Death 💀

This article was released on Kin 66: White Magnetic Worldbridger, with the code:

I unify in order to equalize
Attracting opportunity
I seal the store of death
With the magnetic tone of purpose
I am guided by my own power doubled

Let’s talk about death 😇

The night before I began to write this, I was lying awake in bed for a long time. A constellation of perceptions was taking shape into an unsettling revelation. I felt a strong sensation that the appreciation of the invisible, the mystery – hell, the essential is fading away from the world.

I notice ever more value judgements made, about profoundly fundamental aspects of human experience, based solely upon surface level appearances. In a previous article I touched upon this with regards to meditation and how the mainstream conversation of the topic tends to focus on the material benefits at the expense of its actual purpose.

But that same uncomfortable nagging I felt also calls to mind a disturbing pair of videos I recently watched, about aging and death. Go ahead and take a look if you have a few minutes…

Both of these video makers create fascinating and beautifully produced videos, which can be highly educational. But to me these two videos in particular belie a (perhaps unexamined) disdain for humanity in some sectors of the scientific community. Concurrently they present a thoroughly materialistic view of life and death beneath a veneer of skeptical credibility.

Of course these videos make many interesting and poignant observations. But, the whole premise stands upon the idea that humans cannot cope with the reality of death. We are too immature and fragile to accept that death is a part of life. And we must aim to eradicate aging and death as we would any illness!

Along similar lines (and not to pick a fight here) Neil deGrasse Tyson argues: If God does exist “either the God is not all powerful, or is not all good. It can’t really be both, given all the ways the universe wants to kill us.” Such a statement again betrays an assumption of death itself being an absolute negative, rather than simply another aspect of a vast, mysterious universe.

I think the problem with materialist or positivist science, is their methods rely solely on what can be reasoned, deduced, or calculated based upon the physical world that we can perceive through the senses. Such a limitation is like putting a straight-jacket on intelligence or even imagination. Or like imprisoning consciousness – which has various methods and modes of experience.

Even more to the point, such a basis of understanding completely eliminates any acceptance or receptivity to the notion of a soul, or something essential to every human being which has existed before the body it is animating, and which would continue to exist after.

Tyson goes on to say: “an asteroid rendered 70% of all life forms extinct … 65 million years ago that took out the dinosaurs.” Here he is using a hypothesis of something we can never actually know by using existing scientific means at our disposal to deny the existence of that which may never be knowable through those same means. This is absurd, yet is an example of common practice in debates about the existence of anything invisible or unmeasurable.

These trends give me a grave sense that we are, sadly, losing touch with what is, to me, the roots of this existence.

Is there anything more human than pondering questions such as “Why am I here? Where was I before I was here? Where will “I” be when I die? What is death? Who am I? If I’m not my thoughts, than who or what am I? Am “I” a function of my biology?” Indeed, most people, regardless of their cultural origins, contemplate such things naturally, especially as children.

But, is this kid stuff? Should we not consider these even more deeply as we age? Or could it be that the effects of a materialist-driven, physical/surface-obsessed civilization has discouraged our continued appreciation of the invisible, and of these meaning-endowing questions?

In the simplest cosmological level of the 13 Moon Calendar, death is but one archetypal attribute in a totality of 20(+1) archetypes. I think this offers a healthy dose of equanimity, an essential prescription for clarity on the subject.