--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, maskedzebra <no_reply@...> wrote:
> Imagine presenting this idea to the doctors at The > Harvard Medical Schoolor to Socratesor to Wittgenstein... Here you go again RC - coercing those Western big guns into your hockey team. (Why do you try to do that?). Are we also permitted to try to imagine what, say, Wittgenstein, would have made of this piece of dogma? (take your pick of Wittgenstein 1.0 or 2.0): "There is no safety in meeting one's Creator. How did I first come to exist as the person that I am? In death we meet the author of our lifenot the author of our transcendental consciousness; we meet the author of the person that we are" RC, FFL 2011 Wittgenstein: "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits'' - Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus Socrates: "For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils". What MMY had to say about death might be thought to fit quite well with that. Viz."...by gaining familiarity with that level of your being that is beyond corporeal, you may be able to free yourself to some extent from this unnecessary fear". Not unlike the way a modern-day allergy sufferer may be invited to very gently, and in tiny, tiny steps, expose themselves to the allergen that discomforts them. And just as in this case, it is not the allergen 'per se' that is the health problem, rather it's the panic in the immune system that creates the damage, I find it not unreasonable, and not so obviously unscientific as you assert, that our suffering in death might be similarly alleviated. If, that is to say, we could avoid the panic in our biology that is probably triggered when death approaches. Then again Socrates might have wished a plague on both your houses (RC & MMY) for excessive 'knowing': "And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?"
