To avoid misunderstandings: No, I'm not suicidal (not now, anyway :P). And this posting could as well be titled "I'm a professional hooker" - but I have to raise my price tag :P (and will :P :P). Nonetheless, that's an entirely different discussion. So: How's dying going to be degrading? Well, picture this: For most of our grown-up life, we fool ourselves into thinking, we control things. OK, based on the assumption that we DO think, we control our lives from that little preprocessor we call a mind (or reason, if you will), we got used to the notion of premeditating options before carrying them out. There's one huge evolutionary advantage to this fairly young daugther-processor. One of it is the plain fact that by premeditating options and not being forced into carrying them out, we can detect potentially fatal plans and actions - resulting in.... survival. So... by experiencing ourselves as being able to "control" our SURVIVAL, we tend to think, we can carry on with that concept forever - in fact having us believe, we are immortal, when in fact ... we aren't. Quite the contrary: At the advent of basic existential experiences, we will have to realize that simple physical and chemical processes is what actually controls our entire life-experience. One of those most basic experiences is .... aging. If you fast-forward that, you'll arrive at the conclusion that there is NOthing, repeat NOTHING, in our hands to a) reverse aging and b) stopping that process and its core result, which is .... death. Now, there are quite a number of causes for physical death, but they all lead to the same result: Our physical existence - AND our preprocessor - coming to a irreversible and final halt. And the "symptoms" accompanying that process... are nothing we'd seek proximity of during our life span. For instance: Shortness of breath, body temperature going down, heart-beat going irregularly first, then coming to a stop, resulting in a complete halt of blood circulation. The main point being: All of these "side effects" are OUTside of our control by the mind. For the first and last time, we are forced to experience that there is NOTHING we can do to stop or slow down that process. Which will have a tremendous effect on our ego in that we'll realize for the first time that our ego has nothing to do with our SELF.

I'll leave it at that for now. Take your time to ponder, while I take my time to sober up :P And ENJOY in the meantime LOL