Fear of nothingness I guess?

[W3akCr3atur3]

I consider myself 100% atheist and strongly believe there's nothing but eternal emptiness after death.

But when I feel too close to ctb or thinking of it too much I am starting to be afraid if there's anything after death, such as afterlife, reincarnation, hell, heaven, god?

When I feel more or less mentally stable I realize it was just my weak fucked up mind isn't ready for accepting eternal nothingness.

I am not thinking of joining any religion or not doing ctb because of this. And I don't really like this feeling.

Does anyone feel the same? Any tips on how to control this?

 

[esse_est_percipi]

I consider myself 100% atheist and strongly believe there's nothing but eternal emptiness after death.

But when I feel too close to ctb or thinking of it too much I am starting to be afraid if there's anything after death, such as afterlife, reincarnation, hell, heaven, god?

When I feel more or less mentally stable I realize it was just my weak fucked up mind isn't ready for accepting eternal nothingness.

I am not thinking of joining any religion or not doing ctb because of this. And I don't really like this feeling.

Does anyone feel the same? Any tips on how to control this?

I think this is just SI.
I also get afraid of hell, reincarnation etc even though I have no evidence at all for this, and even though rational thought tells me that consciousness is an emergent property of biological organization, and when the biological organism dies, the consciousness ceases too. I suspect that this fear of what happens after death is an evolutionary vestige which increased survival rates in pre-history. It's the limbic system messing with the cerebral cortex.

Don't know about how to control it, apart from mind-altering substances.

 

[sadghost]

Ah yes I relate to this a lot! I believe that our consciousness ends when we die as well. It's difficult to imagine not being "you" anymore since you've been you for so long. I think this is natural and likely due to a combination of survival instinct + cultural/religious influence

 

[iDieUDie80]

There are a number of threads on this exact topic on the forum, I even started one myself shortly after I joined. It's a reasonably scary thing to no longer exist, to not have consciousness, even though you won't be scared or be anything once you die, because you won't be. I think this is something most of us will have to deal with.

 

[W3akCr3atur3]

There are a number of threads on this exact topic on the forum, I even started one myself shortly after I joined. It's a reasonably scary thing to no longer exist, to not have consciousness, even though you won't be scared or be anything once you die, because you won't be. I think this is something most of us will have to deal with.

I know and I am not afraid of it usually. Just the feeling I get when everything is too bad interrupts me.

 

[falloutcarter13]

Its natural to be afraid of what comes next, no matter what it is. Including if its nothing at all. You can rationalize all you want about why you feel that way, but you still feel it. I'm 110% committed to being gone before the month is out, and I still have the beginnings of thoughts and feelings that I'm not choosing to have saying "what if..?" Like @worried_to_death said, its more than likely deeply rooted in SI.

 

[W3akCr3atur3]

I think about what happens after I die all the time. It's not something new to me either. I figure we are going to find out about it sooner or later anyway. I think in your case although you don't think there is anything afterwards, maybe an inner voice is whispering the truth, that there is.

I would rather stay in my belief.

SI as some people said makes a lot of sense.

 

[nooo2]

Honestly we don't know, some people believe nothing happens after, others believe reincarnation, religion etc. Either way it's all belief, but what comforts me is that dying is natural and it's nothing to be afraid of, I personally believe we come back in different forms, I've said it before but this world has too much crazy shit going on, the universe, black holes, time and space etc, for death to be so ''simple''.

 

[ClairyFairy]

I used to believe in heaven and all that stuff and was brought up as a strict Catholic. I actually felt it quite liberating to stop thinking there was something other than myself I had to keep impressing every single day, that could see my every move. I'm not afraid of nothing it's the bit before that when I'm dying that bothers me. Even if it was a physical illness taking me. Being dead is fine but I'm scared of the last step

 

[Unlucked]

How I cope with it is, I try to approximate nothingness to the experience I have when im sleeping but don't have dreams. Time doesn't exist. You are there one second then the next you are completely oblivious to the next 8 hours, I feel like death will be like that however the time passing will be insurmountable, it could be billions of years or trillions maybe "you" would become conscious again as a different life form somewhere else 1000000000000^6 years in the future, after all the universe is vast and that's not even taking into account that there could possibly be multiple universes, we also don't understand the nature of time, people literally experience time dilation when they are tripping out on drugs so maybe the passage of time being linear is an illusion, it could be just how our brain arranged our memories one moment to the next, but I've heard stories of people feeling like a literal 4 minutes felt like years and so on on mind altering drugs, we don't know all the chemical changes the brain experiences at the moment of death and how those chemicals will affect our subjective sense of reality, including time, too many unknown variables tbh.