At a friends house I used to see a large elephant ornament standing behind her settee in her front room, I felt it was a strange thing for her to have,but never mentioned it to her, untill one day we were out and I mentioned this elephant," I havent got an elephant ornament behind my settee and never have done " she said, " but the people who lived here before had lots of elephant ornaments". I had never been in that house before my friend moved i , never knew / met the previous owners , and my friend had never spoken about them

I don't believe in the supernatural at all but I think humans have lost some of the senses they had at the start which animals and birds still have and these sometimes re-appear.

Actually, this kind of response is in itself, a tad primitive. In our universe, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Hence nothing ever "dies" as such, it simply changes form.
Everything that makes you YOU has been here since the beginning. You were born in a star billions of years ago. Atoms of Hydrogen combined to make atoms of Helium, they combined to make other elements and so on. All of it, simply a change of one form to other forms. But fundamentally the same amount of "stuff" has always existed. It's just constantly changing. With this in mind the question arises as to whether you & I are more than simply matter. If we are just matter then "dying" simply equates to another simple change of form. The atoms of our body will slowly change and we will initially return to dust before being recycled (again) into something else. There can be no actual "death" in that situation if we are just matter. What dies is just the form. Thus if you build a castle out of Lego today, then break it up tomorrow and build a bus instead, then are we to say that the castle has "died"?

If you boil a pot of water and it disappears as steam, have you killed the water?

If you take an apple from a tree and eat it, have you killed the apple?

I submit that all you have done is changed one form of matter into other forms of matter. There is no actual death.

The problem we have of course is that it seems likely we are much more than just matter. There is something more to us. What that is exactly, is tricky to define. Maybe it is a form of energy who knows. For some it is what we refer to as "God", i.e. we are all a tiny part of God. God is us and we are God. As such we are immortal, or at least that part of us that is not simply matter.

If you struggle with the concept that we are more than matter then life imo looks bleak. It would mean we are simply robots, programmed machines just acting as we have been programmed to act. Actually I have some sympathy with such notions. After all can anyone out there tell me how you consciously manage to:

1. keep your heart pumping
2. heal your skin when it gets cut
3. grow your adult teeth
etc

Scientifically/biologically we might understand how it happens, but we sure as hell are not conscious of making those things happen.

This should tell us then that our BODY is a robot, a machine, simply a form of matter. WE are the drivers of that machine. We are in some way connected to it so that we can operate it and experience the feedback from its senses. So that which we call pain is simply a signal from the body to me.

So where am I then? And what am I?

Insert your own beliefs at this point. Every creed, religion, faith has its own idea of what we actually are. Personally I strongly expect that I am nowhere near my body, that I am somewhere else. The problem is, I am only experiencing things through my body, so I can't see or feel "me". If this theory is true then I have to ask, how did I end up in such a situation? Did I volunteer for some Sci-Fi type "Total Recall" experience? Am I badly injured and in "Vanilla Sky" fashion have volunteered to live the rest of my life out in a false computer generated universe? Or are we just all slaves, controlled by aliens we can not see and imprisoned in a computer generated "Matrix"?

Perhaps it is all a test. Perhaps the whole point of it all is for the REAL US to grow, mature, start to ask such important questions and seek out the answers in some great cosmic puzzle game. Perhaps we are all inadvertently participating in a galactic form of Big Brother !

In the end however, I tend to think that we can not die as such. I think the notion of death is the great deception that we are conditioned to believe from birth. Either we are simply matter, mere robots and thus will change from this form into some other form over time (maybe a better form or a worse form). . . OR . . . we are more than matter and exist somewhere else and once our machine expires we will snap back into the "real" world and who knows what we will do then. Either way, death is surely not what we've all been led to believe.

. . . imo