I was at my birth in that my body did not spring into existence from nothing; before that particular event I existed as a fetus.Dontaskme wrote:One may know one is going to die, but no one knows one is dead.
You have no way of knowing you are alive. You were not there at your birth.
Some changes took place during my birth, so my state as a baby was different to my state as a fetus, but all change did not stop then. As an adult I am different to how I was as a baby, when I woke up this morning I was different to how I was last night. As you write yourself in a later post:
So I don't see why you pick out birth as being particularly significant.Man is conscious of the aliveness (action, word or thought) of the moment with certainty, only after it happens and never before it happens. Man can never premeditate the aliveness of the moment with certainty. Each moment is passing away, dying into this eternal stillness that is going nowhere.
I also think it is a mistake to think of time as a series of 'moments', popping into existence and then going into a dustbin called 'eternal stillness'.
We use time as a tool for ordering sensations. If we really only had 'the moment' then we could not be conscious, since we could never differentiate ourselves from any current sensation. I cannot think 'hot now!' unless I can think 'was cold'. We need to be able to think 'this is new relative to me' which means I must have the idea of the past in order to have the idea of the present, they are not separate things.
We know that this notion of time is only subjective, that my own memory of 'childhood' is not some sort of an object in the universe, that has fixed attributes or is accessible to others. (Our ideas of 'time' in physics is different.) We do not think it 'exists' now, let alone after we are dead. So I'm not clear what you are telling us.