What about "death"?

[afleitch]

While I’m relatively speaking, fit and healthy (and even when I'm not) dying bothers me, because it might hurt but death doesn’t bother me. I didn’t exist in any way, shape or form to experience 1982. If I don’t experience 2082 for the same reason then why should it concern me? Death is simply moving back into a state of non-existence.

Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good an evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evil, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living and the dead no longer are – Epicurus

[afleitch]

It is the pernament stage of sleeping. It doesnt terrify me, since I believe in reincarnation. It is going to happen, regardless, because we all get old.

While I don't believe in reincarnation, I have to admit that if there is some metaphysical component to ourselves that 'exists' beyond us, then I can understand the concept of reincarnation. I suppose much of this could be talked about in the thread devoted to souls.

Our understanding of metaphysical concepts tends to be guided by our physical experience and diagnosis of them. For example, no one can truly say that if there is a ‘soul’ left to itself then that it has quality ‘x’, because we have not met anything that is 'just a soul' by which to make any comparison. Every soul is bound to a physical person.

Knowing of birth and death and projecting onto that, the concept of souls inhabiting bodies , that we can deduce that souls inhabiting bodies is something that souls seem to do. Therefore it seems logical (not that metaphysics can ever be logical) that souls need bodies and perhaps by extension that bodies need souls. The idea of a ‘cyclical’ consciousness to me makes sense in that respect.

[afleitch]

he elements, the molecules that make up our bodies have been around for eons.  A fairly large number of the atoms and molecular structures making up my body have been components of the bodies of many living beings before me.  They recycle through the environment as the result of various kinds of transport, consumption, absorption and reabsorption, ect.  When I die, in one way or another, many of these atoms and molecules will help to constitute the bodies of new living beings in future generations. 

That's where I find comfort through death. My body will breakdown and provide food for plants an animals, just as I ate them. We all share the same base atoms as things living and non living in this planet, in this solar system and even with the sun. And the sun is here because other stars died. That's where beauty, for me lies (if I can 'worship' anything in any meaningful sense, it's the sun).

It's aesthetic, poetic and in many ways 'just', but it's scientific too. And I am fine with that. I have no right to wish to escape that, or ascend it. I'm just a human. We only think of ourselves as special; the universe does not.