Is Death the problem OR am I the problem?

So we can discuss death. We can discuss what it is, how we should approach it, whether there is life after death and all sorts of things. But in doing this are we really approaching the problem of death?

So what is most noticeable about death? It is that all things die, including ourselves.

But there is something else most notable about death. It only really matters when it happens to us. We watch the news every day and find out that people have died and we have response, but the world goes on. Sometimes people very close to us die and it seems that our life cannot go on. But it does. We get over it eventually. But there is that person whose death is utterly catastrophic: when we die. Life does not go on after that. It is game over.

And yet this must be a lie because this is true for everyone. All those people in the news who die day after day, their death is utterly catastrophic for them but not for me. And likewise my death is utterly catastrophic for me but not them. How is this possible? How is my death so important to just me and no one else?

Well it must be because of self-consciousness. When I die, this also ends the self-reflection so I cannot see myself anymore. My death is actually the same as anyone else's death, what makes it unique to me is that I am turned in on myself to create a self-consciousness and an observer of myself. When I die what is unique to that death is the loss of that self-reflection. I lose my reflected self not my real self.

Imagine 2 mirrors reflecting each other. Each mirror can see itself reflected in the other mirror. To the outsider we break a mirror and it is just a broken mirror, but to this pair of self-reflecting mirrors they lose the world of reflections "inside" themselves. So it is with the self. But that world of reflections is not real: all there is is just 2 mirrors. This is how "my" death becomes a special problem for "me". But it is not a "real" problem. If SRG says one thing its that we cannot have a reflection of our actual self. The real self/mirror is a condition of the reflected self/mirror. It cannot be the same as it.   

Now another way to look at this is to ask how does "my life" or "my death" become filled with "me"? We know there are billions of people in the world, yet this one somehow is special, it is "me." How does this "meness" come about. If we look at the "facts" we see a world of bodies and minds and people getting old and dying and people getting born and the world going around in a giant circle but there is nothing special about a particular person: every one is special. If the Western World has stumbled upon anything its this gradual realisation that everyone is important equally. So again how do I become myself, and how is this more important that others? The answer is called "attachment" in Buddhism. The world is like a river, with bodies and minds flowing through time from birth to death and maybe beyond (it doesn't matter). The key thing we do is cast an anchor into this process so that we get dragged along with one of these bodies and minds. As life progresses and the body quite naturally ages this anchor appears to drag us ever closer to death. But if we stop and look the other way: what is being dragged along through our life? Our body and identity may be at one end of the anchor, but what is at the other? The answer is nothing. The anchor is there, but nothing is being anchored. There is no ship being dragged along. Nothing is being dragged through life with us, there is just the body and mind and its identity and the anchor and nothing else. If we dismantle the anchor then we just have a world and a life unfolding quite naturally and nothing is heading towards deaths or getting old or anything. Nothing is actually happening!

This is an identical realisation as above, where the "self" is just a reflection in a mirror but has no existence of itself. The mirror finds that reflection very precious as it believes it is "itself" but it is just a reflection it is not real. The "actual" mirror is the one doing the reflecting and it is like any other mirror. The anchor is what ties the mirror to its reflection, but there is nothing but a reflection doing the anchoring.

So actually death is the same for everyone and is as normal as hearing about a death on the news. What makes it a problem is the anchor that we have to a particular body or bodies and the belief that there is something casting that anchor.  When we realise that the death of our body does not drag anything down, cos there was nothing there anyway to drag down we are free of death. Yet our death still happens quite normally as if it were someone else's death.