• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

What does it mean to die?

Polaris

AKA Nunki
Joined
Apr 7, 2009
Messages
2,529
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
451
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
On introspection, the self appears as outward projection turned back on itself--an eye in the process of seeing its seeing. In that case death, the end of the self, would appear to be the supreme victory of projection over introspection. Upon dying, one would become unified with the universe. Many people have said something along those lines. What they're missing is that their conclusion rests on the premise that they're trying to cast off, namely the self. If we remove the lens of introspecting from the picture of a lack of introspection, what we get is the diametrical opposite of oneness with the universe. Death would be the self collapsing in on itself, as though pressed from all sides into an infinitely dense ball. When faced with the threat of death, we get a taste of that--we become paralyzed, no longer loose and flexible, and we don't seem to be out there in the world anymore: the world, or some specific thing in it, seems to be closing in on us, cutting us off from everything.

The final lens that needs to be cast off is the lens of either/or. When we step back from looking at things as being diametrically opposed and quite separate from each other, we see that death is something posited by life, and vice versa. The absolute victory of death over life only has meaning in the context of life. To say that one could really die is altogether meaningless, much as it's meaningless to suppose that one could be immortal. They're not states: they're actions that presume each other. To be dying is to be living, and to be living is to be dying.

Something deeper than a lens needs to be cast off, and that's perception itself. Seeing, existing, and reality in general, presume blind indifference, which is neither a state, a thing, nor an act: when something has meaning, in other words, when it exists, meaninglessness in relation to that meaningful thing is implicit (e.g. meaninglessness as a previous state of ignorance). All things that exist fill in this empty context of meaninglessness. Before one or any of them ever arrived to fill in that context--meaninglessness. After they all depart--also meaninglessness. Living (which means continually being born anew) and death are ways of glancing at meaninglessness from opposite ends of the telescope. If you were finally to die, you would be born again, and if you were to be born again, the old you would die. This is nothing that doesn't happen with every passing moment. The old yous--you as a child, you as a fragment of DNA in your great grandmother's womb, you as a speck of dust hovering in prehistoric outer space, and you in a time before time itself--they're all dead, and you carry their countless deaths into new life with every passing second. One day you will probably be lying asleep in a coffin; another day, the particles that made up your body and the traces of your thoughts and dreams will be scattered all about you in a new world, as has already happened countless times.

This doesn't make death any less real: you will lose everything you are. But the future will carry you along with it, even after you come to be buried under trillions of years of history.

EDIT: Note that the one premise that can't be cast off is the premise of other people. Everything said is biased by the fact that it is said to others and only has meaning because of the meaning they endow it with. This sheds an important light on everything I just wrote.
 

Stigmata

Super Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
8,779
Death, or as much as is possible to learn relating to the concept due to the limitations of current technology, is to return to the same nothingness of non-existence from which you arose. Nothing too profound or ethereal about it.
 
G

Ginkgo

Guest
On introspection, the self appears as outward projection turned back on itself--an eye in the process of seeing its seeing. In that case death, the end of the self, would appear to be the supreme victory of projection over introspection. Upon dying, one would become unified with the universe. Many people have said something along those lines. What they're missing is that their conclusion rests on the premise that they're trying to cast off, namely the self. If we remove the lens of introspecting from the picture of a lack of introspection, what we get is the diametrical opposite of oneness with the universe. Death would be the self collapsing in on itself, as though pressed from all sides into an infinitely dense ball. When faced with the threat of death, we get a taste of that--we become paralyzed, no longer loose and flexible, and we don't seem to be out there in the world anymore: the world, or some specific thing in it, seems to be closing in on us, cutting us off from everything.

The final lens that needs to be cast off is the lens of either/or. When we step back from looking at things as being diametrically opposed and quite separate from each other, we see that death is something posited by life, and vice versa. The absolute victory of death over life only has meaning in the context of life. To say that one could really die is altogether meaningless, much as it's meaningless to suppose that one could be immortal. They're not states: they're actions that presume each other. To be dying is to be living, and to be living is to be dying.

Something deeper than a lens needs to be cast off, and that's perception itself. Seeing, existing, and reality in general, presume blind indifference, which is neither a state, a thing, nor an act: when something has meaning, in other words, when it exists, meaninglessness in relation to that meaningful thing is implicit (e.g. meaninglessness as a previous state of ignorance). All things that exist fill in this empty context of meaninglessness. Before one or any of them ever arrived to fill in that context--meaninglessness. After they all depart--also meaninglessness. Living (which means continually being born anew) and death are ways of glancing at meaninglessness from opposite ends of the telescope. If you were finally to die, you would be born again, and if you were to be born again, the old you would die. This is nothing that doesn't happen with every passing moment. The old yous--you as a child, you as a fragment of DNA in your great grandmother's womb, you as a speck of dust hovering in prehistoric outer space, and you in a time before time itself--they're all dead, and you carry their countless deaths into new life with every passing second. One day you will probably be lying asleep in a coffin; another day, the particles that made up your body and the traces of your thoughts and dreams will be scattered all about you in a new world, as has already happened countless times.

This doesn't make death any less real: you will lose everything you are. But the future will carry you along with it, even after you come to be buried under trillions of years of history.

Your mind could split a one dimensional object down the side.
 

Giggly

No moss growing on me
Joined
Jun 12, 2008
Messages
9,661
MBTI Type
iSFj
Enneagram
2
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
To die is just a natural progression .. I'm more interested in what happens after we 'die'.

Really? I'm the opposite. I don't think much about that and am more interested what I'm doing while I'm alive here on earth. That said, I do like to believe that our souls live on forever.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Human Being

We understand our being through our non-being. And we understand our non-being through our being.
 
Top