I have to admit to having developed a very strong obsession with my own mortality in recent years, since breaking free from jw doctrine. I think about death a lot, and if I really sit and think about it hard, I can freak myself out big time! I dont want to think about it, and outwardly its not apparent to other people, but it is something that seems to pervade my thinking, something that haunts me.
Perhaps I should be excited, because I realise that on the whole what I came to believe as a jw was fabricated, and maybe there is an amazing afterlife to experience, but at the same time I do tend to agree with jws about death being the end, I just dont agree with the whole resurrection claim they add on to it.
I have known two people who were temporarily 'dead' on the operating table, one of whom was dead for several minutes(one of these people is a friend who shrugs it off like it was nothing!). Both these people claim they saw and heard nothing, as if they were asleep. This tends to be how I view death. It terrifies me. Is this terror of oblivion the true root of all religion? Is this what causes otherwise intelligent people to be hopelessly enveloped in fundamentalist denial?
Can anyone give me any words of hope and comfort that aren't Jesus-related? How can I best deal with this morbid obsession?