MINDFULNESS VIDEO SERIES (5): HOW TO STOP SUFFERING

For many centuries we can observe that the language that has been used to describe the experience of death is how people viewed the identity of a person. Typically, those who had some spiritual or religious connection would refer to the event of death as “The person has passed away or has passed on, or “The person left and went somewhere else, perhaps to be with God.” Such kind of references imply that there is a continuum of personhood and existence beyond the duration of this current body.
On the other end is a different worldview that has become very popular in the last 150 years, and that has been promoted by some leading scientists. It is the idea that all we are is chemicals and that chemicals somehow combined to create life. That the person’s presence does not bring life to the body, but rather life somehow mysteriously came from somewhere else. And that when the body dies and does not show any symptoms of life anymore, I also am finished. In fact, they suggest that we will never exist again. But it was our natural condition to cease existing, then why do we struggle so much with death? Why does it feel completely unnatural to us to not exist?