Death.

The end.

The final sleep.

It’s hard not to get carried away in the magnitude of it all.

But you don’t know death. You’re not getting carried away by anything you know, but by your imagination. Don’t allow yourself to become confused about what death is in your ignorance. Let’s look at it a bit, and perhaps we will learn a few things about its true nature.

Here is something that may surprise you: you already know what it’s like to die. You already know what it’s like to be dead. To be dead is to not be alive. Or, more accurately, to not perceive yourself as alive. You are always alive, and always will be, in one sense. The matter that makes you has always been here, and will remain until the end of all things, should that time ever come. Yet you only started living once you became aware of it, once you realized that a certain packet of matter was you, and was alive. So to be dead is not to disappear, or to vanish. It is simply to cease to recognize that you are here.

Before you were born you did not recognize you were here. Done. Easy. You have been dead for so long before you came alive and it was no issue to you. Every night you go to sleep you are dead to yourself. You cease to be aware of your life. This is death.

That part of your brain which creates life has been turned off, and returns in the morning. While other parts of your brain may continue to run and function, so long as you do not know it, you are experiencing death. Another person may look at you and say you are alive, but to yourself you are truly dead.

This means that our concept of life is different than the experience of being alive. We say a plant is alive, but a plant does not experience it’s own life. A plant is dead already to itself.

Organisms are not alive or dead, because this thing we call life is merely consciousness, or sensation. The extent to which we are conscious is the extent to which we are alive, and death as we know it is just the end of consciousness.

Death is not a gaping, terrifying, demon. It is a very small and quiet fellow, who will not take you, but let you release yourself when you are ready.

​As peaceful as an afternoon nap.

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