Boundless Life.
Why Death Is the Great Myth of Now.
Every age has its great myths. And the great myth of ours is death.
Nietzsche proclaimed God dead, Sartre put existence over essence. Now, if we are reasonable people, we believe that the mind dies with body, and all we are is lost the instant there is death. The mark of a modern mind is to believe, really have unblemished faith, in death, is it not?
We are the first age in history to believe in death as the final destination, the ultimate ending. Every era before us believed in an underworld, afterlife, and so on. But death defines us. You only live once, live for the moment, and so on. We are all trying to grab a little more life, at any cost, any price, before this moment of death, because it is the end. We have become obsessed with death, paranoid about ending. It is the monster we see lurking in every shadow. And perhaps that is why we have forgotten how to live nobly, courageously, wisely.
But it’s time for us let the myth of death as annihilation, ultimate ending, go. Because now we can be reasonably certain that all it is is a myth.
At the most basic level, we are beginning to understand that reality is atemporal, acausal, and nonlocal. That is, time and space do not really exist. They are just phenomena, not the fabric. If time and space do not really exist, then neither do cause and effect. How can death exist if there is no cause and effect? Death is an effect, right? It can only happen to what is caused. But if being is not caused, then neither can there be any such effect as death.
I know. That’s abstract. So let’s put it another way. Two particles can be at opposite ends of the universe, and still know what each other are doing instantaneously. They can be in two places at once, and pop in and out of existence. How can this be? It contradicts everything that we think is real.
There’s really just one way in which this can be. The universe is not dead matter as we think of it. Everything is aware. Every single particle is in a field of awareness. That field is the fabric of being, not time and space. That is the only way that two separate fundamental things can somehow instantly “know” about one another’s existence and state, right?
If everything is aware, then how can anything die? It is truer to say that everything is always alive, and what lives merely passes through different forms on a journey in being in a field of awareness.
Every particle is in a field of awareness. But if a particle can pop in and out of existence, then there is really no particle at all, right? There is just the field of awareness, which is changing perspective. It is our subjective perception that creates the illusion of the particle. In reality, the field and the particles are one, unified, like waves on an ocean.
If all is one in this field of awareness, then there is no annihilation, is there? Like we see the particle that pops in and out of existence, so we see ourselves. The body is a physical particle, the sense of “I”. The self is a mental particle, the thought of “I”. But that is just a matter of perspective limited to time and space. In reality, there is no particle popping in or out, just the field’s awareness of itself shifting. Nothing is created or uncreated.
The wave doesn’t see the ocean. All it knows is rising and falling. But if you ask it where it begins and ends, it can’t really say. We are part of the field of awareness. But like the wave, our own subjectivity limits our perception of it.
So death is a myth in this universal sense. But what about the personal one? You are probably concerned with the simplest question. What happens to “I”, the self, all the memories and emotions that thoughts you’ve accumulated, in this little life?
If time and space do not really exist, and everything is aware, then what are they? They are not just bits of electricity in the mind. Rather, they are the fundamental reality. So the answer is nothing “happens” to them. They are what is really happening. They are not composed, so they cannot be decomposed.
It is better to say that they are simply absorbed. Just as the wave falls back into the ocean. The ocean is pure awareness. You are little awareness. When you fall back into the ocean, then these awarenesses will meet. That meeting will probably feel a little bit like love, the sense of surrender of self that you feel when you are truly one with someone else.
And that is the purpose, the final cause, of being.
The annihilation myth has defined us too poorly, and for too long. It has made us afraid, anxious, insecure. We look for aliens in the universe, but the truth is that we feel like the aliens, do we not? So let us let this myth go. It is a superstition created for an age trapped in between nothing and everything.
How, then, should we think of life? There is not just endless life. There is boundless life. All there is is life. It is our limited idea of “life” as stuff in bodies that needs something like a Copernican revolution.
Life is a journey beyond this, you, here, now. You are here, in this form. You will be here tomorrow, in that form. And on, and on. All are, but neither one independently exists. There is no time for then and now to exist, no space for this or that to exist. All that is is awareness. You have the awareness of a person today, perhaps tomorrow you will have the awareness of the river, the grass, the sun. Who can say which is more beautiful, true, luminous? All are improbable miracles, are they not?
There is no beginning, no end. These awarenesses just are. And all are true at once. They rise from the ocean, and fall back into the ocean, ceaselessly. Why? Because that is how being comes to know itself with more purity, clarity, depth. The sun cannot see the sunrise. You can. You cannot feel the water falling. The river can. That is why this journey of awareness arises. So being can know its every infinite possibility, and radiate with endless love.
Umair
London
May 2016
