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If you die in your sleep, do you think you'll know you're dead?

Asked by SmashTheState (14245points) April 23rd, 2020

If anything survives death, I am satisfied from my own exploration of the unconscious that it won’t be the ego-self we generally regard as our personal identity. However, as sleep unknits the ego-self and divides our various selves into separate identities, I have begun wondering whether I’ll even notice that I’ve died.

I am a Jungian mystic, and I’ve spent many years manifesting my many archetypal selves, often talking to them in dreams. The conscious ego-self seems particularly unimportant during these discussions, and it makes me curious whether the death of the body will be something my selves will recognize and acknowledge, or if they’ll all just drift apart like suddenly untethered balloons to return to their various sources in the collective unconscious.

In the Gnostic paradigm, we are a soul. The soul is a combination of pneuma (spirit: literally “breath”) and soma (body: literally “clay”). When the pneuma departs the soma, the soul simply stops existing. Will there be enough of my unique identity to notice or care when my soul dies?

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