You know, I have to admit, Death scared the living hell out of me for a long time. Only within the past month or so have I begun to be OK with it. The problem of most Western Cultures is that we tend to view ourselves as individuals and endow ourselves with such a great amount of importance that the thought of not being is simply terrifying. Fortunately for us, none of us are all that important though. The best discription I've heard to describe the Human race is an ocean. All the waves of the ocean are individual, just like people. Each wave will run it's coarse and do it's work (eroding, making sailors seasick...) but when it's reached the end it subsides and retreats back from wince it came. It's not what you as an individual will acomplish that is important, the only job the individual has is to enjoy what you've been given and make the best of it. The real goal is what we can do as a species. I'm sure that's not to comforting still but it's a start if you really try to think about it. Another point I want to tell you about is Wu Li. Wu Li means patterns of organic energy, it is also the Chinese charicters representing physics. Don't give up on me, I'm going somewhare with this. If you've ever studied physics you've probly have heard of the two-slit experament. When this was done with single photons instead of a whole light source (the photon was proved to be the basic component of light by Einstein's photovoltaic effect, and since light..., therefore all electromagnetic energy...) it was discovered that the act of observing whithout changing the conditions changed the responce. Blah blah blah in the end what we are left with is that energy can process information and respond, the very basis of declairing something as organic. It would follow that this could account for the brains ability to respond and learn and basicly act organic because it is a series of circuts conducting energy, which has conciousness. So it appears that at this time physics is pointing to energy as being the form of life and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Organic energy is responsible for our being and is the force trying to fight entropy (chaos). From this it can be supposed that while our matter will die, our energy will continue and in essence our death is only part of a greater metamorphosis into energetic beings which most likely will be the final destination of evolution. I hope maybe this gives you something to grasp other then dark dark death, if not i tried. Just don't be so scared of death that you forget your alive. Try to make your time here as good as possible for everyone around you as well as yourself and do something pretty... -Mike +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the reborn Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". WWW: http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "jelly-filled danishes" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+