AJ and Ceres ...................this was not that place..................although I have felt that profound loneness in both places......................I don't know the name of that place..................the first thought there .............an awareness........an awareness of being......................an awareness of being profoundly alone.............no light no entities ....absolute nothing.......................fear arose...............fear was something ....from fear all things arose.............. all things instantaneously............the world existed again.................and I have never been able to return to that non place........................I think we hold on to this illusion tightly........................its like if you .....without a wisp of doubt believed you could walk on water ........your faith was solid as the belief you are....................then could you not walk on water?

But we will never believe in anything that will weaken our reality ....for to do so might undo your world..........................fact or fiction Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan's ...........explores that really well..............reckon Peter J orta make a film series of those stories they would raise the bar on Potter or Rings........................

RC universal stream of consciousness................I may have had to search for that......probably end up falling in, as long as I missed the Ferrymann .... ....I did try med................but found it really had to focus.................normally a mantra would come to my rescue...........but it didn't arise.................The Tibetan Book Of the Dead...........comes to mind......................what use is it if you can't focus?

www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=NfMCeidJ8bg

My question is how long do you have to realise when your dead, that your dead, before your once more alive?

yeah how many thoughts?

yeah man. totally.it's prolly more fun to contemplate"How long have i been dead here? than contemplate what is dead.what is dead anyway? we die all the time as true psychonauts.(weel alot of people od their own consciousness but the important matter is how long have we died befor becoming aware of the death in the first place.

turn the lights down and immerse yourself into the bath of unknown

now put on the music and dance like a tree

good advice..................

.youtube.com/watch?v=tjrO3d4TdS4

Edited February 24, 2015 by Dreamwalker.

[paradox]

Sorry to be a whiney bitch but i'd like to read your posts dreamwalker but i never do because all those full stops make it a real pain in the arse to read. the flow of your sentences get all messed up in my head & it doesn't make sense. by the time i get to the next word after all the full stops i have forgotten what the last word was & just can't get the flow.

i'm not a grammar nazi or anything, it just hurts my head.

[Dreamwalker.]

its a habit in my head

I will cease.

[woodwoman]

After visiting the "Void" ( where every thought you have is created instantly) the whole world seemed brighter, my emotions were welcomed, unlike ever before, maybe I was just happy to be submissive to the vibrations of the Earth in contrast to the all creative power I wield in the void. All I wanted to do was feel and experience the new day in every way that it came. This is the most alive I have ever felt and I would not trade that for any endless supply of "relief from pressure". I believe there is nothing better than life, provable by the way we all reach to create something in the void or revisit places, feelings or people where none can be found. Our minds, the only thing weaving the tapestry of this life we so viciously attatch to.....

I am reading "The Decipherment", Rayan Ali, today and wow it is all about this exact subject.

Here is a copy in PDF The-Decipherment.pdf

I will know I am dead.......... when I lay down and die .

When my brain, try's no more, they shall call, to close the door.

The-Decipherment.pdf

The-Decipherment.pdf

[wert]

i think that knowing if your dead or not would require knowing what being alive truely is. and if im not mistaken there are a lot of takes on this and a lot of holes in theorums to?

if your searching for answers in life... they are in life... death is a concept drawn from within life... therefore death is not.

perhaps an emo gothic might know more. lol.

[eleMenOHpee]

Maybe the Tibetan book of the dead could answer that question,haven't read it yet but it's on my list