Why does this keep happening??
Something extremely profound hit me just now and I couldn’t think of a better place to jot it down (thnx Kyna).
I was staring up at a poster of a deseased hero of mine in my room, when I found myself almost sub-consciously talking to him. Naturally I stopped and asked myself why it was I was doing such a thing! After all, Dimebag’s dead! It’s not like he can hear me assuring him he’s not forgotten.. Then, whilst staring up at Darrell Abbott, realisation hit me like a freight train; I think I’ve figured out the meaning of life. (yes. Again.) When you think about it, the idea actually makes perfect logical sense… We live, so that we may learn to die. Detail is of course required here. As human beings, we have absolutely no idea what death is, as no-one has ever been able to tell us! This is just it. We simply cannot know. Epistomologically speaking, we will never know. We cannot gain any form of knowledge of death, ever. We cannot gain any empirical sense knowledge of death as that would require dying then analysing the results of what you discover. That’s not possible. You’re dead. Nor at the same time can we gain knowledge of death through inductive thinking, as that would require a similar thing to compare death to. The most comparison made by the living, to death, is a deep, dreamless sleep. However again, we hit the same hurdle here, as with death itself. You cannot consciously gain sense experiense of something, whilst unconscious. It is an unfortunate flaw in the human thought process.
So profound is this, I will now validate it by using the theory to answer other ‘big questions’. Take for instance, Darkness, my old friend; religion. It is widely acknowledged that you are at your most pious, during youth and old age. This actually seems blatantly obvious when you think about it, as it is when the concept of death most concerns you: When you are new to the idea of life and unwilling to forsake it, then when you are rapidly nearing the point where you will suffer death yourself, for lack of a better word. Religion has always sought to provide the big answers to those questions that concern us most; what they call spiritual issues. Cardinal among these is of course death. Human nature dictates, because we have absolutely no knowledge of death, we act as if it doesn’t exist at all, in blissful ignorance. This is why I talk to dimebag. As far as I’m concerned, he’s still here. Rather than and ceasing to exist altogether as an independent lifeform, Dimebag has gone away. As Hume would put it, I do not currently have empirical knowledge of Dimebag, therefore he has ceased to exist in my own reality. That does not mean he is dead. Sound familiar? Heaven, hell and the afterlife are just a disgracefully sexed up version of the idea to which I know refer.
Moving on. Time for another big question. This one is actually far simpler, as the answer is implicit in the question. Why fear death? Good question. Why fear that which liberates from imperfection; physicality? It’s human nature again. We automatically fear that which we do not fully comprehend, wholy because we do not fully comprehend it. We don’t like the idea of not having any idea what something is like, as implicit in that, is the idea that whatever we are thinking of, may be a whole lot worse than we imagined. That’s why we fear death. we fear it because we do not know what will happen when we die and that is imperfect. Humans seek intellectual perfection.
That is what elevates death above life to such a degree. We were born to die, we’re mortal beings. But underneath that, we are human. I don’t go in for all this ‘we’re human because we have a soul bullshit’. Yes we have a soul. It’s just that the soul is another word for the pre-frontal cortex. What makes us sentient and therefore human is that we are finite beings and will therefore end; we know we’re going to die. We’re born with the knowledge that we will die, and FUCKING soon for that matter, in cosmic terms! (Let’s not get arrogant here, ‘human terms’ are completely irrelevant.) It is due to this fact that from the very moment that the first impulse is sent round the fetal brain, to the very last, that we are fully aware of the fate that awaits us, that makes death the meaning of life.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in the quest to reconcile and education ourselves with and about our imminent dooms, that we really are, quite simply….
Learning how to die.
