A curious question hit me as of late: why do we die? It is known that the objective purpose of life, beyond our definition of personal purpose, is to reproduce and thus create more life, ensuring that life exists in the future. But as is mostly common throughout nature, after one or more stages of reproduction, the organism reproducing dies, and the offspring lives on. The organism then is used to sustain other life. Although it is a brilliant system that has worked for billions of years, death seems to be a kink in the system. Of course death could be explained off as in place to stop overpopulation and so that life itself can exist without existing to the point of destroying itself, but is there really a need for an organism to die? Rocks don't die -- inorganic matter was never even living. It can be crushed, pulverized, reshaped, and vaporized; but it can't die. So why do we die?

If life had no death to balance it, how would life be? Imagine never having to consume another living thing to survive. No survival of the fittest, no death to sustain life. Photosynthesis in all organisms, or something similar? Without death there would be no competition to survive or reproduce, since all could equally reproduce. In essence it seems that this bliss without death would be what course life would take. Somewhere in the evolution from single celled organisms to the human being, doesn't it seem like such a thing would have happened? If so, then why do we then die? Our definition or your personal definition of death itself may need to be put in question to respond. If life as we know it could exist without death, than why is there death?

I don't think we do. We just serve our purpose in creating the big picture, and move onto another element of what that means. No fear. It doesn't serve in this case because it can't help defy destiny. Life is procreation. It's never really over.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
-Susan Ertz

I'm glad we die. If there was no death like you laid out above, people would try to die from the boredom.



Ogranic material is the same. We can be crushed, pulverized, reshaped, and vaporized and all that. Our energy is still there no matter what just like that rocks is. Our mind won't be there working but we will still be. We'll just simply exist in a different state by that defination.

Like the circle of life off of the Lion King (do not diss the Lion King ), were the bodies and everything else goes in circles. Though I don't believe in reincarnation, I do think that our energy will always be there in some shape or form even if we're not whole or conscious of it.

There is death in sense then by our cells being built up and with that we burn more quickly. Even the tallest building and greatest mountains will one day crumble despite their greatness. We wear down and break. Our energy is still there but what made us, us won't be.


edit: lol, GW and I seemed to switch roles for a quick bit. She makes a short and sweet comment that fits and I write the essay.

We die because of our cells, they mitose on and on until eventually there's not enough original DNA to mitose from (like a CD, to many copies from the original results in the 20th - per se- will be of a crappy quality). Our need of re-newable cells to replace the old - from skin, organs ect - is also our downfall by resulting in death.

Otherwise if we continued to live our organs would decay and our skin would eventually tear and fall

Well at the rate we as a species reproduce, if there wasn't death, the earth would surely be grossly overpopulated.
Not to mention living for ever with the mind of a human, especially when you see and experience everything, would become very boring. You'd want to die eventually.

Also, Kratos made a good post here and I entirely agree with it.

Thanks for giving me that break. Shall we dance?

I blame the undue influence of the pink unicorn. It's all your fault K.

Redundancy by design much like your fridge and dishwasher. Must make way for the new and improved model. I am a 1956 vintage human male I am not as sleek and fast as the 1985 models but I have earned the title of classic and have a few more miles left on the old chassie. The parts are getting harder to find and the tires are quite bald but the ride is still pure luxury.
Irish

If living creatures don't die they would quickly over tax their environment. Then they'd die anyway. Living things can't get away with not consuming other living things because living things require energy, energy that is produced by other living things in forms they can easily break down. So, unless something evolved with a particle smasher in it's gut it won't be able to derive energy from breaking down the nuclear bonds of crystaline things such as rock. Rocks don't require a constant energy source to exist. They're just there.

Oh man, I love your way of putting it. Don't think of it as bald, think of it as running with the top down.



Love the classics.

Think of how much the greats have accomplished because they had a sense of purpose and they could feel time running out on them. If there was no death would man have advanced as much as he has? would we still be sitting in little lean-to's watching the sun go down ONE MORE TIME?

we die because we are mortal, we die to make room for the new and improved, if the old didnt die and the new werent born, evolution could not run its course. It is a fact of life that we are gonig to die, what hapens after death is a mystery that we will never know the answer to until we die, it doesnt matter why it hapens, it just happens.

That's weird, I actually watched that film yesterday. It's a freaking classic.

Death is essential for life to continue. Without death it would be impossible for nutrients and energy to become recycled, and they're essential for living organisms.

Leliel is right about cells aswell. A process named Telomere shortening can, I believe, trigger cellular senescence.

Even plants compete to survive.

Truth is all things are impermanent (some of call that the 1st Truth ). Everything that is ceases to be at some point. Animals, plants, planets, stars, galaxies, all of these things end because that is the essence of nature.

You can also consider that nearly every concept we can name has an opposing and related concept. Light/Dark, Pull/Push, Rise/Fall, Life/Death, so it's easy to surmise that the universe runs on an equality of opposites. No half of any of these conceptual couplets can exist without its twin.

So death is not against nature, it is nature. Immortal Self is against nature.

exactly at some point life ceases to be, death varying degrees of life ..basically....its natural to die .....

And if cells could endlessly rejuvenate?


So does this mean that possibly our conscious selves affect our own evolution?

Energy-wise, plants do not consume other organisms in most cases/ Photosynthesis only requires water, carbon dioxide and sunlight. Why would life exist to destroy other life, anyway? What type of competition is this?


Maybe not, but would we remain in such an unhealthy, fast paced world?

But couldn't evolution itself be altered to affect the living? Wouldn't things run smoother if living creatures evolved while they were alive, and then passed it on to offspring, both creatures having advanced.



To use Life/Death as a duality implies that death happens and then there is experience after death. Afterall, life is our lifetime; we come into the world through conception and consciously through birth. Would a Life/Death duality not mean that death is a continuation of consciousness after life, but in a way that we cannot yet comprehend?

Then organisms would continue to survive until killed off by the environment, it would just be delaying the inevitable.

Where do the vital nutrients that plants require come from? Cycles that are dependant on decaying organic matter.



That's not how evolution works. An organism is not able to evolve within its own lifetime, it's entirely dependant on which genes are passed on to the next generation.

This is an image I used to demonstrate the point in another thread a while ago, it's not completely relevant (well, it's completely irrelevant) but hopefully you get the point:




This is kind of a dead-end argument, anyway. It's possible that in an alien environment, organisms could find a way to simply live, without dying due to any biological processes; but not on Earth.

Of course it does. Death is just Bardo.

*goes back to my CD anology* like a CD, to many copies from the original results in the 20th - per se- will be of a crappy quality

But it's a duality in concept only. Neither life nor death has any intrinsic reality. One cannot exist without the other. Consider this analogy.

all things exist as bubbles on a stream, they float along for a while and then pop. the water is absorbed back into the stream and the air inside returns to the atmosphere. The process repeats but no consequent bubble is exactly the same as any bubble that came before, even though it may contain molecules from an earlier bubble.

Why would death imply a continuation of consciousness? Consciouness itself, being part of the natural world, would also have to abide by the truth of impermanence. You could cite that consciousness is energy and thusly cannot be destroyed, but as you see in the bubble analogy it is not destroyed on death but dispersed to formulate the non-material component of another existence. An afterlife implies an immortal self. I say that if one is self aware even after the failure of the physical form you are not dead. Of course this idea would require the general definition of "life" to be changed and this would take irrefutable evidence that self endures. It makes no sense to me how a "soul" could exist without it's material component, the body. Just like light/dark, body/mind is a symbiotic concept, they rely on each other to be real.

But after all is said and done, the view I have relayed is not truth but mere words.

You could not have said it any better the second we are born our death clock starts ticking away!
Death is just simply a part of life their is no avoiding it.

What doesn't kill me only delays the inevitable?

If it wasn't for death wouldn't everything overpopulated?

I agree with what rev r has been saying.
The question I would ask is: Does death actually occur? When we think of death, we think of something ceasing to exist. Think of a dvd player that has died... maybe it is only one component that has stopped its function, resulting in the overall 'death' of the dvd player. But, what about all of the other components, perfectly functional and ready to be used somewhere else? Heck, even the faulty component can be broken down and used for something else. So basically, if everything is completely usable or able to be recycled, then does death actually occur? I look at it as, all the elements are there to form a compound... eventually that compound will break down and be dispersed, used for some other compound. Death is a human concept, when we think of it we think finite. It is true that the person as a whole ceases to exist... the compound it once was is breaking down. But, at least its good to know that our energy, our particles and elements will be used elsewhere. All things recycled.

Well, if we did not die, and all lived indefinetally, we would, in theory, be using an infinite ammount of energy.
Seeing as how no energy can be destroyed nor made, this suggests that there is a finite ammound.
Seeing as how we reproduce, and yet live forever, in theory, there would not be enough energy for all of us.
So, in a way, we die to keep ourselves alive.

uh oh!



Only in terms of the Self (assuming a definition of finality). When the being known as Rev R "dies" he will be gone forever, save the memories of those who love him, an occasional pithy quote in a message board archive, or a song on a battered CD.

The mind/body construct that served as the vessel for Rev R will do whatever it does.

Nature is nothing to fear.

Brilliant explanations Rev R, and Artymoon. As calming as that may sound, though, the great beyond is still such a fascinating mystery. My thread does indeed refer to the death of the self as a whole, as you have spoken of. Yet if this is not a fade into absolute oblivion, then what is? What really has an end that does not have a successive beginning?

They do sometimes. It's what makes cancer.


If we didn't die naturally we'd all starve to death as we over populate the planet.

Thank you for the compliment.

It might be a fascinating mystery, but I'm in no hurry to solve it.

It's only due to the fact that cancerous cells divide uncontrollably and at such an accelerated rate that they're considered cancerous, right? If cellular senescence didn't take place, would it not be possible for the cells to continue with a normal replicative cycle while remaining healthy?

Possibly, but it is not something I believe would be do able as the (this is from memory btw) protien (i think) that allows continous growth is actually uncontrollabel, I suppose there is scope for prevent it, however I cuoldn't say it would be a good idea, it still would not prevent a truck hitting you though.

But how about creatures likes starfish, who can regrow entire limbs?

Who is to say that we actually "die?

Where talking about physically dying I think...which is 99% proven to happen (I'm leaving that 1% open for zombies and vampires...and human error).

I know what your getting at though, which in short is either heaven or reincarnation.

I think it would be better if people died like in comic books, they die after a heroic death only to show up three issues later without nobody noticing or making up a BS excuse like "Super-Boy Prime punched a whole in the universe so I'm alive now".

But like, the energy which makes our body can never be destroyed. It can only change form. And our consciousness/awareness cannot be proven to be made from the body yet.....So if consciousness ends up being intangible and not physical it cannot die. And if the energy which constitutes the body cannot be destroyed but simply changes form. Then what dies? No death ,only change of a physical level and who knows what kind of change if there is a change on the consciousness/awareness level.

They still have finite life spans and they can only regrow limbs because there nervous structure is so much simpler than ours. Our nerves take decades to heal, we also tend to live longer than star fish and other animals that can regrow limbs like spiders.

What makes you conscious and aware though are the biochemical reaction that go on in the brain. No brain, no reactions, no life.


Cadetak it is 100% proven we all die, no one has done anything to show otherwise.

Why are we so arrogant in our assumptions?

It's not just humans who live and die, it is all life that must die. Try to imagine a world without death, a world so choked with life that existence is a misery. To opine on death but presume that only we should be made proof against it is to assume we have some importance over all other living things - we don't. Phytoplankton, among other things, is more important to the continuance of life on this planet than we are.

Not sure if you have ever seen the movie Flat Liners, but it's a fascinating idea, and if it was safe I'm sure people would try it. Maybe they have? Stopping your heart and a massive decrease in brain function, but being revived minutes later by medical instruments. Near death experiences taken to the limit. How does one explain off the patterns in near death experiences, of being separate from your body and being a bodiless consciousness?

What proof have you got that the biochemical reactions in the brain create consciousness? If you did, it would be the find of the century!@!

Physically being dead is 99.9% proven ( I leave room for human error )

Actually if what mysticism and the perennial philosophy say is true then we can't even die physically. Because according to the perennial philosophy all energy is consciousness. So the body just changes form but remains conscious/alive. While the consciousness within the body that is conscious moves on to another realm or dimension or is reincarnated. I might as well stop with this confusing talk and just put it like this: Everything is infinite consciousness and there is no death.

Fine 99.8 percent proven leaving .1% for human error and .1% for brave's crack pot theories.

Since we cannot imagine not existing, i think that means that we dont stop living after death. I wonder why it's unimaginable? When i think of nothingness i see all black or all white or clearness. But that's still something.

This was a double post. But not anymore.

Yeah I agree!

The universe isn't limited to your comprehension. Just because you can't imagine something, doesn't mean it's not possible; that's just ridiculous. If you want to think of 'nothingness', just try to remember what it was like from before you were born...

Greetings Raven

To better unnderstand and comprehend the meaning of death we need to first look at and discern the meaning and purpose of life.
What is the purpose of experiencing separation?
What is the role of pain and suffering in individuality?
To understand life one needs to learn and understand consciousness and considering the Stevenson studies look at the concept of "completion incarnation".
For whatever it's worth, digging another shovelful in language out of my NDE, the question, "You don't really know yourself, do you?" definitely carried a nuance of meaning of "incompletion". I suppose this would be fairly obvious. There was "knowledge" to acquire; there was "something lacking", an "emptiness to be (ful)filled", a "fullness to be emptied"
As I've tried to explain a couple of times before, knowing was not limited to the sense of "learning", but is a deep "gnosis" that comprises all kinds of experience, including (oooops!) an understanding of "purpose". So for this and other reasons I feel that hunches about "the necessity of completion" are probably accurate and not another manifestation of spiritual wish-fulfillment fantasies.

You brought up NDE's and if we were to study NDe's we would gain a sense of the following:

-NDEs (where individual consciousness appears to be retained, yet permeable)
-OBEs (definitely an individual witness there)
-reincarnation experiences, some of which suggest individual consciousness (ie. the life between lives accounts, the fact that children do not report the memories in the third person, but say that the memories belong to them and have physically taken on board personal characteristics, even traits of the other person).


I know the only way to investigate the truth is to get outside ones comfort zone of current beliefs.
Any voyagers out there?

Blessings

Excellent questions. It's curious that we know so much about the world around us, or we claim to, yet scientifically at least, and often spiritually, we know close to nothing about ourselves. We know how the human body works biologically, hence modern medicine, and yet there is still a vast void of knowledge about ourselves and individuals. So many people are spiritually lacking or have a non-existent well-being because they do not yet understand themselves, yet claim to be such intelligent and wise individuals.

On a side note, hello Turtle, it's great to see you again!

Maybe I'm just out of it this morning but I didn't quite get what you were saying here.


Reincarnation experiences, especially, bring up a very potent debate. There are plenty of scientifically and reasonably, thoroughly documented cases in which reincarnation experiences seem to be legitimate. Knowledge and experiences, often proven to be fact later on, come to the person through seemingly metaphysical means, and often there is no rational way that this person could have known these things in such detail. If you remember a popular case nation-wide a few years ago, a young boy was interviewed by Nightline, along with his parents, and they were at odds about how this little boy could know what he did. He recalled being a American WW2 pilot in the pacific, who happened to have been shot down. He knew all these technical things about airplanes, he could recall in great detail his final flight, and even a name came up. These experiences and memories were passed by veteran pilots who were with the man in that final battle, and they were shocked but confirmed what the boy knew. How do you explain this off, especially because the boy was only about five years old? I don't know about anyone else, but when I was five I was not researching in detail the lives of individual WW2 veterans, and there is no way I could have recalled undocumented personal experiences! Is it evidence of reincarnation, miracle, or something else?

Thank-you friend, so good to converse again with you as well!!

LOL
Let me try to explain

You said:



If one was to subjectively look upon re-incarnation experiences we need to admit that there are just too many stories out there for this phenomina to be just an anomoly(?).
I brought up the Stevenson Studies to show this.
For those readers out there that are not familiar with Dr. Stevensons work, you can gain an understanding by clicking on the following link.



Quoted from :
http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2001/03/stevenson.html

Now, whe ideas Stevenson raises create a whole new set of questions based on the belief that their is a re-incarnation cycle to our existance.,
As I raised earlier:
What is the purpose of experiencing separation?
What is the role of pain and suffering in individuality?

These questions now form the basis for what I postulate is the "purpose" of life.

Is there "knowledge to aquire?", do I reincarnate because my soul was "lacking", was their an emptiness in my soul that needed filling, or did I reincarnate her with a fullness that needed to be emptied/shared.
New Age thinking is that finding yourself is the most important aspect of life and this is done by looking "within" and finding our true selves.
We are all magnificent beings which is the paradox of our existance.
We don't believe in our magnificence.

Blessings


Blessings

We die because:
- we get old
- our vital body functions are slowing down
- we get a deadly decease
- war (weapons)
- someone else takes your life (killing)
- poison food, poison world (radiation, etc.)
- religion

When we die we go ''ascend'' to another higher existence, spiritual plain.
But I don't about that, we'll see when we die.