I think DH made a very good point, and it may indeed be the very crux of human consciousness, as he suggests. That's why religions and philosophies are so concerned with death, possibilities of afterlife, the transitory nature of things, and so on.

This is what happens to a consciously self-observant creature, which is what you have in the case of a human being. I don't think animals worry about death in an abstract sense...for them it is always NOW, so they only worry about an immediate threat or discomfort, but not about what may happen tomorrow, a year from now or twenty years from now.

This sets us humans apart. We fantasize and worry about possible futures, and a great deal of the worrying we do (if not most of it) concerns possible futures that never even come to pass as we imagined they might! In other words, most of our worrying is a waste of time and energy. :-) It would make more sense to take action than to worry, wouldn't it? Or if you can't do anything about a situation, then why worry, because the worrying won't help?

Now I can look at the way my ideas about death shaped my existence...

As a young child I hardly thought about it at all. I felt that my life was endless, so my attention was mostly on having fun, satisfying my boundless curiosity about almost everything, and avoiding various unpleasant situations. In other words, I was behaving a lot like a young, playful animal would. I was mostly carefree and happy, because I felt immortal.

As an adolescent I did begin to worry about mortality some, but I didn't believe in anything religious or any afterlife or anything like that at all, so my main attention was on a number of pressing problems:

How to avoid being bullied by other youngsters.
How to avoid being oppressed and harried by my father.
How to survive school, which I hated.
How to deal with romantic loneliness, which was driving me crazy.
How to be special and win the respect and love of other people.
How to tolerate being (apparently) utterly powerless in the face of those things.

Obviously, I was beginning to worry about death (an eventual end to my hopes and dreams) and passing time, since every week and month that went by without my finding my Mecca (a girlfriend) and my Medina (the respect of other people) signaled failure and doom in my mind.

Ugh! I hate to think of it now. What an awful state of mind I was in, giving over all my power to the approval and acceptance of other people. It was essentially the fact that I believed in death as a final end to my existence that I was in that pickle. Had I thought of myself as immortal, I wouldn't have been in nearly so bad a spot.

In my twenties I began an informal inquiry into religion and spiritual philosophies. All of them appeared to lead to the conclusion that death is not the end. I was very curious about that. They also led to a feeling of my own intrinsic worth regardless of the opinions of other people.

But...it was a long struggle to move from a scientific objectivist who thinks death is the end and physicality is all there is to a spiritual philosopher who thinks death is simply a doorway into further life.

It took until I was about 50 before I actually became pretty much independent of relying upon other people (their love, their opinion of me, their respect for me) for my happiness...or upon outer objects (which give a brief sense of happiness when you acquire them, but it doesn't last long).

I no longer have to be "a success" at anything to be happy. I no longer need to be famous or even well known. I no longer need some particular special possessions or property. I no longer need a lover to be happy. I no longer need a reputation of some kind to be happy. I need a certain basic level of comfort, of course, where necessities are met, but that's pretty obvious and there are practical ways of managing it.

I am happy (much of the time) because it is natural to be happy, and because I am that I am, as someone else said, and that is the total justification of exactly what I am, and it is not going to end with my physical death...

I'm just going to leave this stage at that time, that's all, and you won't see me around if you still have a part to play here.

Yup. One's ideas about death are absolutely crucial to one's consciousness.

Cheers!

- LH