Even though we have ideas about what happens after we die, we do have an natural instinct to survive. It is ingrained in us, a basic instinct. It is what forces us to find food, shelter and medicine. We want to experience life. When we die, we will have different experiences, but there are experiences we want to have on this earth in this body. Sometimes though, we forsake those experiences in exchange for security in our survival, like not sky diving for fear of what could happen. Also, part of the process of dying usually includes pain and suffering. We also have a natural aversion to pain and suffering, so we avoid things that might cause pain and suffering.

I find the fear of death as being associated with those brought up in a religious background. Perhaps deep down they fear ending up in hell or maybe getting stuck in "limbo". The not being good enough to enter Heaven, having been born in sin and die in guilt sort of thing? Perhaps if more people were aware of reincarnation and how easy it is to check out one's previous life, then this fear would dissipate.

thank you, namaste

The best movies are the ones that draw you into them - they cause you to engage with the main characters, to care about what happens to them.

As a result, the metaphorical journeys that those characters undertake during that movie become your journey as you watch the film and identify with them.

You experience joy as those characters triumph over adversities that the plot presents them with, and you experience fear as those characters find themselves in difficult, even perilous, situations.

I would say that the three-dimensional physical reality into which we all choose to project ourselves is the greatest movie of all.

We all know at some level that our individual physical lives are as inconsequential as those of the characters in the movie - because we are eternal beings - but our personal interpretation of physical reality (through what is termed the ego) causes us to engage with our physical lives in such a way that the stakes seem higher...and so the movie of life causes us to have experiences in much more depth than if we remembered that none of it really matters that much in the end.

So why does that illusion of physical experience matter?

Just because a physical lifetime may seem inconsequential from the point of view of being physically incarnated, the experiences, realizations and clarifications of it can have universe-wide implications.

It's a bit like someone on Earth with internet access discovering some important news and immediately posting it on Twitter. Within hours, everyone on the planet who is interested (and has a Twitter account) will also know that bit of information...the same applies on a universe-wide scale with the realizations and clarifications that come to us within our physical Earthly lives and the universe's equivalent of Twitter :) Once the knowledge is out there, everybody in the universe can benefit if they wish to.

Just through living our physical lives, the universe becomes MORE.

And so, as part of causing us to engage more deeply with our life movie, we also give ourselves (through the ego perspective) the experience that we have "something to lose" through death...it causes us to focus more and thereby enhances that Earthly experience.

If we kept remembering that we are eternal and unlimited beings, the movie just wouldn't be as interesting :)

it may be a matter of 'not yet knowledge of' or ignorance instead of being programmed,
or of feeling excessively awkward outside of media consensu, enough so, to only accept 'their point of view'
unlike the 'end of earth is near' story.
just imagine, accepting respomsibility for all that we do
could a real world actually exist with thinking entities,
or is that they see heaven as

From the question about the natural disasters, it is somewhat enlightening and refreshing to me that it seems that not a lot of people on this site are really that worried about the end of the world. :)

As for the other people who have still not opened their mind to metaphysical principles, many of them have been bombarded by so many conspiracy theories in the past that never went to fruiton (if I'm not wrong there has probably been at least 2 mentions of the world ending in the past but nothing major really ever happened).

So I would say that right now not really a lot of people are worried about the world coming to an end... if not you would be seeing a lot of people trying to do things that they had never done before. But I would say that if there is any fear regarding this issue, the simple and main reason to me is the "Fear of the unknown". Not knowing where you will go or what happens after death can sometimes be truly frightening to some people especially if they believe in the concept of Satan and Hell.