Hi there. Thanks for dropping by. My name is Josh and this is Darma Punk's New York.

I've been the pastor here for last 16 years.

And before I jump into tonight's vaguely Halloween themed talk.

Just reminding you if you'd like to,

everything I do is entirely by donation,

offered freely in the 2,500 year old Buddhist tradition.

If you'd like to support my work, the Venmo is Darma Punks with an ex-NY NYC, or you can drop by the page on the web, which has all the information

and there's a PayPal button there. So thanks for your support. We'll jump into death anxiety and

reincarnation.

Last week we did dread, so this felt like a suitable follow-up.

I think it's pretty familiar to all of you that we live with a profound psychological conflict, all of us.

On the one hand, our brains have deeply embedded survival instincts.

We fear threats to our survival.

At the same time, while having this fear of our mortality. We also have the recognition death is inevitable and largely unpredictable. So we live with both a fear of death but also

the knowledge that it will happen to each and every one of us.

And that is, of course, a profoundly uncomfortable reflection or insight or concept to grasp. So death is particularly difficult for us because we are representational beings in that we can

translate our life experiences into stories and ideas.

We're a language-based species.

And in language, we represent our experience

in stories and ideas and concepts.

And these stories we tell about ourselves

create the sense of a very fixed unique identity.

...