When I was young, say about 8 or 9, I worried about dying and no matter how old Imight live, I’d still die. I learned to get over it by simply thinking about other things that were making me happy and that’s how life is. It’s like riding a bicycle. You keep moving forward, or you fall over. As mobile organisms, we evolved this central nervous system as a navigation tool, to process the emotions bubbling up through us and the environmental feedback from our actions, which have to be distilled and channeled into a course of action.

Part of the problem with understanding this is that as we experience reality as a sequence of perceptions, then learned to narrate our journeys to one another, building civilizations out of the cumulative knowledge, we assume time is this narrative flow, from past to future, but the underlaying reality is activity turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc.

So there is only this dynamic state and it is more definitively explained in terms of thermodynamic feedback loops, than the linear progression of time.

As such, the conscious state is expressed as the forms of both thought and individual organisms. As individuals, we go from being in the future, at birth, to being in the past, at death, while the species flows onto the next generation, shedding the old. Just as our cells, thoughts, etc. all come and go, affecting the direction of the process, in a big feedback loop.

The energy driving life mitigates against any one form of it being immortal. The price we pay to feel is that much of it is pain.

Without the ups and downs, it would just be a flatline. Waves of being, all the way down.