I don't buy any of this. Everything suggests individuality is an illusion, it's logically impossible to make sense of consciousness being a tangible unique something we possess.
When you die you don't stop existing because you never objectively existed in the first place. Think of a wave: it's not made of atoms, when you see a wave in a lake the water is not moving forward, it just moves up and down, the wave a vibration that is passed on from particle to particle. Is it a big fuss when one wave dies out? Waves are simply part of the continuously-changing lake, waves are constantly appearing, separating into others, and dying out.
Likewise, throughout life we're constantly exchanging matter and information with the exterior: we learn, we change and we age. We're completely different both physically and mentally from what we were 10 or 20 years ago. We are as dead as we'll ever be.
When we die, it's simply another change. Others we'll take our place, life goes on. Just like every cell in your body is part of you, every animal, rock or star is part of the Universe.
Even yet, death is not as sudden end as we make it to be, (again, like a wave) it's gradual. A person's brain and body may forever stop working in mere minutes, but other things take longer (more often than not a whole lot longer) than that to die out: the DNA left in his children, all the art, knowledge and culture he produced, the influence he had on others through out his life, etc etc.
When you die you don't stop existing because you never objectively existed in the first place. Think of a wave: it's not made of atoms, when you see a wave in a lake the water is not moving forward, it just moves up and down, the wave a vibration that is passed on from particle to particle. Is it a big fuss when one wave dies out? Waves are simply part of the continuously-changing lake, waves are constantly appearing, separating into others, and dying out.
Likewise, throughout life we're constantly exchanging matter and information with the exterior: we learn, we change and we age. We're completely different both physically and mentally from what we were 10 or 20 years ago. We are as dead as we'll ever be.
When we die, it's simply another change. Others we'll take our place, life goes on. Just like every cell in your body is part of you, every animal, rock or star is part of the Universe.
Even yet, death is not as sudden end as we make it to be, (again, like a wave) it's gradual. A person's brain and body may forever stop working in mere minutes, but other things take longer (more often than not a whole lot longer) than that to die out: the DNA left in his children, all the art, knowledge and culture he produced, the influence he had on others through out his life, etc etc.