[Buddha-l] Re: Magic

[Tom Head]

Okay, here's what gets me.  Bertrand Russell once pointed this out,  
and I'm not doing him justice because it's 5:30 in the morning but I  
think the general gist will carry:

If consciousness is an emergent property of the mind, then continuity  
of consciousness is more than likely illusory because there's nobody  
left over to "watch" the process without being affected by it.  Every  
moment would be a samsara of annihilation and reemergence, and we  
would be none the wiser; the "me" of this moment exists, the "me" of  
the moment before is annihilated forever.  Only the concept of the  
soul, or something comparable, suggests that the me that exists  
tomorrow morning--never mind the physical death of my body--is in any  
subjective way the "me" that exists tonight.

Certainly it's hard to grieve the death of a sadistic dictator, but  
there was a time when that dictator was a child, more likely than not  
a good-natured and loving and relatively innocent child, whose death  
would be worthy of anybody's grief.  Is it really correct to say that  
the death of the dictator is the death of the child?  Wouldn't it be  
more accurate that the child died a long time ago?  If the dictator  
lives to become a sweet and senile old man who tends to his garden  
and makes sweets for the neighborhood children, doesn't that kill the  
dictator long before his heart stops beating?

And if we can acknowledge that these too are deaths, then why should  
we assume that the less visible but equally real changes that occur  
with every passing moment do not just as completely annihilate us?

So death, it seems to me, would be a constant process.  Or to put it  
another way, maybe it _is_ in fact the fall that kills us and not the  
sudden stop at the end.


Cheers,

TH