I am struck by your desire to want to know what I am implying by certain statements. That is exactly what I don’t want a person to do. I want them to consider, to imagine with me, this line of thought and see what changes in them through that process.
In a way, it’s as if I’m asking you to partake in a fairy tale – suspend disbelief.
A Thought Experiment
Sometimes a thought experiment takes us to the limits of the mind and the edge of what is beyond. A line of thinking may lead us to a perspective greater than the sum of the parts. For example, if we hike in the woods and take an uphill route, we may discover a panorama never hinted at as we trudged up the hillside.
Imagine the everyday event of riding in a car down a two-lane road. The opposing traffic rushes by your door so close you could reach out and touch the other drivers. Your thoughts are not unusual. Perhaps planning errands, calculating costs, musing over past conversations, weighing relationships, or simply drifting with the radio’s music and the swaying of hills and curves.
It is a completely ordinary day. A pattern that repeats in six billion minor variations all over the world – thinking, breathing, living beings on the verge of tragedy. For this day, as you think profound, silly, or profane thoughts, a vehicle crosses the centerline and slams headfirst into you. There is no time to react.
There is no aftermath. No sound of crashing metal; no sirens, horns, or voices of passer-bys. You are here, then you are no more. Let your imagination reach the limit of experience – the moment of your non- existence.
Of course, you can picture all sorts of potential after-death experiences based upon what you have heard or read. Tunnels of light, reunions with relatives, adventures in other planes of existence. All these are but variations on the theme of life. What is death’s theme? To discover the truth of that theme we must explore the limits of our experience and dare to touch the boundary between knowing and the utterly unknown.
The experience of sleep or passing out is the nearest analogue to death. When we sleep or pass out there is an unknown blankness, perhaps interspersed with dreams. We awake and the remembered pieces of yesterday become who we are today. Memory holds our sense of self together. Without memory, we are dead to our self.
You are here, then you are no more. Who remembered your thoughts while living? As you hear these words in your mind, someday you will sleep and never wake again to remember them.
When you die, will the “you” right now, this moment, have ever existed? If you are dead, will you live on in the thought of another person who is dead or soon to be dead? Once dead, how will you know of your death or life? What will be when knowing is lost?
The immediacy of this thought experiment, the fact that at any moment you may cease to be, mirrors the immediacy of the answer to the above questions. Dig deep into the emptiness at your center. When one sinks into the truth, extinction and glory will rise.
To you, death is a wall, a void, an utter blackness. All falls into the void. Therein lies the answer if you have the desperation to look with your mind at the possibility of no mind. What seems a black wall of voidness, may be a state of utter completeness.
You are here, then you are no more. Come with me to the edge of your mind, to the place where you are not. Dance between the equal considerations of immortality and oblivion.
What if in death, rather than being snuffed out, you were flattened out and made so vast that you no longer knew the extent of your boundaries? What would it feel like to be without edges? To forget your belief in beginnings and ends?