Meta Mortality: The Denial of Death

Part 9 of the Theory of Emanism Series

Germane Marvel
6 min readSep 10, 2019

I find the best way to find something out about something is to build what I know around something about it that doesn’t change, and doesn’t vary. The invariant. Finding invariants is a good way to begin constructing knowledge about the world, the invironment.

It seems many, if not most (if not all), of us build our lives around an invariance. Our identity, our job, our family, our nation, our religion, our football team. Even if this unchanging thing does actually change. Even if this unchanging thing causes an effect on what it is we’re finding out about something, or an effect on the actual thing we’re finding out about itself.

Philosophy uses language as unchanging symbols, although meanings change over time. Maths uses countable measures, like kilos, although these too can change. Science uses a seemingly unchanging cause and effect process, although recent studies show the future may affect the past. Art uses the invariance of changing emotions.

The depth of this can be overstood when we notice two things. Firstly, any balance is an active process of smaller changes to ward off a bigger change in a more complex way that would tip the balance. From this perspective everything always is changing. Any difference between change and no change is simply a difference in time. Secondly, following on from this, time and change are intimately linked.

In trying to find out about life I inevitably ran into life’s invariant. Death is life’s only certainty. If you think it’s taxes I’ll refer you to the Panama papers, and the fate of some of those who worked to leak them, and the breaking, the exit of a relationship they triggered. As an archetype, a cliche, death symbolises and points to transformations that come from endings.

Ironic because we ignore our deaths so much that reading this (reminding me of my own death) is enough to affect my decision making. In our society, we view death as a curse. Death is the great unknown. The long dark night. We tend to fear the unknown, especially when we can’t appreciate the magic in it.

Remembering and forgetting are similar to life and death. Life and Death are two sides of being with time. Remembering and forgetting are two sides of learning with memory. That uncanny sense we get when we forget something important, to me is similar to the feeling to feeling of exploring what my experience before I was born.

Not forgetting can be seen as a kind of immortality. After all what good is immortality if the immortal being forgot everything it knew in each moment? Here I don’t mean forgetting everything in the usual, figurative sense. People with amnesia tend to remember a lot of useful and important information. They tend to recall language for instance. People with amnesia tend to remember they are a human being, despite forgetting their names. They can still articulate themselves, they can walk and talk.

What if a being forgot everything, in the specific, literal sense. Everything about living, everything about being. Dementia patients’ families speak about their loved ones losing their memory of more recent years. Patients don’t recognise their invironment but those closest to them still recognise them.

As a person with dementias loses memory of their early years their morals change. They no longer recognise themselves and with this comes a change of morals that means family members struggle to recognise their loved one. Their morals decline. Memory and morals seem to be linked in some way. It can even be seen in nation states and the way they remember their history.

States such as Germany that remember the times they’ve been on the immoral side of history tend to want to help immigrants and refugees than nation states such as the USA or the UK. The process of remembering is important. Comparing fully. Acknowledgement of doubt. Acknowledging ignorance. Acknowledging a variety of lenses. Lensing from outside of space and time.

Remembering and forgetting are a lot like life and death. Can we imagine a life after death without memory of this life, or at least a chance to form new memories. At the same time the analog of memory in this way has run its course. I need more detail. Memory and learning are closely linked. Learning happens best when we continually remember after forgetting.

I am truly a mortal animal of the earth. I come from the earth and I’ll go back to it after I die (Unless I die in space, in which case replace earth with the universe). The earth alone is billions of years old. We live for a moment compared to the Earth. Immortality to us as animals is tempting, desireable. Imagine if death did not exist.

Firstly, would I have got here? Wouldn’t it still be the dinosaurs, or that first common ancestor all living things share. Secondly, if I were immortal that wouldn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t get injured, or suffer strokes, paralysis, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other degenerative and/or age related illnesses. Finally would I truly appreciate my life knowing it never ended. The cliches ‘be careful what you wish for’ come to mind. And ‘the grass is always greener’.

In my opinion death is a gift. It’s a gift that gets taken away from me when I die. If I am killed, my life and my death get taken. Life and death are the same thing. Two sides of the same coin if you want another cliche. Life is the chance to direct change, for the better, from the view of a particular lens (what is the better? I’m not quite ready to step into morality yet). Time, and death, is that change, which is a change in lens and a change in ends.

Each ends, each present moment experience, is the lifetime of that particular piece of existence. The denial of death is a denial of a deeper felt reality. The relentless sense of separation that echoes out from our sense of being. It’s a force that drives us together to be with each and sometimes drives us to be apart. From this lens I am always dying as ends. And so are you.

I started with complete forgetting, not knowing, knowing nothing, non-existence. I avoided non-existence, and found an enduring existence. I discerned between existence and nonexistence. I aligned with existence and found time, the present moment. I attuned with the flow of all time. I began to approach an understanding of relations, between all times and I found connections. I then cohered as these connections and found space.

From this lens everything is time. Time connected and folded by the gravity of self understanding and the love, compassion and connection that results from self-understanding. Space is time. Two places in space are two different moments in time.

This is why the faster we move the less we age. We are travelling through, experiencing the flow of, more time more indirectly Gravity is what happens when time is compacted past a critical point. This is why at higher gravity we ages less. We again are experiencing the flow of time in higher amounts and in a more indirect, lateral, complex way.

The denial of death could me lead to ignoring truth, and believing lies. Lies, a form of ignorance, would lead me to bias, prejudice, discrimination and most likely harm. Lying is a form of polluting my informational invironment. Ignoring my death, like ignoring my life, could cause me to have my death, and so my life, taken from me.

Accepting death gives me a more accurate picture of what life is and helps me to navigate life and death more smoothly. Accepting death is to accept life. In order to make find space we must accept death, and so life, as life and death are complex emanations of time.

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