Death is not the end - Two proofs

When it comes to death the uncertainties around it can easily drive anyone close to madness. The lines of reasoning I will put forth below are probably not "proofs" in any meaningful sense, other than that I wholeheartedly buy them myself. I don't believe in death - as it is understood by the brahmins of the west - at all. In fact, even if I aspire to be "intellectually forgiving" I notice a tendency within myself to belittle anyone that does - to me, this is just so obvious! But then, of course, I ignore all the hard work that had to be done to reach this particular understanding. (A work I don't credit to me, but I digress)  

Anyhow. 

Death in our day seems to mean non existence, oblivion, no experience for the dead subject in question to be had. This is blatantly absurd and I can't recall any initiated explanation of what this non existence would, uh, consists of and how it could be said to be possible at all to experience non- existence. A priori, before we examine anything else, non existence has to be considered an impossibility. No one of us has ever experienced it, not anything even close to it. You may bring up deep sleep, anesthetics, the state before birth or something else but the fact still remains: Your existence has been eternal and continuous, without beginning or end. This can be found as an experiential fact. The only things which have beginnings or ends are the various contents of existence. Not existence itself. I won't claim here that you are existence itself or something else rather radical but regardless of the validity of such claims you don't know who you are - You may think of yourself as being X having Y as an occupation and ABC as close friends and relatives and therefor you have a certain idea of who you might be but all of that is referring only to different contents of existence. There is nothing tying those "clouds of the mind" to what is to be considered the real you. 

Existence is one thing, but there is also life and I won't claim that life as we know it has a chance of being eternal. The question is though what we mean by this word. Even today, when I'm feeling quite happy and excited about life, I can find myself uttering "I don't want to live" when tired or frustrated. What has happened then is that a particular memory has showed up and claimed that I have done or said something and that I should be ashamed or embarrassed because of it - it could also be that an image of a potential future has popped up with the message that I would do best by being scared or worried of what is about to come. Images from the past and the future with an identification sticker attached to it, claiming that you have something to do with them - that is what I would call Life in this context.

That particular process I would have no reason for claiming to be eternal. They are a typical category of the movements of the mind and the content within them has clearly recognizable ties to the biological body- mind. If one looks closely at them one can see that how they present themselves aren't static or exact, they change more or less every time they show up - indeed, they share quite a lot with regular sky clouds, one can interpret them almost however one like and see all sorts of things among them. One common pattern that shows up almost universally among us modern humans is the one of the Ego. The Ego is a mind structure that is very persuasive in their version of how reality looks like and works. They connect themselves to all different kinds of stuff and build up an identity and personality with the help of these connections. Since they are so convincing most subjects of experience simply buy it without question. The Ego then claims they are the one who is doing the experiencing and since they have no reason to believe that the identity and personality they have made is going to last forever they also buy - and you with them - that they must die. And thus, we have the belief in death as an obliterating wall of darkness being so strong as it is today, even though this view has nothing speaking for it other than a manic cloud of Ego trying to take the role of being the subject of experience away from You. 

This line of reasoning is the basis behind the prayer "let me die before I die so I don't die when I die". How is this supposed to be done even? Well, if one is able to recognize that our sense of Ego is just another mental structure like all others it's easy to conclude that since all other mental structures within our minds is subject to a vast amount of change and that some goes away never to return at all, this should be applicable also to the ego. Maybe we won't experience it, but in principle it should be possible to get rid of one's sense of ego while still physically alive. With that conclusion in the bag one can start to work with diminishing it. 

One of the first insights to come forth (I'm not far on this journey, I must add) is that the sense of self that calls itself Ego isn't very consistent to begin with. It has changed in various ways only in a young lifetime as my own. Yes if one looks closely one can notice that day by day the feeling of ego can be drastically different. The Ego likes to claim that it is structured like a big cube made out of an iron like substance, but rather its nature is more like a shadow. From certain angles it absolutely can be mistaken to be strong and solid, but from others it simply reveals itself to be an illusion - it's not really there at all. The Ego is merely a conglomeration of different memes that has evolved together into something looking like an actual mental structure, worthy of being taken seriously. It really isn't. It's just a massive cloud. 

That's the ego by all means, but still, the body still needs to die, right? Yes, the body is very much a mind structure with a beginning and an end but it's primarily the ego that is blocking us from realizing that our identity isn't with "life" (as defined in this text) but rather with existence. Without the ego lens it's no issue to understand how we can be "existence itself" and then it's natural to conclude that the body is a mind structure which is taking place within us - not the other way around - and its inevitable end isn't too much of a big deal. Of course, are we attached to such things as our good looks and stable health its not going to be very fun to reach ever so much closer to that end, but attachments is what the ego claims to do, not anything that is bothering the mere existence aspect of our consciousness. 

This doesn't give any answers to what happens after the end of the body has come to pass and it isn't really the scope of this particular text but I just want to say that I believe life (the process of remembering the past and plan for the future) and death (the extinguishment of that process) are two poles of one of the more important cycles of the very cosmos itself. Life is in this way something that comes and goes much like a breath and, however scary or exciting, isn't too much to care about. It seems that way to the ego, which in mythological terms is desperate to claim the role of the experiencer, but I suspect that for the real experiencer (You) human life is closer to being something that happens as a by product when something else is going on (no clue what that is though). In any case it's bonkers to assume that nothingness is the most likely to "happen" when the body meets its end when existence is so clearly omnipresent.

Where would existence go? Oh, nowhere? So it will stay, then.

I thought so. 

***

An other line of reasoning was brought to me originally as a proof of God. It frustrated me to no end that this wasn't obvious to everyone. To me it's so obvious on an intuitive level I have to struggle a whole lot to put it in into words. I've tried one or two times before but not a single soul has understood what I tried to communicate (However I once saw an image together with a shorter argument that was precisely on point with my own argument, if I can retrieve it, it will certainly compliment the blog post) so this will be a challenge. 

Anyway, here goes nothing. 

*

If you, as materialists seems to do, believe that there is nothing after death and that there is no soul within us that could have the possibility to exist before our conception - then this is nothing. Life, the world, the universe, YOUR BELOVED PHYSICS, anything at all does not exist. It has nothing to attach to, no basis, no ground - it is just mere nonsense playing with other nonsensical nonsensians trying to do nonsense instead of nonsense. It has to be this way.
When you as a subject dies everything goes with you because it was never there in the first place. It's illusions all the way down. 

I had this realisation hit me in the face after my first black out session out drinking. The day after people were claiming I did all sorts of things which I had and still have absolutely no recollection of. It felt so bizarre and as if they, when they retold the events of the night before, rather could have talked about a fictional character or anyone, anyone at all but me. It dawned on me then that if something is deserving of being called real and certain events to get the status of being "historical" and actual it must be possible for a mind to recollect them and well, remember them. Without memory, without awareness, without meta-consciousness nothing is real and since all of humanity will die, since all of universe will collapse in a soup of tingling quarks going to sleep God is strictly necessary if you want to treat anything with sincerity and meaning. God is the one who remembers all of our lives when we cannot, God is the one who by his mere thought upholds the universe even when time itself has come to an end. God is the one who is conscious in each and every event, regardless if all other minds decide to black them out or forget by other means.

To me, this is so unfathomably simple and self evident I sometimes find myself shocked that materialism is a real thing. Or, at least, I would sincerely expect all self claimed materialists to be passionate nihilists just roaming around in existence like Camus on steroids, but they aren't doing that and - I must admit this - I hate them for it. I hate that they killed God, the after life and everything with a fragrance of magic and meaning without even going all the way and start setting up an anarchistic, hedonistic, chaotic form of utopia for us. No they left us in this hell space where we have to care about all sorts of irrelevant things and yet being called morons when we have the impudence to believe in the only aspect of existence that can make anything worthwhile. This is not about who God is and what they would possibly care about in our lives. The simple fact is that if we are remembering something, God needs to be able to remember it too and if there is no God at all then thjghje ihs ngkhgjhgjhg tho rvivkgvkghmr!! 

Death can't be the end, because in the end someone is sitting in their heavenly chair and reminiscing about the odd place called Earth taking place so long ago. This is certain because, well, here we all are. We are most likely, nested through our own memory systems, inside the memory of God as we speak. Don't forget to say hello to the Guyette when you realize the truth of this. 

****

When we think about death we automatically think of it in relation to our own identities and forgets that even if death may be certain, there is nothing certain about the identity structures we have created for ourselves. It's no coincidence that all serious spiritual practices consists of different approaches and techniques to kill and destroy those structures which we have made. Up on the cross, you little one of faith, it's the only place to actually be victorious over death. Let the ego die and your attachments go away and see that, oh, eternal life and enlightenment were available in plentiful all this time right under our noses. 

The cosmic joke, they call it, I believe.