precipice
when is it in our lives that we are faced with the precipice? is it when we falter before the strangeness of an unfamiliar reality? or is it when we are confronted by the visceral solidity of that barrier which is death?
one of these things we choose to ignore, and the other one is purely fabricated.
our understanding of the world is held together by rather flimsy thread. we understand that when we let go of an object, it falls to the ground, that when we light a fire it produces illumination and heat, and that if we don't pay taxes we will be penalized by the law.
but what exactly ties these events together? the only thing that can be observed is that every time we've let go of an unsupported object, it has fallen. or that every fire we've encountered produces heat. or that we are told that we must pay taxes.
we seem to filling in that invisible connection between these ideas, and it is that implicit patchwork that holds the whole of our perception together. otherwise, it is utterly meaningless.
why should an object fall? if you say something about gravity, you speak of the how, not the why. why, then, should an object fall instead of floating?
truly, there is no reason, for why things should fall, or fires should burn hot, or that taxes must be paid.
and it is this revelation, the shattering of the illusion of a coherent reality, that appears before us as a bottomless cliff at the edge of our silent rumination.
and what of death? is that not the great equalizer, the line in the sand that we fear stepping over but also cannot?
what happens when someone dies? they cease to be alive, that is clear. but what of dying? what does it mean to die? is it simply the absence of life? then we should love life, not hate death.
no, this "death" which has etched fear into our minds is not just the lack of life. it is something else altogether. it is a fabricated imagination of non-existence, which has been conceived of by our living consciousness.
what we really fear is not dying itself, but the lack of life, but this lack is not just the absence of our life as we know it. rather, it is our imagination of how the world must go on if we were not it in. and we grieve that, because we cannot bear that reality exists even without us.
but as i have written above, reality itself is incoherent, it is a mess. it is not something worth mourning. in fact, it appears that death is a solution to this bizarre journey through time. it is a statement of whether such a meaningless system can exist without our mind to fill in all the blanks. and as many have found, it cannot.
what, then, happens when you are dying? reality begins to fall apart. the veil is pulled away, and the imperfections begin to show. we begin to realize that what once made perfect sense was in fact non-sense that we had scrapped together into a semblance of form, that even our own self, that we held so dear against the oncoming death, does not truly exist. if death is the annihilation of self, then we should welcome it with open arms, because only once the self is gone can we really live and see reality for what it is.
that is death. whether it is in the form of a heart attack, a gunshot, or the withering away of our organs against the eroding current of time.
and so, i conclude, that there is nothing to fear. once you arrive before the precipice, you should jump, without looking back.