Awareness of death

[diesel]

if we were unaware of our inevitable mortality we would live pretty conservatively within ecosystems like plants and animals. Awareness of death is where liberalism and individuality step in. People start wanting to grab that brief period of time for which they are on earth by the balls. They know they will decay so they partake in derelict behavior to maximize the survival brain chemicals that normally reward us sparingly when we make progress towards procreation. They crave icon status to immortalize themselves. All of these people flailing around trying to make the temporary permanent. Religion trained and  calmed us down a bit by promising survival beyond death, and liberalism tries to be religion without the afterlife and god. Of course it doesn't work. There is no incentive for the  monkeys. Humanism is failure, and so is the modern world. 

[crow]

Awareness of death is whatever the individual makes of it.
As you say, it can be interpreted as an excuse for an orgy of 'living', while there is time to live.
But also it can be an awareness that now is all there is, and so it is best to get it right.
Beyond that, it is a promise, of freedom from mortal flesh when one's mission is accomplished.
Or the quest to turn the temporary into the eternal, through expanding each moment into infinity.
Any of these views, and probably many more, come from an awareness of death.

[§Transcix]

I never understood the notion of gaining a sense of immortality by having one's name or deeds live on after one's death. It boggles my mind how that could afford any atheist or any person any sort of satisfaction whatsoever. It's like comparing the difference between infinity and infinity plus one.

Speaking of death is just semantics since "death" doesn't actually exist, it's an absence of existence. Awareness of life is the point, and I reject ignorance however blissful it may seem.

[crow]

Rejection won't get you very far.

[§Transcix]

Rejection won't get you very far.

I'm sorry, rejection can be sort of a dirty word, like I'm throwing something out in the garbage.

I choose to valiantly oppose that which is false.

If you've seen truth though, and still turn a blind eye afterwards, now I would call that rejection.

[lafindumonde]

I never understood the notion of gaining a sense of immortality by having one's name or deeds live on after one's death. It boggles my mind how that could afford any atheist or any person any sort of satisfaction whatsoever. It's like comparing the difference between infinity and infinity plus one.

I'm just guessing, so don't take this as truth - but:

Deeds living on beyond death is a form of transcending death.

Deeds which transcend individual death represent a form of heroism. This transfigures the individual into one who is "more than human" and makes one a member of myth/legend.

Modern argument is "I shouldn't care what happens after I am dead, because I am dead." Ancient vision realizes the individual is limited, but part of the whole, and that which transcends the individual and helps them partake of the whole is a greatness worthy of pursuit.

[crow]

One may choose to do the best one can, in life, not because what one does may live on after the one who does it, but because, by so doing, one's life becomes all it could be.

[lafindumonde]

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man

Ernest Becker, 1973

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

[crow]

The human animal, perhaps. Not the realized human being.

[diesel]

Conservatism's biggest problem is that humans are aware of death.
Liberalism's biggest problem is that humans are still animals.

[lost_wanderer]

Death is change. You are afraid to die when you don't want to change. You try to grab your body, your personality, etc, but you can't in the end. The flow of life will always push you foward. Death is only an agent of the real life who goes beyond matter and thoughts. You die constantly. Maybe the real death is non-awareness of life.