I know a thought that is more frightening than death! Immortality, within linear time as we experience it. There would be no change. Or, if we envision an immortality with change, that would inherently come with alternating joy, sorrow, and “blah," without end. With change, there would always be coming of things we don't want and going of things we do. We’d have to deal with that, which would give us intermittent stress and suffering forever. So immortality would entail either eternal suffering of some kind or being in a completely static and frozen state forever. No form of immortality, as we could conceive of it, would be anything but horror!
So the fact that there is change, that things come and go, and that we die is the surest proof we have that, in fact, the universe is benign.
And our only enduring reality is an essence (pure energy as physicists could potentially describe it one day + whatever remains as impossibly knowable, and even the most optimistic physicists say there is a limit to the knowable). That essence, like the physical energy which it subsumes, is neither created nor destroyed. It just freely changes outward form.
So not only is the universe benign, but what we really are is, in fact, free and immortal. Plug into that!
— Gabriel Fenteany, November 5, 2015
